Reinventing the “Madwoman in the Attic” Trope in Thriller Fiction
If you want to insult a woman, it’s hard to beat calling her “crazy”. For millennia, that lazy slur has been used to shame women into doing what we’re told. In my debut thriller, See How They Fall, I set out to subvert the “mad woman” literary trope.
The Ancient Greeks kicked off the crazy girl trend. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, declared that the womb (hystera) wandered around the female body, unleashing physical and mental mayhem. His theory was a precursor to the Victorian diagnosis of “female hysteria”— which I was stunned to discover remained a legitimate mental illness right up until 1980.
Hysteria is the condition that the first readers of Jane Eyre would have attributed to Bertha, the violent and insane first wife of Edward Rochester, and the original literary mad woman in the attic.
In Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, Bertha is presented as a feral creature — a “clothed hyena”, a “strange wild animal”, a “goblin”, a “vampire”, a “demon” — and perhaps worst of all, a dehumanised “it”. The Victorians’ sympathy was with Edward Rochester who locked crazy Bertha up in the attic of Thornfield Hall for her own protection so that he could romance the pretty new governess, Jane. What a guy.
It goes without saying that the demonic depiction of Bertha in Jane Eyre is uncomfortable for modern readers. After all, these days we’re wise to the impact of the patriarchy and colonisation and sensitive to mental health challenges—aren’t we?
I’m not sure we’re quite as enlightened as we’d like to believe. Despite our progress, the spectre of the mad (see also: psycho, insane, crazy, over-emotional) woman still looms large in our culture. Female politicians and sexual abuse complainants are regularly labelled “crazy”, “unhinged” and “hysterical” by their detractors.
On her blockbuster Eras Tour, Taylor Swift — one of the most powerful women on the planet — debuted her ballad “Mad Woman” where she draws a link between being labelled “crazy” and the being gaslit by powerful men in the music industry ( ‘Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy’). If Swift is still battling this stereotype, what hope is there for mortal women?
Swift and I have been musing along the same lines — the collision of the mad woman trope with gaslighting. See How They Fall centres on the super-wealthy and powerful Turner brothers. When the police are called in to investigate a shocking death in the Turner family, the brothers close ranks. They label the women who challenge their narrative of events “unhinged”, “unstable” and “troubled” to destroy their credibility.
When Skye, an outsider who has married into the Turner family, begins to suspect that her own husband is hiding his role in the tragedy, he is quick to convince Skye that she is simply traumatised and failing to cope. The more Skye challenges her husband’s version of events, the more he gaslights her. Soon Skye doesn’t know whether she can trust her own mind, and she finds herself in psychological freefall.
In See How They Fall, I deliberately drew parallels between Skye Turner and Bertha Rochester so that I could dismantle the “mad woman” trope. Like Bertha, Skye is an outsider who struggles to fit into her husband’s affluent world. Like Bertha, Skye’s husband isolates her in the attic of their opulent home under the guise of protecting her. But, unlike Brontë’s Bertha, Skye never cedes agency to her captor.
I won’t spoil the plot in case you read the novel, but let’s just say that in 2025, it’s only right that the madwoman in the attic doesn’t just get mad – she gets even.
Discover the Book
Skye’s delicate balance is undone when the family patriarch, Sir Campbell Turner, dies suddenly and an illegitimate heir comes forward to stake his claim in the luxury goods empire the old man leaves behind. Reluctantly, the Turners receive the newcomer at an intimate weekend retreat at Yallambee, the family seaside estate, but tempers flare and egos clash within their first few hours together and the night ends in a tragedy that leaves one dead and another fighting for life.
Sergeant Mei O’Connor is assigned to investigate the incident and though her superiors are keen to close the case as swiftly as possible, the evidence just isn’t lining up. Convinced that there’s more to the suspicious death than a simple accident, Mei continues to search for answers. But pulling at these threads may just tear down the Turner empire.
By clicking 'Sign Up,' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
