ASIAN 1111-103 Women on the Verge: Representing Gender and Madness in East Asia and Latin America: Using the Library Catalog; Book selections

"Speaking through a woman's voice, each of these authors humorously undermines such time-honored commonplaces as women's "appropriation" of discourse or their "trespassing" into exclusively male domains."

Aru Onna describes the spiral toward self-destruction of the passionate Satsuki Yōko, a rebellious, intelligent, and beautiful woman from a bourgeois Meiji-period (1868−1912) family. Aru Onna, Arishima's masterpiece, stands in marked contrast to much of the literature of the same era, which chose more familiar and comforting settings. Through Yōko's madness and the nightmarish setting, Arishima suggests the intellectual turmoil of the times and the sense of dislocation that arose in a rapidly changing urban environment.

In The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a young woman who has spent her entire time so far caring for a demanding ill mother, believes she has been chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant., and that finally someone wants her, that something is happening in her life.

A woman suffering from postpartum depression is confined to a room by her doctor-husband and forbidden to write, in the belief that staying quiet and unoccupied will help her recovery. She keeps a hidden journal however, which reveals to us her increasing obsession with the wallpaper in the room and the patterns she sees in it. She comes to believe there is a figure of a woman moving in the wallpaper trying to get out.