Sarısoy, Rabia2022-01-142022-01-142021SARISOY, Rabia. Deciphering the Representations of Women and Female Madness in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Master’s Thesis, Nevşehir, 2021.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12695/1431In the nineteenth century, which was dominated by the moral values of the society, women were subjected to patriarchal discourses in many fields of their lives due to the strict social norms and gender-based definition of social roles. Literary works of the nineteenth century also describe the secondary positions of women. The representation of women in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession suggests that women in these plays have adopted masculine attitudes to achieve their independent identities. Thus, women characters in the selected plays are portrayed as mad by the playwrights of the works in order to alienate them from society because madness becomes a gendered illness in this period. Furthermore, it is argued and illustrated in this study that women in these plays adopt masculine qualities in order to express characters’ strengths. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that women are alienated from society through the label of “madness” if they reject the cultural norms. Two plays based on the nineteenth-century point of view towards women are analysed within the frame of the concept of female madness. The selected plays also exhibit women’s enslavement and representation in a patriarchal society. In this context, this study concludes that female madness has been a feint illness to suppress women in the nineteenth century.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessindependent identitymadnessfemale madnessMaster Thesis