SAVED BY MADNESS: RESPONSES AND REACTIONS TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN NOVELS.

Abstract

This dissertation studies responses and reactions to domestic violence with special emphasis on madness in three major sub-Saharan francophone novels from West and Central Africa. These novels include Mariama Bâ's Un Chant écarlate (1981) (Scarlet Song), Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane (1982), and Sony Labou Tansi's Les yeux du volcan (1988). It studies the concept of madness as a myth and a cultural construction, as well as how women, to serve their own ends, can appropriate madness and inflict violence on others. It not only studies the violence done to women by men, but all forms of domestic violence, which include those done by women to men, by parents to their children, by in-laws and extended family members to wives of the family, and among co-wives. It also studies the role of the community as perpetrator of domestic violence as presented in the novels that studied.