Illinois Wesleyan Professor Examines Madness in Francophone Literature

March 8, 2003

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Valerie Orlando, associate professor of French at Illinois Wesleyan University, is the author of a new book that explores the prevalence of female characters who suffer madness and insanity in fiction by African and Caribbean women writers.

Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean was published earlier this year by Lexington Books.

Orlando, who specializes in francophone text and culture, examines novels by such authors as Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, and Simone Schwarz-Bart. Orlando contends that the madness shared by these female characters is the manifestation of split identity and investigates the texts to determine how this identity has been formed.

In the introduction to her book, Orlando writes: "Fear, oppression, isolation and physical ailments are common subjects in francophone feminine works by authors from Algeria, Cameroon, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia. These nervous depressions and physical sufferings are symptoms that manifest when women are pushed to the edge, marginalized in the outside realms of what is considered ‘normal’ by their respective societies."

Orlando approaches her study from psychoanalytical, philosophical, and literary perspectives, interspersing excerpts from the novels with theoretical discussions.

She explains that her study "explores the conjuncture of otherness, exile, and marginalization and how these states of being contribute to madness," adding that "I seek to explore how madness is rendered thematically in the feminine francophone works of African and Caribbean novelists."

A member of the Illinois Wesleyan faculty since 1999, Orlando received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands, her master’s in French language and literature from George Mason University, and her Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown University.

Prior to Illinois Wesleyan, Orlando taught at Purdue University and spent a year at Eastern Mediterranean University in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Francophone Studies.

This is Orlando’s second book. She previously authored Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghr, published by Ohio University Press in 1999.