‘Maria, Just Maria’: A defiant story of female madness with a wicked sense of humour

Madness has always been threatening to those who imagine themselves sane. In his Madness and Civilization (1961), tracing the history of the institutionalisation of insanity, Michel Foucault wrote of the “ships of fools” of medieval Europe – carrying madmen away from the city, getting rid of the contagion of their abnormality: “It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern (…) the land he will come to is unknown – as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.” Foucault’s madman is non-conforming and non-compliant; the outlier, pushed to the margins of society and community; subject, for his dereliction, to disciplining and control.

Reformulating madness

In synergistic symmetry with Foucault, Sandhya Mary writes the story of Maria, in Maria, Just Maria, who, by her own admission, has become mad “without a clear and...

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