Julia's Hallucinations

By letting the audience in the space where the characters live in, Fornes makes it easy to understand their suffering and to feel their fear. Through her hallucination, Julia expresses her fear about Fefu. She is afraid of Fefu’s challenge of the male authority. She expresses her feelings of loneliness and alienation from everyone, even the women surrounding her. “My hallucinations are madness, of course, but I would still know I am mad but I would not feel so isolated” (129).

By challenging the social system and trying to confirm her equality to men, Julia is condemned as a mad woman. She defies the order of the community that line the borders between men and women roles. Felman argues that “for her initial family upbringing throughout her subsequent development, the social role assigned to the women is that of serving an image, authoritative and central of men; a woman is first and for most a daughter / a mother / a wife” (118). Julia rejects her assigned role and tried to prove her power and therefor, she is considered as a mad woman and her speech is hallucinations.

“what we consider “madness” whether it appears in men, is either the acting out of the devalued female role of the total or partial rejection of one’s sex role stereotype” (Qtd in Felman 118).

In a world that women should be stupid and silent, Julia is mad and

This metaphor represents the process through which one is identified and consequently his identity is constituted. According to Lugones “the failure to identify is a failure to see oneself in [others] who quite different from one’s self” (393). So, by travelling in someone’s world is considered a way of identification. By identifying with others, one becomes a whole human being. Fefu cannot identify with Julia weakness and femininity, and Julia, on the other hand, cannot adopt Fefu’s male-ideology