Advanced International Journal for Research

E-ISSN: 3048-7641   •   Impact Factor: 9.11

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Call for Paper Volume 7, Issue 2 (March-April 2026) Submit your research before last 3 days of April to publish your research paper in the issue of March-April.
Submit Research Paper Join as a Reviewer

Plagiarism is checked by the leading plagiarism checker TurnItIn

Call for Paper

Volume 7 Issue 2
March-April 2026

Submit your research paper

Indexing Partners
Academia Advanced Sciences Index Bielefeld Academic Search Engine CiteSeer DRJI Google Scholar Independent Search Engine & Directory Network ISI (International Scientific Indexing) Issuu Mendeley Research Networks
RefSeek ResearcherId - Thomson Reuters ResearchGate Scirus Scribd Semantic Scholar Wiki for Call for Papers WorldCat Zenodo

Her Sin is Sight: Madness, Witchcraft, and the Fantastical in Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale

Author(s) Mr. Jyotirmoy Joshi
Country India
Abstract Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) stages a profound interrogation of how patriarchal cultures define, diagnose, and punish women who perceive differently. Set in fourteenth-century northern Rus’, the novel follows Vasilisa Petrovna (Vasya), a girl who can see and communicate with household and forest spirits, and her stepmother Anna, whose religious visions are pathologised by an aggressively Christianising society. Drawing on Michel Foucault's genealogy of madness as a socially constructed category of exclusion, Elaine Showalter's feminist history of the “female malady,” C. G. Jung's theory of shadow projection, and PhebeAnn Wolframe's work on counter-psychiatric epistemologies, this study argues that Arden employs the fantastic mode not merely to represent individual mental disturbance but to expose madness as a contested label at the intersection of gender, power, and the more-than-human world. The novel demonstrates that the question is never simply whether characters are “really” mad; rather, fantasy makes visible how certain experiences are named as witchcraft or insanity depending on who possesses the authority to define reality. By validating Vasya's animist visions while revealing the psychic disintegration of the ostensibly sane Father Konstantin, Arden destabilises the diagnostic gaze that historically silenced women. The text transforms the accusation of madness into a badge of perceptive courage, reclaiming the figure of the “madwoman” from the archive of exclusion. Ultimately, the novel suggests that survival—personal, communal, and ecological—may depend on learning to hear precisely those voices we have been taught to fear.
Keywords fantasy literature, gender studies, Russian folklore, counter-psychiatry, shadow projection
Field Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In Volume 7, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On 2026-04-08
View / Download PDF File

Share this



E-ISSN 3048-7641
CrossRef

CrossRef DOI is assigned to each research paper published in our journal.

AIJFR DOI prefix is
10.63363/aijfr

Downloads
Research Paper Format Copyright Permission Form and Undertaking Form Cover Page Vol 7 Isu 2Cover Page Vol 7 Isu 1Cover Page Vol 6 Isu 6

All research papers published on this website are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, and all rights belong to their respective authors/researchers.

CC-BY-SA Open Access

About AIJFR
Fees & Payment
Current Issue
Publication Archive 		Submit Research Paper
Track Submission Status
Publication Guidelines
Publication Ethics
Peer Review & Plagiarism 		Join as a Reviewer
Editors & Reviewers
Reviewer Referral Program
Get Reviewer Membership Certi. 		Website/Journal Policies
Usage Policy
Content Policies
Privacy Policy
Contact Us +91-9898-79-39-59 editor@aijfr.com