"How Will They Ever Heal . . .?" Bearing Witness to Abuse and the Importance of Female Community in Sarah Daniels's Beside Herself, Head-Rot Holiday, and The Madness of Esme and Shaz

In her three women-and-madness plays, Beside Herself, Head-Rot Holiday, and The Madness of Esme and Shaz, Sarah Daniels presents conflicting views of female madness. While she is critical of a society that labels women's anger or refusal to conform as madness, she goes beyond the simplistic view of women's madness as misogyny to show the severe psychological pain suffered by women who have been the victims of verbal, physical, and particularly, sexual abuse. Healing from this type of abuse, Daniels suggests, is only possible through homosocial bonds with other women. Moments where women remain silenced and even complicit in the patriarchal systems and cycles of abuse that oppress, harm, and stifle all women are contrasted in these plays with those moments in which there is potential for change through speech and through women's support of one another, and it is through this contrast, through both the presence and the absence or subversion of testimony and community in these plays, that Daniels appeals to her audience and stresses that the only way forward for women who have endured such trauma is the establishment of an attentive and supportive female community.