History Main / MadwomanInTheAttic

[[folder:Manga And Anime]]
* Quoted above: [[spoiler: Sakurako]] from ''SakuraGari'', who has been locked in an old house for nine years [[spoiler: after becoming TheUnfavorite and the death of her mother.]]
* Hisoka Kurosaki from ''YamiNoMatsuei'' is locked away by his parents because of his [[TheEmpath empathic powers]]. [[spoiler: In the manga, it's also to keep him from being the prey to a demon who raped ''both'' of his parents and forcibly impregnated his mom.]]
* At least two cases from ''DetectiveConan'' have people trapped in attics and becoming unstable.
** One featured a gifted writer, hiding in the attic after committing a murder over a decade ago. He was very sane indeed, just rather confused/fascinated over a cellphone.
[[/folder]]

----
<<|{{Villains}}|>>
<<|HorrorTropes|>>
<<|MadnessTropes|>>

[[quoteright:300:[[TheGoonies http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/SlothTheGoonies.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:300: I swear on my life, they've got... an "It", a giant "It". They got it chained to the wall.]]

** Then there's "The Yellow Face," in which the ''suspected'' MadwomanInTheAttic in fact turns out to be [[spoiler:simply the main character's mixed-race daughter from a previous marriage, whom she'd kept hidden from her new husband. The story has a happy ending, but leaves you kind of unsure if this has lots of UnfortunateImplications or is simply a plea for tolerance at a time when having a mixed-race child was that severe a social liability. Or both.]]

This trope is named for the landmark work of feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Oddly, the analysis indicates that this trope first popularly appeared, in all places, in Victorian women's literature, where depicting some women as crazy people was an easy way to make female villains with whom readers would be unlikely to sympathize. Obviously, this plan was not a [[YourMileageMayVary complete success]].

* Parodied in a HalloweenEpisode of ''TheSimpsons'', with Bart's EvilTwin, Hugo, locked up in the attic. The TwistEnding was that ''Bart'' was the Evil Twin, so Hugo was allowed to go free (even though he was clearly insane) and Bart is locked up in his place.
** Then again, you'd be insane too if you'd been locked in the attic for your whole life.

* [[FeralChild Kaspar Hauser]] claimed to be one of these.

* Saul Femm from ''The Old Dark House'' (1932), though not incredibly deformed, is a raging madman with a taste for arson and is thus kept locked in his room by the rest of the family with the help of a mute and deformed butler.

* If not the UrExample, then certainly the [[AncientGreece Knossos Example]] would be the Minotaur. This was when the queen fell in love with a ''bull'' that was supposed to be sacrificed to Poseidon and... well, she was the queen, she could do what she wanted. She had a child by the bull that was a giant human with the head of a bull. To hide the monster, the king commissioned Daedalus [Icarus' papa] to build an elaborate labyrinth under the city from which no one could escape, in order to hide the Minotaur.

* There's a story that was filmed for the ''TwilightZone'' called ''The Howling Man''. In it, the protagonist visits a European monestary in the early 1930s and hears horrible screams in the middle of the night. He finds the man imprisoned and frees him. [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Turns out]] that was Satan [[SealedEvilInACan imprisoned there]] to prevent him from bringing strife to the world, and well, given the time period, you can [[WorldWarTwo guess what happens next]].

* The novel ''The Cellar'' is about a woman who keeps horriffic rat-men in her old house.

* In the ''TouhouProject'', Flandre Scarlet is an EnfantTerrible kept in the basement of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, kept there thanks to a combination of being very mentally unstable, and hitting the SuperpowerLottery jackpot with being able to disintigrate any physical object from a distance. Since some fans prefer a much more sympathetic version of Flandre, there is an AlternativeCharacterInterpretation of her where she is far more friendly and stable... but they are not willing to break the {{canon}} backstory of her being locked away for 495 years, which only leaves them to make Remilia completely KickTheDog by seeming to lock her little sister away for no good reason, ironically making Remilia less sympathetic as they make Flandre more sympathetic.

<<|MadnessTropes|>>

* Done with the half-breed Scorpius in {{Farscape}}. He was raised on a Scarran ship in a single room and only one person ever entered the room or interacted with him in any way.

** Of course, back then the profession of Special Education didn't exist, and the alternative was to send the child to a Snake Pit. Arguably, being locked up by people who cared for you at least a little was better than being locked up with a bunch of other freaks under the supervision of hired sadists.

* In the ''DoctorWho'' ExpandedUniverse, one of the Eighth Doctor novels has a woman keeping a whole load of deformed and disabled people away from society. But in a bit of a twist, she's quite nice to them, treating them almost like family, and refers to them affectionately as "mooncalves". The story takes place in a Dystopia where they wouldn't be safe anywhere else.

* In Francis Hodgson Bernett's ''The Secret Garden'', Mary's uncle keeps his son and Mary's cousin, a bedridden hunchback and sickly child named Cedric, hidden away in the house for fear that he will not be able to survive in normal society, and shuns him because of the boy's resemblance to his dead mother.

* Somewhat reversed in {{Fallout}} 3 DLC ''point lookout'' where a deformed couple have a normal looking son and hide him in the basement (untill he runs away)

* The Penguin in BatmanReturns spends his early years as this, before his parents get rid of him by throwing him to the river.

*Happens twice in Harry Potter- to Harry himself in the first book, and [[spoiler: Dumbledore's little sister Ariana]]. Subverted with Harry, though, as he was locked in a cupboard under a stairway, but was allowed outside unless he showed signs of magic. He was then freed when all the letters came from Hogwarts, but only because his aunt and uncle thought the letters would stop coming if he slept in a different part of the house. And then he got locked in there anyway, and food was passed to him through a cat flap.

*The novel "The Cellar" is about a woman who keeps horriffic rat-men in her old house.

* The Richard Matheson short story "Born Of Man and Woman" is told from the point of such a person, a vaguely described grotesque who is both pitiable and terrifying at once.

* {{Supernatural}} has this as the twist in [[spoiler: "Family Remains", when they discover the last owner of the house kept the twins he conceived with his daughter. The daughter committed suicide and the father was killed by the children, then a new family moved in...]]

* Quoted above: [[spoiler: Sakurako]] from SakuraGari, who has been locked in an old house for nine years [[spoiler: after becoming TheUnfavorite and the death of her mother.]]
* Hisoka Kurosaki from YamiNoMatsuei is locked away by his parents because of his [[TheEmpath empathic powers]]. [[spoiler: In the manga, it's also to keep him from being the prey to a demon who raped ''both'' of his parents and forcibly impregnated his mom.]]
* At least two cases from DetectiveConan have people trapped in attics and becoming unstable.

* In the third edition {{Ravenloft}} products from Arthaus, the role of half-orcs is instead given to 'calibans': a PC race of Berthas in the Attic, usually born to human mothers who'd been exposed to black magic or curses while pregnant.

*Genestealer Hybrids in {{Warhammer40000}}. Most have three arms and greyish skin, so they generally camp out in the Underhive (which, when we get right down to it, is the Hive City answer to "basement) to avoid getting picked up by the cops for execution by torture. Many of them are also Psykers (who are also often sequestered by their families), who are batshit crazy anyways, due to the scrabbling of Daemons at the back of their mind, and the constant nightmares and flashes of precognition this produces.
*Ogre Gorgers from {{Warhammer}}. They don't start out crazy, but ''scrawny''. Constant exposure to [[GreenRocks Warpstone]] drives them insane and mutates them horribly.

* In [[DarkCornersOfTheEarth Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth]], a woman in the [[spoiler: Waite's home]] is kept in the attic as she falls to TheCorruption. The husband is just trying to keep his family safe, though.