The fourth chapter, ‘Madness: in the hall of mirrors’ engages with the disruptions and disturbances at theborders of perception. In this chapter, I build on the imaginative and metaphorical potential of the spectre to consider its double: the mad woman. I examine the field of feminist engagement with mad literary figures to demonstrate how this figure of excess is often operationalised as a figure of revolt and revolutionary potential in the refusal of norms. In this chapter, I aim to depart from the romanticisation of madness as a condition of resistance that we might see in some Gothic and feminist readings. Instead, I bring together the questions that critical irrealism raises about modernity as a lived, material condition of oppression, with the history of, and literary representations of asylums in Al-Joundi’s The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing [Le Jour où Nina Simone a Cessé de Chanter] (2011 [2008]), and in Prisoner of the Levant [Prisonnière du Levant: la vie méconnue de May Ziadé] (2024 [2017]) alongside Haddad’s fictionalised family memoir, The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019). In this chapter I explore the abjection and excess in depictions of madness in The Story of Zahra [hikāyat Zahra] (1986 [1980]) by Al-Shaykh, Al-Tahawy’s The Tent [al-khiba’] (1998 [1996]), Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze [matāhat Maryam] (2009 [2007]), El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil [ḥubb fīzaman al-naff̣t] (2001 [1993]) to show that the mad woman, as a dispossessed subject, offers a figurative “mirror image” to other kinds of dispossession, where others might see themselves reflected in her struggle. I then extend my readings of how (trans-generational encounters with) madness becomes occulted and Gothicised across generations, as a way of emotionally connecting with foremothers and forebearers. When we encounter the mad woman’s gaze we see our own prejudices reflected back at us, and our own fears of alienation, dispossession, and expulsion from our communities and histories.