[Bertha is] necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—offstage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. (Jean Rhys, Letters 156)

We need, therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history—the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten—should be a task for all of us at the end of this century. (Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” 10-11)