If one unconsciously thinks of schizophrenia as a unique product of Western culture, it is startling to discover in A Question of Power, by the South African novelist Bessie Head, a profound enlargement of the geographical as well as the symbolic regions of madness. (p. 30)

The "question of power" is the many-leveled issue of the novel, expanded to include both internal and external dimensions. Elizabeth's dissociated personality first reveals the idea of "soul power"—in which specters of her own psyche dramatize her lack of personal identity, as well as her spiritual and emotional paralysis. That powerlessness in turn symbolizes the non-white South African's political and social situation….

The most important kind of power implied in the novel is, finally, the power of the human spirit to overcome its own movement toward annihilation…. [Elizabeth's] internal battle ceases when she at last exorcises the negative "powers" within, and finds...