Madness as a literary device has been very useful to express ideas of criticism of the social order and the destabilizing effect of this order on the minds of the characters. More than a biological pathology, we treat madness as a discursive strategy that generates social consciousness: its basic meaning is transgression of the established order. With a sociocritical methodology in the analysis of several stories, we propose that in the literary representation of madness there is a precise historical-cultural dimension.