The Madwoman in the Attic

For the Sarah Jane Adventures episode, see The Mad Woman in the Attic. For the Cracker episode, see The Mad Woman in the Attic (Cracker).
The Madwoman in the Attic
Author Sandra Gilbert
Susan Gubar
Subject Victorian literature
Genre Feminist literary criticism
Publication date
 1979

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979, examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife Bertha Mason is kept locked in the attic by her husband.

The Text

The text specifically examines Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson.

In the work, Gilbert and Gubar examine the notion that women writers of the 19th Century were confined in their writing to make their female characters either embody the "angel" or the "monster." This struggle stemmed from male writers' tendencies to categorize female characters as either pure, angelic women or rebellious, unkempt madwomen. In their argument, Gilbert and Gubar point to Virginia Woolf who says women writers must "kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art".[1][2] While it may be easy to construe that feminist writers embody the "madwoman" or "monster," Gilbert and Gubar stress the importance of killing off both figures because neither are accurate representations of women or of women writers. Instead, Gilbert and Gubar claimed that female writers should strive for definition beyond this dichotomy, whose options are limited by a patriarchal point of view.

They also explore the way women were inhibited in their writing by what they called the Anxiety of Authorship – the lack of legitimating role-models for the 19thC woman writer.[3] One result was what they identified as the literary palimpsest or double-voiced text – one with a feminist subtext hidden within a more conventional narrative, so that “surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less socially acceptable levels of meaning”.[4]

Feminist criticism

Over 700 pages long, the work is an early landmark in Feminist literary criticism.[5] While some would argue that it has become outdated, and that the metaphoric framework outlined by Gilbert and Gubar is limiting, essentialist, and insufficient aware of the varying individual circumstances,[6] it remains an important and influential, if not foundational, feminist work.[7]

Originally published in 1979, the book is now in its second edition (2000), the first from Yale University and second from Yale Nota Bene press.

Collaboration

Gilbert and Gubar continue to write criticism together, examining Shakespeare and Modernist writing, among other topics.

References

  1. ↑ The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
  2. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for Women," The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt, 1942, pp. 236-8.
  3. ↑ J. Childers ed. 'The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 14
  4. ↑ Quoted in J. Childers ed. 'The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 218
  5. ↑ K. Hall, Feminist Disability Studies (2011) p. 91
  6. ↑ F. O'Gorman ed., The Victorian Novel (2008) p.85
  7. ↑ H. Bertens, Literary Theory (2012) p. 115


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