The Madwoman in the Attic
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"It was not at first clear to me exactly what I was, except that I was someone who was being made to do certain things by someone else who was really the same person as myself—I have always called her Lilith. And yet the acts were mine, not Lilith’s."—“Eve's Side of It” (1935) by Laura Riding, epigraph "As if to comment on the unity of all these points—on, that is, the anxiety inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies—Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought them all together in 1890 in a striking story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their “speechless woe.” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which Gilman herself called “a description of a case of nervous breakdown,” recounts in the first person the experiences of a woman who is evidently suffering from a severe postpartum psychosis."--The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is a book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
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The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) is a book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. It draws its title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's mad wife Bertha stays locked in the attic.
The book examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective specifically looks at Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.
Gilbert and Gubar examine the notion that women writers of the 19th Century were essentially "madwomen" because of the restrictive gender categories enforced upon them both privately and professionally. In their re-examination of these writers, they argue that madness often became a metaphor for suppressed female revolt and anger. They write that the madwoman "is usually in some sense that author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage." Gilbert and Gubar argue against many popular, explicitly phallocentric literary theories popular at the time. They especially argue against literary critic Harold Bloom's theory of Oedipal poetics, proclaiming that the relationship he describes does not hold true for female authors.
Over 700 pages long, the work is a landmark in feminist literary criticism. While some would argue that it has become outdated, or that the metaphoric framework outlined by Gilbert and Gubar is decidedly limiting, it nonetheless remains an important and still influential, if not foundational feminist work.
References
- Literature After Feminism, by Rita Felski ISBN 0-226-24115-7
