The Madwoman in the Attic
"The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" is a seminal text in feminist literary criticism that explores the challenges faced by women writers in the nineteenth century as they sought to establish their identities in a male-dominated literary landscape. The authors, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, identify two archetypal female representations in literature: the submissive heroine and the madwoman. These figures reflect the societal constraints imposed on women, with the submissive heroine conforming to cultural expectations, while the madwoman embodies rebellion against these limitations.
The book provides in-depth analysis of the works of notable British authors such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters, as well as the poetry of American Emily Dickinson, highlighting how these writers grappled with their identities and the authority of authorship. Gilbert and Gubar argue that these authors experienced an "anxiety of authorship," distinct from the "anxiety of influence" typically associated with male writers, revealing their struggles through their characters. The text emphasizes that the fight for identity and literary recognition was a shared experience among women writers across both Britain and America, shaped by similar male literary influences and societal stereotypes. Overall, "The Madwoman in the Attic" remains a vital resource for understanding the intersection of gender and literary creativity in the nineteenth century.
The Madwoman in the Attic
First published: 1979
The Work
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination addresses the struggle that nineteenth century women writers underwent in order to determine their identities as writers. The work particularly analyzes the portrayal of women’s identity in female authors’ works of fiction and poetry. The Madwoman in the Attic quickly became a classic of feminist literary criticism. The book is notable for the incisiveness and for the clarity with which it recognizes a single theme in women’s literature and for the encyclopedic breadth of information that it contains. The authors divided responsibility for drafting the chapters, and together wrote the introductory material.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that nineteenth century women writers were faced with two debilitating stereotypical images of women; women were depicted in male writing as angels or as monsters. The pen in the male literary imagination was metaphorically seen as a penis, excluding women from the authority of authorship. Faced with such images, women writers suffered from an “anxiety of authorship,” in contrast with the “anxiety of influence” Harold Bloom attributes to male authors. Their writings reveal this anxiety in the prevalence of submissive heroines and madwomen. These contrasting female types express the author’s sense of division. The submissive heroine accepts cultural pressures to act as nineteenth century women were expected to act. The madwoman, on the other hand, vents the author’s rage and her desire to reject the constraints her male-dominated culture places upon her. For example, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the submissive Jane learns that Edward Rochester, whom she would have as her husband, already has a wife, the insane Bertha. Edward keeps Bertha locked upstairs in his mansion. Gilbert and Gubar see Jane’s encounter with Bertha as a meeting with part of herself.
The majority of the works analyzed in The Madwoman in the Attic are by British authors: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot receive chapter-length treatments. The poetry of American Emily Dickinson also is given substantial analysis. The vast range of references to major and minor works by women indicates that the struggle for identity and for authority of authorship is common to British and American women writers. These women writers, whether widely read or obscure and whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other, were exposed to literature written by the same male writers and to the same stereotypes and prevailing images of their cultures.
Bibliography
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983. A collection of essays on the female Bildungsroman, or novel of development. Interesting considerations of the relationship between gender and development in nineteenth and twentieth century British women writers.
Auerbach, Nina. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. A collection of essays that examine many of the same authors and issues analyzed in The Madwoman in the Attic. Auerbach’s interpretations are characteristically provocative.
Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. An analysis of nineteenth century women writers that uses Lacanian psychology to draw relationships between the maternal and language.
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Pratt argues that women’s fiction should be read as an interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes in conflict with patriarchal culture.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Cited in The Madwoman in the Attic, Showalter’s work is a source of information on the female literary tradition, breaking down that tradition into three stages: 1840-1880 (the feminine stage of imitation of the dominant male discourse), 1880-1920 (the feminist stage of protest against that dominance), and 1920 onward (the female stage of searching for a new identity).