The Madwoman in the Attic

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

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
AuthorSandra Gilbert
Susan Gubar
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectVictorian literature
Publication date
1979
Media typePrint

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 nineteenth century were confined in their writing to make their female characters either embody the "angel" or the "monster", a struggle which they argue 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 accurately represents women or women writers. Instead, Gilbert and Gubar urge female writers to strive for autonomous self-definition beyond this dichotomy, which they see as imposed by a reductionist patriarchal view of women's roles.

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 nineteenth-century 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pages long, the work is an early landmark in feminist literary criticism.[5] While some would argue that it has become outdated, and that the metaphoric framework outlined by Gilbert and Gubar is limiting, essentialist and insufficiently aware of the varying individual circumstances,[6]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 Press and the second from Yale Nota Bene press.

Collaboration

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

gollark: And this seems too vaguely defined to be useful if you can just handwave any issue which does not in fact run on something like "balance" as being caused by some other imbalance.
gollark: Actually, no, they're partly just background radiation. Nobody is particularly responsible for this, on the majority of Earth.
gollark: By some unreasonably stretched definitions, maybe.
gollark: There are upper and lower bounds for how much water I should drink. The precise amount of cancer I should contain is exactly zero, though.
gollark: There are examples of this. There are examples of this not being the case.

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
  • Literature After Feminism, by Rita Felski ISBN 0-226-24115-7
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