54 pages • 1 hour read
Sandra Gilbert, Susan GubarThe Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Feminism and the Patriarchy
A foundational text of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic makes several key arguments in favor of the rights and the equal treatment of women. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the male depictions of women in Victorian literature as either idealized angels or vilified monsters are incomplete and diminishing. The authors also confront the Victorian notion that women artists are unwomanly and unnatural, arguing instead that women are not insane for wanting to create art, but that they become insane when they are silenced and oppressed. Additionally, Gilbert and Gubar point out that the challenges to female writers are much greater than the challenges that face male writers, who have dominated the literary arts for centuries and benefited from privileged access to education; because women must overcome significant barriers to their creativity, their work must be deemed as a uniquely female literary art form.
Through the thorough debunking of stereotypes that exist in highly varied works of women’s literature, Gilbert and Gubar encourage the reader to appreciate an essential femaleness in the works by the women writers they have selected. This act of appreciation can be difficult because many 19th-century women writers had no choice but to emulate the writing of men, thereby demonstrating that they had internalized the stereotypes of women depicted in male writing. This aspect of female creativity is the anxiety of authorship, which is a play on Harold Bloom’s term “anxiety of influence.” Women writers of the 19th century lacked an awareness of their own potential as well as a history of women’s literature on which to rely for inspiration and support. The absence of a canon of women writers from which to learn meant that only male perceptions of women existed. These conditions, the authors argue, led to an intensification of the anxiety of authorship, which became instead a much more difficult “schizophrenia of authorship” (78). Women writers must negotiate all of their different selves when they write; the selves that they know and observe conflate with the selves that the patriarchy assumes of them, and excessive vigilance and paranoia take the place of a naturally creative process.
Family Dynamics
Gilbert and Gubar discuss the impact of family dynamics on both their selection of women writers and the characters these writers created. By comparing the personal lives of the writers to the lives of the characters they invented, Gilbert and Gubar reveal that two types of family dynamics in particular—relationships with parents, living or dead, and marriages, real or imagined—had a significant impact on all the women they discuss in the text.
Several of the writers discussed in the text have missing parent figures. Mary Shelley’s mother was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and she died shortly after the birth of her daughter. The Brontë sisters lost their mother, Maria, very early in childhood. Their states of motherlessness led them to a reliance on others, on themselves, and on books for the care and knowledge that mothers typically provide their children. In their novels, Shelley and the Brontë sisters write of the troubles that befall girls and young women who lack mothers to guide their development and nurture them with affection and warmth.
Other writers feature mothers, or the absence of motherhood, in their writing, demonstrating the importance of this family dynamic in their fictional families. For example, Jane Austen’s novels often feature absent or flawed mothers. Though little is known about Austen’s relationship with her mother, the patterns of maternal behavior in Austen’s novels are interesting to observe nonetheless. Mary Shelley’s creature has no mother at all, which suggests that Shelley wrote much of herself into her creature. George Eliot, at times, punishes her less appealing female characters with sterility or worse, as in the case of Adam Bede’s Hetty Sorrel, who kills her illegitimate baby. These creative decisions around the rendering of mothers and motherhood may not reveal any biographical detail about Austen and Eliot in particular, but they do illuminate the authors’ attitudes towards mothering.
Fathers, real and fictional, literal and figurative, also play a significant role in the creative processes of these writers. Gilbert and Gubar identify the English poet John Milton as the father figure who influenced all the women writers they have selected the most. In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, some critics argue that she conflates her submissiveness to her own father with her seeming piousness towards God. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, abandoned her after she eloped with Percy Shelley, leaving her feeling orphaned; Victor Frankenstein, her best-known protagonist, abandons his creature as soon as he gives the creature life. Several of Jane Austen’s protagonists live only with their fathers, and the institution of marriage often appears as the only means of escaping their fathers’ homes.
Marriage is another family dynamic that plays a significant role throughout Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis. The writers selected by Gilbert and Gubar all had unconventional experiences with marriage: Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson never married, Mary Shelley ran away with a married man at the age of 17, Charlotte Brontë married late in life and died mere months after the wedding, and George Eliot married a man 20 years her junior after her partner of 23 years died. Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, was married to someone else for the duration of their relationship. That marriage is depicted as a kind of imprisonment for many female characters discussed in the text reflects an ambivalence towards marriage in many of the writers mentioned above.
Imprisonment and Escape
The attic of the text’s title is one of many spaces in which a 19th-century woman resides and eventually escapes, and Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of many so-called madwomen. Bertha’s attic functions as a symbol of all the possible spaces, literal and figurative, that confined women during the Victorian age. Sometimes, this space has walls, like the narrator’s room in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper or Bertha Rochester’s upstairs bedroom in Jane Eyre; other times, as in the case of women writers of the 19th century, the space is emotional, professional, and social, reflecting the entrapment women experienced due to their general lack of agency in patriarchal Victorian times.
As the early chapters of The Madwoman in the Attic describe, societal expectations of women during the Victorian Age were more than just confining; the social mores of the Victorian Age also meant that women who attempted to live according to their own personal value systems were seen as irresponsible, dangerous, and unnatural. Women who lived freely, ironically, lived secretly; for example, the “tight spaces” of Jane Austen’s life and fiction restricted her movement while they also allowed her the shelter she needed to observe and to write.
The anxiety-provoking nature of prisons is described in the numerous mentions of death imagery throughout the text. Gilbert and Gubar find proof of the repressive nature of women’s lives in the 19th century in the repeated mentions of burial sites, coffins, and shrouds in women’s literature of this time period. Literal forms of burial as well as figurative ones communicate the futility of escape for some women writers and their characters; many women, like Bertha Rochester, are imprisoned in their own minds, and only madness and death result from their forced silence and self-denial.
For some female characters who do manage to escape one prison, the freedom is only temporary. Marriage is one escape from the patriarchy of living with fathers, as evidenced by many of Jane Austen’s heroines and the romance novels they themselves read, while death and madness await the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Bertha Rochester, and even Jane Eyre herself.
For all of Gilbert and Gubar’s women writers, the reading of books and the writing of literature function as a means of escape from the prison of patriarchy, but the freedom is often conditional or tempered by other complications. Only the American writer and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe is described as enjoying a measure of contentment as a writer, a mother, and a wife.
