The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary

Imagination

Introduction

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
directness 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.

Authors:

Susan Gubar is a prominent feminist literary critic and scholar. She is best known for her
work with Sandra Gilbert on the book "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination," which is considered a seminal work of
feminist literary criticism. The book explores the representation of women in 19th-century
literature and the ways in which patriarchal attitudes shaped the literary imagination of the
time.

Gubar was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1939, and received her PhD from Columbia
University. She is a professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University and has
published numerous articles and essays on women's literature and feminist literary
criticism. Her other works include "No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth Century" and "Race changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture."

Gubar's contributions to feminist literary criticism have had a lasting impact, and she is
widely recognized as one of the leading figures in the field. Her work continues to be
influential and relevant today, as it provides a framework for understanding the
representation of women in literature and the ways in which patriarchal attitudes have
shaped the literary imagination.

Sandra M. Gilbert is a prominent feminist literary critic and scholar. She is best known for
her work with Susan Gubar on the book "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination".

Gilbert was born in 1936 in Los Angeles, California, and received her PhD from the
University of California, Berkeley. She is a professor of English at the University of California,
Davis, and has published numerous articles and essays on women's literature, feminist
literary criticism, and poetry.
In addition to her work on "The Madwoman in the Attic," Gilbert is also known for her
contributions to the field of feminist poetry criticism. She has written several books on the
subject, including "Nights of the Word: A Memoir of Literary and Political Imprisonment"
and "Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions."

Gilbert's contributions to feminist literary criticism have had a lasting impact, and she is
widely recognized as one of the leading figures in the field. Her work continues to be
influential and relevant today, as it provides a framework for understanding the
representation of women in literature and the ways in which patriarchal attitudes have
shaped the literary imagination.

The Background of the Book and Essay

"The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination" is a book of feminist literary criticism that was first published in 1979 by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The book emerged from the feminist literary movement of
the 1970s and was part of a broader effort by feminist scholars and writers to challenge
patriarchal attitudes and representations in literature and culture.

The book is focused on the representation of women in 19th-century literature and the
ways in which patriarchal attitudes shaped the literary imagination of the time. Gilbert and
Gubar examine the works of female writers such as Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and
George Eliot and analyze the ways in which these writers used their craft to challenge the
limitations imposed upon them by the patriarchal literary tradition of the time.

The book also critiques the literary canon of the 19th century, which often excluded women
writers or dismissed their work as inferior. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the literary
tradition of the time was dominated by a patriarchal imagination that created a
"madwoman" archetype to symbolize the repressed and unruly female psyche.

"The Madwoman in the Attic" is considered a landmark work of feminist literary criticism
and has had a lasting impact on the field. The book's central arguments and insights have
been widely discussed and debated and continue to influence contemporary feminist
literary criticism.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that nineteenth century women writers were faced
with two weakening 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
frequency 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.

Analysis
Susan Gubar begins the argument with questioning the patriarchal attributions to women in
their writing. Often, as she points out, women are depicted either as an angel or monster,
sweet dumb Snow white and mad Queen. She asks if women write, how do these images
that the patriarchy depicted influence women as writer. This is the problem that Susan tries
to investigate.

Susan Gubar further goes on to prove that the literary history is adamantly patriarchal in
every sense. She examines the psychology of literary history as explained by Miller that the
literary history “is inhabited ... by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions,
guests, ghosts of previous texts.” This chain of relation is male oriented as explained by
Bloom. Bloom examines the history of literature from the point view of ‘psychohistory’ of
literature in terms of Freudian theory of Oedipus complex. Bloom points out that the
dynamics of literary history arise from the artist’s “anxiety of influence”. This influence is
caused from the concept that the literary artist is not his own creator but he is an offspring
of his predecessors. It means that an artist is under the influence of his own predecessors.
This causes a struggle between the artist and his predecessors. Bloom suggests this state as
“he is in a literary Oedipal struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating
his poetic father”. According to Susan this state of literary history is patriarchal. This will
continue to be so. At this juncture of the literary history, Susan asks where does woman
writer fit into this history? Or does she has any predecessors or muse as the male writers
often invites them in their writings? All these concepts affirms that the literary history is
patriarchal.

Attempting to answer to such questions, Susan finds that Blooms historical construct is
useful at first to identify the patriarchal psychosexual context of western literature and
second, to help to distinguish the anxieties and achievements of the female writers from
those of male writers. The author finds at this context that the women writers ‘do not fit’
anywhere. It is like the Freudian theory of male and female psychosexual development
there is no symmetry between a boy’s growth and a girl’s. So the Bloomian theory of
‘anxiety of influence’ is not accountable to the situation of women writer. The ‘anxiety of
influence’ suggested by Bloom is not experienced by the woman writer. The patriarchal
authority attempted to enclose the woman writer into an extreme concepts that
contradicts even the woman writer sense of herself. While men writers symbolize authority,
they fail to define the ways in which she experiences her own identity as writer. It is not the
‘anxiety of influneces’ that bother the woman writer but ‘anxiety of authorship’, a radical
fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a “precursor” the act of
writing will isolate or destroy her.

The reality about woman writer is that she needs to fight not against the male precursor’s
reading of the world, but his reading of her. In order to define herself as an author she must
redefine the terms of her socialization. For this reason, as well as for the sound
psychoanalytic reasons Mitchell and others give, it would be foolish to lock the woman artist
into an Electra pattern matching the Oedipal structure Bloom proposes for male writers.
Women writers searches for a female model to legitimise her own rebellious endeavours.
While this searches, she experiences her gender as painful obstacle under patriarchy. This
phenomena of “inferiorization” mark the woman writer’s struggle for artistic self-definition
and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart.

The women writers participate in a literary culture different from male writers. The male
writers have brought up in a male inhabited culture of literature from the very tradition of
literary era. And the male writers are in ‘anxiety of influence’ as suggested by Bloom. But
women writers are not anxious about this fact, instead they find themselves in a literary
culture where female writers are pioneers, at least since Romantic era. The female writers
feel that they are helping to create a viable tradition. Thus they have a literary subculture
formed different from male literary culture. The darker side of this female literary
subculture is what we call ‘anxiety of authorship’ as we noted ‘anxiety of influence’ in the
case of male writers.

The anxiety of authorship is built form the complex and conscious fears of male writers. This
anxiety links the women writers to the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture. The
male writers are influenced by their predecessors, and they indeed want to get out of this
Oedipus clutches. The recent feminist emphasis on positive role models has undoubtedly
helped many women, it should not keep us from realizing the terrible odds against which a
creative female subculture was established. The interpretation of women’s literary history
as the enactment of strategies of survival and rebellion against patriarchal literary authority,
disregarding the artistic form they decide to engage with, tends to emphasize the mimetic
over the poetic as a mode of characterizing women’s relationship to their artworks

Gubar revised Bloom’s male centered model to make into account the experience of literary
daughters. They argue that women writers like Jane Austin, Emile Dickinson do not fit into
Bloom’s theory, as there are no material precursors under the male literary tradition. So the
literary daughters have the anxiety of authorship imposed by the pervasive view of writings
as only male activity- the pen as a metaphorical phallus.

Unlike to the literary sons who suffer from anxiety of influence, the literary daughters’
anxiety of authorship is positive, and creative, offering them less competition and more
grateful connection to their foremothers. However, the literary daughters’ deep sense of
insecurity of writing can be found in their infected sentences of uneasiness and repression.
But their creativity free from the anxiety of influence helps them to begin new and unique
women writing tradition with freshness, novelty, radicality making distinct from male
writing. They create their own poetics because of the anxiety of authorship.