The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Leads Classics out of the Parlor

 

“What does the future hold for Snow White…? When her Prince becomes a King and she becomes a Queen, what will her life be like. Surely, fairest of them all, she as exchanged one glass coffin for another,” (42).

After reading The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, I understand why many people hate the classics.

But The Madwoman is not a bad book. It’s a very good mirror.

 Its analyses of the role of women in 19th-century English literature are clever and nuanced. But even as Gilbert and Gubar describe the ingenious strategies and symbols utilized by 19th-century authors like Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson, a depressing reality descends: most English-language authors before 1900 (at least) were male, and most of them couldn’t write women with range beyond a sewing needle. Gilbert and Gubar highlight the contributions of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson. But every artistic victory these authors wrested from domineering hands—every Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, every Aurora Leigh and every creative arachnid—had to struggle beyond parlors of mockery and one-dimensional “Makerie” women. Before The Madwoman, I was only peripherally-aware of this struggle.

I imagine that many 20th-century students were similarly oblivious. Gilbert and Gubar’s work, first published in 1979, has the air of a canonical text. When I asked my mother to check it out from her university library, she found four or five different annotated editions and a 30-year retrospective review. It looks like The Madwoman in the Attic gave birth to the whole school of feminist literary criticism. Either that or I’ve misattributed the development of 20th-century scholarship.

As is the case with many good pieces of analysis, The Madwoman is a convincing invention that draws from all corners of the medium. Figures, symbols and messages appear over and over in the works cited by Gilbert and Gubar, who theorize that a female author or poet experiences an “anxiety of authorship” because “she must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore fundamentally different from her,” (48). Often confined to the parlor (and occasionally the wilderness), this lonely scholar simultaneously depicts and critiques the circumstances in which her fellow women operate. Recurring motifs include starvation, confinement, incest, dry male scholars and witchy older women. I’m still not completely sure whether these writers borrowed themes from their forebears or were “merely” expressing widely-applicable reactions to 19th-century patriarchal oppression.

“The woman writer—and we shall see women doing this over and over again—searches for a female model not only because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her ‘femininity’ but because she must legitimize her own endeavors,” (50).

The scholarship is fascinating and clever, and once a book is written with a certain level of rigor its “quality” can only be determined by personal enjoyment of the subject matter. I loved the topics most of the time, and the sources employed are diverse enough that there is something new every 5 pages or so. Gilbert and Gubar are clearly passionate about the field they study, and that doesn’t inhibit the nuance with which they analyze it. Instead, it electrifies every work analyzed.

It’s not completely applicable today, but very few classics (fiction or nonfiction) are. It relies on vaginal imagery as the primal expression of womanhood, and the kinds of women depicted do not stray far from the white, English or American middle-to-upper-class heterosexual model. That’s not to say that Gilbert and Gubar are racist or transphobic, but they’re working within a very narrow frame. And if The Madwoman really did originate the field of feminist literary analysis, it could even be credited with inspiring works that analyze broader groups.

The Madwoman is a classic in its own right. And after reading it, I understand why so many people love it.