The Madwoman in the Attic
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| Author | Sandra Gilbert Susan Gubar |
|---|---|
| Subject | Victorian literature |
| Genre | Feminist literary criticism |
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Publication date
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1979 |
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979, examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife Bertha Mason is kept locked in the attic by her husband.
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 19th Century were confined in their writing to make their female characters either embody the "angel" or the "monster." This struggle 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 are accurate representations of women or of women writers. Instead, Gilbert and Gubar claimed that female writers should strive for definition beyond this dichotomy, whose options are limited by a patriarchal point of view.
Feminist criticism
Over 700 pages long, the work is a landmark in Feminist literary criticism.[citation needed] While some would argue that it has become outdated, or that the metaphoric framework outlined by Gilbert and Gubar is limiting, it remains an important and influential, if not foundational feminist work.[citation needed]
Originally published in 1979, the book is now in its second edition (2000), the first from Yale University and second from Yale Nota Bene press.
Collaboration
Gilbert and Gubar continue to write criticism together, examining Shakespeare and Modernist writing, among other topics.
References
- Literature After Feminism, by Rita Felski ISBN 0-226-24115-7
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