SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR’STHE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC:THE
WOMAN WRITER AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERARY IMAGINATION(1979)
SANDRA M. GILBERT
Born – New York City
U.G – Cornell University
M.A – New York University
PhD in English Literature – Columbia University
Works:
Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H.Lawrence (1973)
Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy(1995)
Six Books of Poetry: In the Fourth World(1978)
Summer Kitchen(1983)
Emily’s Bread(1984)
Blood Pressure(1988)
Ghost Volcano(1995)
Kissing the Bread(2000)
SUSAN GUBAR
Born – New York City
PhD – University of Lowa (1972)
Works
Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American
Culture(1997)
Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century(2000)
Co-edited Works:
For Adult Users Only: The Dilemmas of Violent Pornography (1989)
with Joan, Hof
English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism(1992) with
Jonathan Kamholtz
SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar – Young Professors at Indiana University (1973)
Ms.Magazine - Women of the Year
Works:
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English(1985) (Editors)
Co-edited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essay on Women Poets(1979)
The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic(1986)
Three Sequel to Mad Women in the Attic on Women and Modernism titled No Man’s Land: The Place of Women Writer in the Twentieth Century The War of the Words
Sex Changes
Letters from the Front
THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY:
Slaves
Caged birds
Social penalties were too high – could not have children or cohabit with man
Uneducated
Banned from Universities
Low paid jobs
Reproductive machine
In mid century 30% women over 20 were unmarried
Spinsters were forced to emigrate
Marriage is a vow to obey husband
Properties were inherited by their husband
19TH CENTURY MAJOR WOMEN WRITERS:
Jane Austen
Emily Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
George Eliot
Anne Bronte
Christina Rossetti
Elizabeth Barret Browning
FOCUSES ON NINETEENTH CENTURY WOMEN
WRITERS:
Women’s right to own their properties
Mother’s right to custody of their
children
Ownership of her body
Women’s suffrage
FEMINISM
Feminism - equal rights between the sexes(political, economic and social).
(Empowerment) First Wave Feminism
Began in United Kingdom and United States
19th Century
Focus – Promotion of equal contract, marriage, parenting and property rights for women
Second Wave Feminism:
Early 1960’s to late 1980’s (the end
of 19th century)
Focus – gaining political power, the
right for women’s suffrage
The key factor is education
(The education of women and of
men)
INFECTION IN THE SENTENCE: THE
WOMEN WRITER AND THE ANXIETY OF
AUTHORSHIP
The Mad Woman in the Attic is a landmark of American feminism.
Encapsulates the strength and limitations of the 1st decade of 2nd
wave feminism.
Gilbert and Gubar seeks to define the patriarchal
culture in the nineteenth century
The basic question of feminist according to
Gilbert and Gubar,
When Queen is looking glass speaks with
Kings voice
Does Queen try to sound like the King?
How about the Queen’s own voice?
Does she talk back to him in her own
vocabulary, own timbre, insisting on her own
view point?
The 19th century writers assimilates consciously
or unconsciously deny the achievements of their
predecessors.
As Miller pointed out Harold Bloom’s the “anxiety
of influence” fears not for their own creation but
for their predecessors.
Bloom’s sequential relationship between literary
artists is the relationship of father and son.
A man can only became a poet.
Bloom’s literary history is intensively male
dominant and also patriarchal.
Bloom describes metaphorically, the poetic
process as a sexual encounter between male
poet and female muse.
Inevitable questions of Bloomian poetics:
Does she annihilate forefather as a foremother?
Does she have a muse? What is its sex?
The dynamics of Western literary history is male
and patriarchal too.
Bloom’s every literary text is surrounded by
psychosexual as well as sociosexual.
(Freud)Feminist Theorist Judith Millet remarked
“psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a
patriarchal society, but an analysis of one”.
Like wise Bloom’s model is also an analysis not
for a recommendation.
Freud’s theory of male and psychosexual
development is not symmetry between boys and
girls growth(Oedipus Complex balanced Electra
Complex).
But the woman writer could not experience the
same the “anxiety of influence” rather even more
primary “anxiety of authorship”.
Unlike male counterpart, the female writer must
struggle against the effect of socialization which
makes the will of male precursors(exist before).
The female writers battle for self-creation
involves revisionary process.
At the same time the female writers battle is not
against her male precursor’s reading of the world
but against his reading of her.
Woman writers, in order to define herself as an
author before they must redefine the terms of her
socialization.
In patriarchal society woman writer
experiences her gender as painful
obstacle.
Mitchell pointed out “the inferiorized and
alternative (second sex)psychology of
women under patriarchy”.
Inferioization mark the woman writer’s
struggle for artistic self-definition and
differentiation of her efforts from self-
creation.
A word dropped careless on a page
May stimulate an eye
When folded on perpetual seam
The wrinkled maker lie
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may in hale Despair
At Distances of centuries
-Emily Dickinson
We may inhale Despair
On the one hand, all those patriarchal text seeks
to deny female autonomy and authority.
The other, all those foremothers conveyed their
traditional authorship of anxiety to their
bewildered female counterparts.
Despair about Annie Gottlieb (American poet and
essayist)
Despair inhaled not only from the infection
suffered from by her physical mother but literary
mothers too.
Social Scientists and Social Historians like
Jessie Bernard, Phyllis Chester, Noami
Weisstein and Pauline Bart found that patriarchal
socialization literally makes women as sick both
physically and mentally.
(Freud) Hysteria, this disease occurs throughout
19th century.
The mental illness caused by the female
reproductive system.
Anorexia (the loss of appetite) caused primarily
adolescent girls.
Agoraphobia (fear of open or public) frequently
affected by middle-aged housewives.
CONCLUSION
The 19th century women were suffered both mentally as well as physically.
This chapter analyses both the psyche and the physical illness of women.
This also endeavors the women as well as men in that 19th century society.
The women were treated as a robot.
The women are not a born free but they are made by society(Simon de Bevouir).
Women were considered only as flesh of the body rather than human.
Both the first wave and second wave feminism made to think the re-vision of the literary texts as well as the life of women in the society.
Not only in U.S and U.K but also every where of this universe.
REFERENCES
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
library.duke.edu/exhibits/
britishwriters/
The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism
www.hastingspress.co.uk/history/19/ov
erview.htms
www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/feminism
www.npr.org › Arts &
Life › Books › Book Reviews
www.rlwclarke.net/.../05CGilbertandG
ubarAnxietyofAuthorship.pdf
voices.yahoo.com/feminism-waves-
brief-overwiew-first-second-
568867.html
THANK YOU