The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer & the 19th Century Literary Imagination

Recently some friends and I were trying to determine why we would re-read the works of Victorian women writers (including many we had despised in high school) rather than pick up the latest highly touted women's novel. We decided, after several hours, that the Victorian women wrote of ethics, moral choices and heroines who understood that there was more to life than simply deciding whether to cheat on their husbands with one man or two. But now there is a far brighter light on the subject. An extraordinary and insightful text, Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic does precisely what I and my friends were unable to do: explain why these Victorian works remain as potent, relevant and rebellious today as they did when written more than a century ago.

This is one work which truly breaks new ground, one of those rare texts that will set the standard for teaching the Victorian novel for years to come. It's doubtful any cynical professor will ever again be able to dismiss Jane Austen for writing "only" little domestic novels, or diminish Mary Shelley by comparing her unfavorably to her illustrious husband. Gilbert and Gubar have quite simply put women writers in their places, at the highest rung of the literary ladder.

Gilbert and Gubar, both university teachers, make no bones about writing from a feminist perspective; they claim that men have denied women not only the right to think, but to express themselves, a claim Gilbert and Gubar back up with some terrifying examples, one of them this remark by Gerald Manley Hopkins in 1886: "[the writer's] most essential quality is masterly execution which is a kind of male gift and especially marks off men from women, the begetting of one's thoughts on paper." Unfortunately, Hopkins was not the exception of his day; this kind of thinking left literary women out on the fringe, freaks and abominations of nature.

Where could women find examples of themselves? Foremost writers such as Goethe, Milton and Swift divided women between devils (vile, loath-some creatures) and angels, perpetual virgins who were equally unhuman. The quotes from these accepted geniuses are enough to turn any woman's hair prematurely grey: contemplation is feminine, action is masculine, and the ideal woman is a death-like fragile heroine ready to expire at a moment's notice. Edgar Allen Poe said, "The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world" -- no doubt to everyone except the woman who's doing the dying.

If the world is for men, where do women exist? If women exist only to be angels, what of our darker thoughts? Some of Gilbert and Gubar's conclusions inspire shouts of "Eureka!" Snow White, for instance, isn't an Oedipal struggle, but a feminist one. The two women--sweet, passive Snow White, and the evil, active Queen are simply mirror images of each other, and the battle is not to win the man but to reconcile the two sides of the feminine psyche. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written when she was pregnant (an almost continuous state for her from ages 17 to 21), is put in the context of responding to Milton's Paradise Lost, dealing with his concept of the "Monstrous Eve" which Virginia Woolf (who pops up frequently in this text) called "Milton's Bogey."

The title of the book of course refers to Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre, that actual madwoman in the attic, locked up to keep her from life, a condition experienced with varying intensity by a great many women. Along with works like The Minotaur and the Mermaid by Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Madwoman in the Attic is an indispensable text for understanding the world in which we live. It's expensive at $30.00, but it is a book to which one can refer repeatedly, not only for its insights into literature but for encouragement about our lives today.