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