Reviews for The madwoman in the attic

The average rating for The madwoman in the attic based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-01 00:00:00 Carl Budlong Have you ever been bothered by that host of angelically drippy Dickensian heroines? Been more satisfied by the sassy alternatives offered by Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet, but couldn't pin down exactly why? Wondered what the hell is up with Wuthering Heights? Thought Eve was shafted? Well, act now to order your official Madwoman-in-the-Attic Goggles. Put them on, and literature will never look the same. Stop me if you've heard this one, but there has been this confining social dichotomy that women are either angels or monsters. Madonnas or whores. Yeah, you know the drill. So, through deep readings of the texts and experiences of nineteenth-century female authors writing in English, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify a pervasive set of images and structures employed by women writers coping with this dichotomy. I'm talking really, eerily pervasive. Over and over again, the authors trace the complexities of how these women enact fragmented selves on the page. Their various coping mechanisms, though, give their literature its complex architecture, built from affirmations of dominant social roles, the aching renunciation of Christina Rossetti, the dignified rebellion of Jane Eyre and the raving rebellion of her mad double(?) in the attic, marriages of equals, accommodations, all culminating in that nuanced explosion of an Emily Dickinson tackling everything-all-at-once. Though a lot of this wasn't a surprise, watching the sad, dark, self-denying compromises and mental hell some of these nineteenth-century women writers twisted through was more painful than I expected. Thank you, being alive in 2012. Speaking of 2012, you should know that this is some early feminist literary criticism, here. It can be crude, but analyzing these texts as not merely by authors, but by women authors, is not an irrelevant exercise. Gilbert and Gubar's taxonomy is so clear and the patterns so convincingly pervasive, that they provide a handy lens through which to read books by men and women; books steeped in the dominant paradigms or reacting against them. True story: I had read, liked, and gone home satisfied from The Painted Veil just a couple of weeks before reading this. After I slipped on my Madwoman Goggles, the themes, imagery, even the title of that whole book went right into focus with an audible click. Yes, the book is flawed. The authors often charge off on elaborate interpretative tangents beyond what the texts can solidly support. There is a strong streak of under-nuanced 1970s feminism. Plus, their exclusive focus on upper-class women in Britain and the US leaves us wondering about contemporaneous writers confined in Other-ness by virtue of class, sexuality, national origin, or anything else outside of the white, bearded Protestant patriarchy. But you know what? Damn -- their taxonomy is enlightening. Damn -- those tangents are lyrical. Damn -- this book must have burst on the lit-crit scene like a veil-rending, mansion-torching mad double of its own. And you know what else?? Damn -- those Madwoman Goggles are scarily relevant to so very, very many modern books. Guaranteed. Or your money back. This book pairs well with: every book ever, but especially tasty with Milton (hissssss), Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, the sisters Brönte, Jane Austen, Ma Mary Wollstencroft and daughter Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-13 00:00:00 Susan Mysliwy The imagination of the title is the boundary of Gilbert and Gubar's reflections, and some qualifications might be added to define the limits and orientation of that imagination, such as whiteness and the English language. All of the women writers they discuss as foremothers and proponents of a specifically female literary culture are white and either English or USian (correct me if I err). Of course it is necessary to have a focus, to delineate a subject for enquiry, but it is important to note that we are not only examining white material but examining it through whiteness, thus Gilbert and Gubar's feminist readings make seemingly uncritical use of the 'dark' Other against whom white women are defined:Bertha is Jane's truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress... 'The novelist who exploits psychological Doubles juxtaposes two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalising the free, uninhibited, often criminal self'Apart from a parenthetical remark about Betha's origin/colour, discussion of the issue of race does not enter this section at all. The very title of the book thus finally serves to erase race as a feminist concern, since the figure of the madwoman in the attic, a direct reference to the character (in Jane Eyre) of Bertha Mason, who is black, is made to stand for a group of white British and USian writers, who in turn represent women in general as maddened by the circumstances of the period. Another trope discussed at length is the aesthetic, often fetishised illness and feebleness of the nineteenth century young woman both in life and literature, but the authors miss the fact that this effectively disabled body is a white body specifically defined against the able, fertile, working body of the black woman, a distinction that enables the denial of femininity/womanhood/humanity to black women. In their excited introduction to this edition, the authors acknowledge rather than answer the critique of their work from this kind of angle by Gayatri Spivak. My intention is not to castigate them or to warn folks off this impressive and enjoyable book! But I do want to suggest that there is a lot of decolonisation left undone for the reader to be aware of... Because really, you wouldn't want to miss out on reading this, if you've ever read Austen, Eliot, Emily Dickinson or the Brontes. Especially if you've ever watched an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and thought oh no, no, no! It really isn't all about the desirability of a rich and handsome young man! There's so much more to it. Because Gilbert and Gubar have carefully excavated and investigated the so-much-more of the great women writers of the so-called golden age, revealing explicit and latent themes that speak to feminist consciousness. Their approach is to 'trust the tale not the teller' in reading feminist meanings into characters and interactions, but their discoveries never feel arbitrary and in general I found them convincing, even where they evidently disagreed with other critics. Their method is close reading, generally working text by text, but also interlinking to flesh out an image of each author's (often changing and evolving) sensibilities and concerns. The personal is hugely important to them, and the preliminary discussion of women's anxiety merely about merely assuming the heavily male-defined mantle of author is crucial for all of the writers they discuss. There is much biographical content, and an air of empathy that only strengthens the overall impression of rigour. Comparative comments seem rare to me, and I appreciated them as treats:Every negative stereotype protested by Charlotte Bronte is transformed into a virtue by George Eliot. While Bronte curses the fact than women are denied intellectual development, Eliot admits the terrible effects of this malnourishment but also implies that emotional life is thereby enriched for women. While Bronte shows how difficult it is for women to be assertive, Eliot dramatises the virtues of a uniquely female culture based on supportive camaraderie instead of masculine competition. While Bronte dramatises the suffocating sense of imprisonment born of female confinement, Eliot celebrates the ingenuity of women whose love can make "one little room, an everywhere." And while Bronte envies men the freedom of their authority, Eliot argues that such authority actually keeps men from experiencing their own physical and psychic authenticity.I also enjoyed the highly imaginative and poetic discussion of weaving, sewing and embroidery, presented in the concluding chapters on Emily Dickinson, but relevant to other authors too. I came back to this exploration when reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers describes men knitting and sewing in different contexts, and I saw this as part of her disruptive re/unwriting of gender. The men in question have characteristics that might be seen as wifely or feminine (cooking daily for another man, design skill, attention to detail, pleasure in homemaking and beauty, desire to care for children) and their weaving-work draws attention to these attributes. References to classical mythology abound, but the authors constantly look beyond simplistic parallels and look for half-submerged layers of meaning that often seem to have been deliberately veiled (veiling is another theme afforded scrutiny) by the authors under discussion. The tradition Gilbert and Gubar claim to have defined and traced seems to have this rather coy mode of concealment as a key tenet. Perhaps the most affecting passage, for me, is their comparison of Emily Dickinson with her contemporary, Walt Whitman, foregrounding again female anxiety of authorship, about taking up spaceAs most readers know, the cornerstone of Whitman's epic meditation is a powerful assertion of identity now entitled 'Song of Myself' and in that first edition [of Leaves of Grass, published 1855] called 'Walt Whitman'. Because the 1st edition appeared without its author's name on the title page, some critics have spoken of the work's near 'anonymity', and perhaps, by comparison with those later editions... which were decorated not only with the poet's name and photograph but with facsimilies of his signature, this early version was unusually reticent. But of course what was modesty for Whitman would have been mad self-assertion for Dickinson [...] He didn't need to put his name on the title page because he and his poem were coextensive... Whitman's expansive lines, moreover, continually and swaggeringly declared the enormity of his cosmic/prophetic powers. 'I celebrate myself and sing myself' his poem begins magisterially, 'and what I assume, you shall assume' promising in bardic self-confidence that if you 'stop this day and night with me... you shall possess the origin of all poems.' While Dickinson, the 'slightest in the House,' reconciles herself to being Nobody, Whitman genially enquires 'Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes).' While Dickinson trembles in her room, with the door just ajar, Whitman cries 'Unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!'Next time I find myself folded up on the tube between men seated legs so far akimbo they block my path I shall remember Emily and Walt, and push back.