The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

“But if, as nurse and comforter, spirit-guide and mystical messenger, a woman ruled the dying and the dead, might not even her admirers sometimes fear that, besides dying or easing death, she could bring death?” 

The stereotypical depictions of women in Victorian male writing present an unrealistic and polarized view of women. For example, women who possess the characteristics of an angel are trusted in vulnerable situations. A nurse, for example, can tend to an invalid in a sickbed, but her proximity means that she has the power to harm as well as the power to heal. In this way, an angel can transform quickly into a monster, the same way a sickbed can quickly transform into a deathbed. 

“Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about—perhaps even loathing of—her own flesh.” 

Broad insights into the psycho-emotional experience of girls and women like this one reflect the interest in feminist issues such as body image that gained momentum in the 1970s when The Madwoman was published. This explanation of adolescent female anxiety and its source applies to readers beyond the academic audience that makes up the readership of most literary criticism.

“Indeed, to many critics and scholars, some of these literary women look like isolated eccentrics.”

The unconventional choices and behaviors that mark eccentrics in any society are often amusing in nature to the superior majority. For many English and American women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, such quirks are less amusing and more transgressive; the simple act of a woman telling her own story is a very complicated decision while she is living under the pressures of patriarchy. 

“Working on leaves, bark, and ‘a white filmy substance,’ the Sibyl literally wrote, and upon, the Book of Nature.” 

While discussing the metaphor of literary paternity, the authors compare the potency of the male instrument to the power of male authorship. Here, the same metaphor is applied to women writers, represented by the Sibyl, a female prophet in Greek mythology who wrote down all of her predictions. That the Sibyl writes on the Book of Nature, a concept from the Middle Ages that suggests nature is a source of knowledge, implies that the Sibyl, like other women writers, is a reliable though underappreciated source of information.

“Spatial images of boundary and enclosure seem to proliferate whenever we find writers coming to terms with Jane Austen, as if they were displaying their own anxieties about what she represents.”

The critics to whom the writers refer in this passage include both men and women writers who use masculine language to criticize Austen’s work. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, and Henry James all lambast Austen for her so-called trivial descriptions of domestic life and reduce her to a mere ladylike stereotype. 

“But Austen did not admire the prototypical Madame de Genlis; she was ‘disgusted’ with her brand of didacticism and with the evangelic fervor of novelists who considered themselves primarily moralists.” 

Austen rejected “conduct literature,” or any didactic writing that contains prescriptive messages about behavior and comportment. Madame de Genlis, a French writer of the 18th century, wrote morality plays and other works intended specifically for the education of children, which explains Austen’s disdain for the author of original contributions to the field of didactic literature. 

“We have already seen that even in the juvenilia (which many critics consider her most conservative work) there are clues that Austen is hiding behind a distinctly unladylike outlook behind the ‘cover’ or ‘blotter’ of parody.”

Austen, a writer often derided for her careful descriptions of domestic life, parodied literary conventions of the time by exaggerating for comic effect the behaviors of women who lived under social restrictions. Her writing is uncouth to some for its darkly funny descriptions of female behavior, an ironic turn of events for a writer sometimes criticized for being painstakingly polite. 

“Almost as if she were reviewing the implications of her own plots, Austen explores in Persuasion the effects on women of submission to authority and the renunciation of one’s life story.”

The protagonist of Persuasion, Austen’s last novel, is Anne Elliott, a woman whose aged and pallid appearance represents the death of her younger self. Eight years ago, Anne ended her relationship with Captain Wentworth, and since then, she has lived with her overbearing father with no hope of escape. Austen and Anne share some similar qualities, and these similarities suggest that Austen’s final work is an examination of the dependency that can result when a woman is unable to live autonomously. 

“For if Eve is Sin’s as well as Satan’s double, then Satan is to Eve what he is to Sin—both lover and a daddy.”

Eve, Sin, and Satan are characters in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and their relationships to one another are complex. Sin is linked with Eve; both characters are female, and both characters are susceptible to Satan’s manipulation. Satan is characterized as “enormously attractive to women” (206), even to his daughter Sin, and their incestuous affair is interesting to the Romantics. The Romantic interest in incest is linked to Lord Byron’s incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. 

“Like God, for instance, Milton-as-epic-speaker creates heaven and earth (or their verbal equivalents) out of a bewildering chaos of history, legend, and philosophy.” 

This description of Milton’s creative powers echoes the notions of male authorship as a matter of paternity. Because Milton has created a version of heaven and hell in his epic poem Paradise Lost, he is like God, the ultimate father and patriarch. The influence of Milton is an important theme throughout this collection of critical essays, and the women writers discussed are all characterized as figurative “daughters” of Milton. 

“To take the last point first, paintings of Milton dictating to his daughters were quite popular at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth.”

Because Milton’s vision declined into complete blindness by the time he was 44 years old, he was dependent on his daughters and other helpers for the completion of secretarial jobs as well as basic household tasks. In this way, Milton cannot be understood as an all-powerful intellect, no matter how God-like his status amongst men. 

“Like figures in a dream, all the people in Frankenstein have different bodies and somehow, horribly, the same face, or worse—the same two faces.” 

Critics have historically found “the moral ambiguity and the symbolic slipperiness” of Frankenstein problematic (229). For example, various characters in the book resemble each other in behavior and temperament even when their roles are disparate and when their looks and their allegiances change. The sub-title of the novel, The Modern Prometheus, alludes to the ambiguity of the plot line; Prometheus is a trickster who challenged Zeus, the chief god, but it is unclear which character Shelley intends to depict as the protagonist of her modern version of the myth.

“And significantly, he is himself as nameless as a woman in patriarchal society, as nameless as unmarried, illegitimately pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin may have felt herself to be at the time she wrote Frankenstein.” 

Frankenstein’s creature is a motherless, illegitimate being whose father rejects him during at a vulnerable time of life. Shelley herself was rejected by her father when she was 16 because she had eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley; Percy Shelley, at this time, was still married to another woman, so he could not marry Shelley until after his wife committed suicide. Neither her father’s name nor her lover’s name was available to Shelley at the time at which she wrote Frankenstein, and her experience with namelessness explains why her creature is nameless.  

“Given the patriarchal nature of culture, women must fall—that is, they are already fallen because doomed to fall.” 

Though this passage originates in an essay about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and concerns the specific fate of Catherine Earnshaw, the passage can be applied to many women whose lives form the subject matter of the book, writers and characters alike. This statement is essentially feminist, as it addresses the situation of women in society in a general sense, but its tone of resignation contrasts with the assertive voices that speak for feminism today. 

“Critics never comment on this point, but the truth is that Catherine is pregnant during both the kitchen scene and the mad scene, and her death occurs at the time of (and ostensibly because of) her ‘confinement.’” 

The confinement of pregnancy, like any other state of imprisonment, contributes directly to Catherine’s mental decline, suggesting that women who are trapped will eventually go mad, no matter the details of their situation. Pregnancy and motherhood are a kind of prison unique to women; though a woman might long for a baby and feel joy at the baby’s arrival, these emotions do not cancel out the pressure some women feel at being utterly and fully responsible for the life of another human being. 

“Similarly, trance-writing—in the sense in which we are using the phrase to describe Charlotte Brontë’s simultaneous enactment and evasion of her own rebellious impulses—is clearly an attempt to allay the anxieties of female authorship.”

Charlotte Brontë wrote with her eyes closed at times, and this process may have enabled her to access deep parts of her creative imagination while avoiding the judgment of disapproving observers. The closing of one’s eyes is a way to shut out the external world, but it is also a reaction to the sensation of fear; this second interpretation suggests that Brontë needed to close her eyes while writing in order to write freely. 

“In other words, what horrified the Victorians was Jane’s anger.”

When Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre was published in 1847, critics were aghast at several aspects of the book. Because the character of Jane did not think or behave according to Victorian societal norms, reviewers believed her to be a dangerous figure driven by “repressed rage.” Jane’s anger stems from her inability to live according to her own preferences, away from societal pressures that limit her movement to “drawing rooms and patriarchal mansions” (338).

“‘Poor, plain, and little,’ Jane Eyre—her name is of course suggestive—is invisible as air, the heir to nothing, secretly choking with ire.” 

The word play observable in this passage is typical of the authors’ punchy rhetorical style. By incorporating the use of slant rhymes with homonyms, the authors make a succinct point about Brontë’s protagonist’s name; the character of Jane Eyre may seem straightforward, according to the adjectives that start the passage, but there is more to her complex personality, and her name, than meets the eye. 

“Like other anorexics, she has been rewarded only for her compliant attractiveness and ‘feminine’ docility, so her self-starvation is, ironically, an acceptance of the ideal of self-denial.”

Caroline Helstone, one of the lead characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, is deprived of love and emotional sustenance, so she rejects the physical symbol of supportive relationships: food. By examining Caroline’s situation in the novel through a psychological lens, Gilbert and Gubar argue that contemporary mental health issues like eating disorders are not contemporary at all. In actuality, women have been managing internal conflicts around self-worth throughout the ages.

“The female artist, Brontë implies, must seek to revivify herself. As sibyl, as shaman, as sorceress, she must avoid not only the silence of the nun, but the curse of the witch.”

Gilbert and Gubar here link the female artist with images of the supernatural, suggesting that a woman’s creative power is a kind of magic or dark art. Women artists were criticized for their impulse to create art because these interests were considered unwomanly and unnatural. In order to pursue a creative life of the mind, women artists must accept the negative implications of their vocation, an unfair circumstance that does not afflict men in similar situations.

“Although Eliot shares to some extent Latimer’s fascination with female beauty, her early fiction repeatedly cautions against judging the inner being by the outer person.”

According to Gilbert and Gubar, Eliot warns her readers against making snap judgments about individuals based on their appearances. Though these warnings can be explained by the fact that Eliot had repeated experiences of men rejecting her for not being beautiful, the authors feel that Eliot’s cautionary attitude towards female beauty has more to do with an awareness of the risks posed to women by the sexually open attitudes of the Romantic movement. Beauty may attract love, but it can also attract trouble, especially for women, who are judged more harshly for promiscuous behavior and who must live with the pregnancies and babies that result from casual encounters.

“As an ethical touchstone, then, the mother-child bond becomes for Stowe a model of what social community should be.”

The life of American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe contrasts with the lives of other women writers. Stowe, a successful writer, enjoyed a “full life as a sister, wife, and mother” (532), a life that explains why her vision of an ideal society is modeled after the foundational relationship of a human’s life: the relationship between a mother and her child. Other women writers, like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, had no children, so their writing reveals a focus on the value of independence rather than interdependence. 

“For one thing, novel-writing is a useful occupation, almost—pace Blackmur—like baking or knitting.”

According to literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, the writing of novels has practical value and is, therefore, an understandable undertaking for women. The phenomenon of women writing poetry, on the other hand, is inexplicable. Women novelists of the 18th century wrote under varying levels of duress; sometimes, these efforts make sense to patriarchally minded critics because the novels earned money on which the writers could live. Women poets, on the other hand, are unjustifiable because their impulse to write is purely artistic.