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

Chapter 2 explores the connection between writing and anxiety, and according to the authors, male writers and female writers experience different kinds of anxiety around literary expression. Men experience what literary critic Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence, which is the fear “that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings” (46); in contrast, the anxieties of women writers have more to do with a fear that the creative process is simply out of reach because the act of writing will lead to isolation or destruction. The consequence of this uniquely female anxiety is the “infection in the sentence” of the chapter’s title, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson. This metaphorical infection explains the many appearances of disease and sickness in American and English women’s literature of the Victorian Age.

When an alienated female writer of the 19th century writes in isolation, the hidden nature of her creativity means she must overcome feelings of self-doubt and inferiority. These negative, anxious feelings manifest in physical conditions like anorexia, agoraphobia, and hysteria. The rigid parameters of patriarchal socialization are to blame for these problems; after all, 19th-century culture “admonished women to be ill” by projecting frailty and strain on women (54), both in real life and in literature.

The artistic achievements of women writers during the 19th century are often linked to disease. Angelic characters in literature are often fearful and unwell, while monstrous women are despairing and infectious, and their existence is a direct result of the contagious nature of anxiety. Other ailments that afflict the characters of women writers include metaphorical and literal blindness, faulty memories, and language-related difficulties. Jane Austen’s Miss Bates is easily flustered and confused, for example, while the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein must learn language “from scratch.”

Because the creative environment of the 19th century is so inhospitable to women, the need of writers like George Eliot to impersonate men makes sense. The mere desire to write reflects a kind of madness, and if a woman writer refuses to apologize for interloping, she must not be entirely female. Like Lady Macbeth, whose capacity for evil is linked with her desire to be less female, both female writers and their characters become mad; women who appropriate male forms of creativity like the novel must experience “a schizophrenia of authorship” (69).

Women writers of the 19th century employed various strategies to overcome their anxiety. Some writers, like Jane Austen, avoided stereotypically modest subject matter, choosing instead to create coded meanings in their characters’ interactions and words. Others, like Emily Dickinson, embrace the isolation of their position, choosing to live as an eccentric rather than change according to the preferences of Victorian patriarchy. Both strategies are characterized by subterfuge, and they prove that women writers of the Victorian time were experts of concealment. This expertise predicts the madwoman trope identifiable in works of both the 19th and the 20th century. 

The study of literary madwomen reveals that these women characters are often confined to a prison or hospital. Even a critical examination of homes suggests that they can be metaphorical dungeons. Some writers describe the experience of burial as a way to explore the experience of confinement. Inextricably linked to a study of a prison is a study of potential escape; for example, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates that the confining nature of the rest cure is much worse than disease that inspires such treatment. 

As the title of Chapter 3 suggests, the cave is a compelling symbol for female literary potential, and this chapter discusses the symbol in the context of three specific situations. Because Victorian society feared caves, the application of Freudian theory, which states that a cave is a distinctly female place, links the Victorian fear of caves to their fear of women writers. A comparison of Plato’s allegory of the cave to several important caves in women’s literature ensues: Simone de Beauvoir’s caves of Tunisia, the Greek myth of the Sibyl and her cavernous home, and Mary Shelley’s description of the Sibyl’s cave in the fictional introduction to her novel The Last Man. These “counter-parables” to Plato’s allegory of the cave seize the metaphorical power of the cave and deliver that power back to women.

Simone de Beauvoir describes a cave she visited in Tunisia, where she observed four women busy with “traditional female activities” like cooking and breastfeeding (94). As de Beauvoir leaves the cave, she observes a man returning to the cave from the marketplace, and the juxtaposition of the man’s freedom to move around contrasted powerfully with the seeming immobility of the women in the cave.

In the introduction to The Last Man by Mary Shelley, two characters, one male and one female, visit the cave in Italy that is said to be the gateway to the underworld. This cave is the home of the Cumaean Sibyl, a prophetess. The male character, not the female one, identifies the cave for what it is; that the man knows the cave better than the woman suggests that Mary Shelley is expressing a moment of authorial anxiety in the introduction. Later in the introduction, however, Mary Shelley reveals that by entering the “cavern of her own mind” (98), she sees her imaginative process as proof of her creative power.

Additionally, poetry by Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and novels by Jane Austen, Willa Cather, George Eliot and others all reinforce the notion that “the cave is not just the place from which the past is retrieved but the place where the future is conceived” (102).