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Sandra Gilbert, Susan GubarThe Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “How Are We Fal’n?: Milton’s Daughters”
Chapter 6 Summary: “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers”
This chapter begins with an explanation of Milton’s bogey—a phrase that comes from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and refers, the authors suggest, to a “patriarchal specter” that haunts several of the women writers discussed in the book. Milton’s bogey is the “powerful rendering of the culture myth that Woolf, like most other literary women, sensed at the heart of Western literary patriarchy” (191); this culture myth is explored in detail in Paradise Lost.
The misogyny of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, combined with its universal appeal as a rendering of the best-known Bible story, makes it a complex work for women readers, who may internalize Milton’s messages about females. Women writers find it difficult to follow the example of many male writers who model their own literary ambitions on Milton; to do so would feel like a betrayal. According to Gilbert and Gubar, many women writers, like Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, display a complicated relationship with Milton and with Paradise Lost in their own writing.
The misogyny of Paradise Lost is most apparent in the parallels that exist between the character of Eve and the character of Satan. Eve falls from grace for the same reasons as Satan: They both desire an improved and more equal position “as Gods.” Both are punished and enslaved for their desires. Even more striking are the ways Eve resembles Satan and his female counterpart, Sin. Eve and Sin are the only two female characters in the poem, and both women experience the “anguish of maternity”; Eve’s childbirth, though painful, does not compare to Sin’s experience of giving birth to hellhounds, who “continually emerge from and return to her womb, where they bark and howl unseen” (198). Both Sin and Eve are susceptible to Satan’s cunning, and the three characters together mock the holy trinity of God, Jesus Christ, and Adam.
Milton’s bogey had a significant influence on the Romantic movement. According to Gilbert and Gubar, Satan is the original Byronic hero who seeks knowledge about himself as an individual; additionally, Satan desires “liberty and justice for all” (202), which is another important Romantic ideal. Both Satan and Eve rebel against conventional norms, just like 19th-century female writers who defied the expectations of Victorian society. The Romantic link to Satan predicts the radical attitudes of women writers and feminism as a movement; Satan may have been the first outsider to embrace his lowly status, but Romantics and women writers were the first to politicize their outsider status. The complicated paradoxical relationship between the Romantics and Milton’s “bardlike godliness” is observable in both male and female writers of the Romantic movement.
Another Romantic link to Satan exists in “the Romantic fascination with incest” (207). Satan is both a lover and a father figure to Eve and to Sin just as Byron was both a lover and a brother to his half-sister Augusta Leigh. As well, Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had an affair with Byron, identified Byron as her lover as well as her “creator.” These real-life examples of incest echo the invention of Eve by Adam’s rib.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”
Though this chapter focuses on an exploration of Mary Shelley and her seminal work Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, the authors begin with a discussion of Milton’s influence on George Eliot. Dorothea, of Eliot’s Middlemarch, relates to her husband Casaubon in much the same way Milton’s daughters related to Milton. This comparison sets up the argument that “all women writers have been to some extent Milton’s daughters” (219), especially those who emerged from and wrote after the Romantic movement, like Mary Shelley herself. In Frankenstein, Shelley explores her anxiety about being a woman writer and the femaleness rendered in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Mary Shelley’s early life and girlhood predict the thematic content of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was born into a literary family, and though her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, died while giving birth to Shelley, she existed for Shelley in her books and in the memories of others who knew her. William Godwin, Shelley’s father, rejected Shelley after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was 16 years old. Thus orphaned at an early age, Shelley found that books became her “surrogate parents.” Shelley learned about herself as a writer at the same age at which she learned about sex, and soon after, pregnancy and childbirth; therefore, the “gothic psychodrama” of Frankenstein depicts Shelley’s deeply personal interpretation of the misogyny present in Eve’s experiences in Paradise Lost.
Shelley shares similarities with several of her characters, one of which is a fascination with problems and problem-solving. This obsession is characteristically female, especially when discussed from the point of view of Eve, whose fall from God’s grace marks her as Satanic. The three narrative layers of Frankenstein, from Walton’s letters to the creature’s speeches to Victor Frankenstein’s storytelling, all interpret the origin story of Paradise Lost in some way. Shelley’s fascination with “family histories” is also observable in the novel. Shelley explores the family backgrounds of most characters in the novel, and several characters are orphans, like Adam and Eve and Shelley herself. They all experience a sense of alienation as well as “shared guilt,” and for Victor, his outsider status may be explained by his incestuous attachment to Elizabeth, a sister figure whom he later marries.
A close examination of Victor Frankenstein reveals that Shelley has given him qualities that link him to both Adam and Satan. Before Victor leaves his family home to pursue his education, he is Adam-like and “sheltered by his benevolent father as a sensitive plant might be” (230); later, as Victor begins his unholy studies, he transforms into a Satan figure who desires the God-like power to create life. Victor takes on qualities that belong to Eve when, after a painful birth experience, he feels guilt at knowing his creature; this guilt intensifies when Victor feels responsible for the murders that his creature commits. Victor’s creative potential links him to Shelley herself; after all, both Victor and Shelley have learned everything they know from books, and the outcomes of their studies prove to be extremely anxiety-provoking.
The parallels between Victor Frankenstein, his creature, and Mary Shelley are numerous. Like Victor, his creature is a composite of Adam and Satan, but at times, the creature is also God-like, like Shelley as an author. At the start of his life, the creature is innocent, like Adam, but he quickly morphs into “an outcast.” Shelley and the creature are both God-like in their strength; Shelley’s imagination gives her license to create, while the creature is physically fearsome. The creature’s namelessness is also significant; he is “as nameless as a woman is in patriarchal society” (241). Neither Victor nor Shelley nor her creature have a mother, which is perhaps the most poignant and personal similarity of all.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell”
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights takes place in “a world where men battle for the favors of apparently high-spirited and independent women” (249). Brontë employs a narrative technique that offers the reader different perspectives and digressions from the plot line, much like the technique employed by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Brontë and Shelley are also similar in their family backgrounds and their relationships to books. The Brontë sisters and Shelley lost their mothers early in life, and consequently, both Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights reveal a “fascination with the question of origins” (251).
According to Gilbert and Gubar, Brontë’s novel is a corrected version of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Its depiction of heaven and hell, the Satanic descriptions of Heathcliff, and Catherine’s fall from grace all link the classic Bildungsroman to Milton’s epic poem. In addition, the mystical qualities of Wuthering Heights connect it to William Blake’s visionary mythology of Urizen, an allegorical God-like figure. During Brontë’s childhood, she displayed imaginative powers beyond her years; these powers enabled her later in life to create literary “fantasy land[s].”
Wuthering Heights explores mysticism, but the explorations are set against an ordinary-seeming domestic backdrop. This antithetical combination is characteristic of Brontë, whose diaries reveal the coexistence of “the most unlikely opposites” (259); weddings become funerals, for example, and heaven becomes hell, and vice versa. Hell, according to Gilbert and Gubar, is the disorderly and violent household of Wuthering Heights, especially for Catherine Earnshaw; when Heathcliff arrives, however, Catherine’s patriarchal hell becomes a kind of paradise. Fulfilled by Heathcliff’s support and friendship, Catherine “becomes increasingly rebellious against the parodic patriarchal religion Joseph advocates, and thus too, increasingly unmindful of her father’s discipline” (266). When Hindley, Catherine’s brother and enemy of Heathcliff, becomes master of Wuthering Heights, his leadership leads directly to Catherine’s fall and expulsion from her version of Eden.
Hindley’s marriage to Frances introduces a mother figure for Catherine, whose own mother dies shortly after Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights. Frances, however, will soon die herself in childbirth, weakened by tuberculosis and “the social illness of ladyhood” (270). Hindley and Frances function in the novel as a pair of step-parents to Catherine and Heathcliff, and the youngsters roam the moors to escape them; when Catherine and Heathcliff come too close to Thrushcross Grange, the home of the Lintons, Eden begins to slip away. Within five weeks at the Grange, Catherine is transformed into a genteel double of herself, a transformation that initiates her separation from her soulmate, Heathcliff, and thus, her fall from grace.
Catherine’s education under the tutelage of the Lintons and its catastrophic outcome “may reflect the Brontës’ own traumatic experiences at the Clergy Daughters School and elsewhere” (275). As a result of her education, Catherine becomes a master of “self-denial,” and her ladylike repression eventually sends her into madness. After Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton, she soon becomes pregnant. While in confinement, both as a result of her pregnancy and as a prisoner of her new state and household, Catherine stops eating, and her physical and spiritual selves begin to “decay.” Though heaven, as represented by Thrushcross Grange, wins over hell, as represented by Wuthering Heights, the victory “seals Catherine’s doom” (282).
The characters of Isabella, Nelly, Heathcliff, and Catherine II all lead parallel lives to Catherine’s. Isabella, “victimized by the genre of romance” (288), also falls in love with Heathcliff, and she suffers for her love. Nelly’s willingness to narrate in the safety of her distance from the characters renders her “patriarchy’s paradigmatic housekeeper” (291); for example, Nelly refuses to tell Edgar that Catherine is not eating. Heathcliff is “Catherine’s alter-ego,” while Catherine II lives her life according to the standards set by her mother.
When Catherine is separated from Heathcliff, her alter-ego, she is like Eve, who was “tragically separated from her fiery original self” (306). Eventually, in death, Catherine and Heathcliff come together again, this time as “witch and goblin” (306), cast out from the Eden of their youth.
Part 3 Analysis
This section of the book suggests that women writers of the 19th century are all indebted to English poet John Milton in some way; these so-called “daughters of Milton” all have conflicted relationships with their literary father figure. Just like in any other father-daughter relationship, the daughters must eventually separate from their parent and find their own way in the world. Though the daughters may develop their own independent thoughts as a result of this separation, internalized echoes of their father’s paternal messaging will likely remain.
By comparing Milton to a father figure and Shelley and Brontë to his daughters, the authors are transforming the literal relationship between a father and a daughter into a figurative one. The emotional weight of this metaphorical family dynamic is significant: If Milton believed what he wrote—that Eve is a female version of Satan—then he must have suspected his daughters of diabolical tendencies. Milton’s suspicions of his own daughters suggest that he feared them and the havoc they could potentially wreak if their behaviors developed unchecked. At the heart of this metaphorical family argument is the feminist belief that patriarchal systems are a reaction to the male fear of women’s power.
Several characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are motherless or orphans, and according to Gilbert and Gubar, Shelley worked through her own experience of living without her mother through her exploration of her characters’ fictional lives. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist, loses his mother, who was an orphan herself, to scarlet fever at the age of 17. Two other important characters in the novel, Elizabeth Lavenza and Justine Moritz, are also orphans. The creature himself lacks a mother, and his father, Victor, abandons him moments after giving him life, rendering him an orphan as soon as he is created. Victor Frankenstein, like William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s own father, lacks the maternal impulse to attach instinctively to his child, and this lack enables both fathers to abandon their offspring. Because Mary Shelley literally lost her mother as a newborn baby and lost her father, in a figurative sense, when she eloped with Percy Shelley, she had significant insight into the orphan experience. The consequences of Shelley’s own emotional isolation play out in the lives of her characters, making Frankenstein a morality story about parenting as much as a novel reflecting various Romantic tropes.
All three of this book’s key themes—feminism and patriarchy, family dynamics, and imprisonment and escape—come into play in the authors’ discussion of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw’s free-spirited rebelliousness suggests a feminist enthusiasm for unchecked female behavior, while the two households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange function as semi-comfortable prisons for their inhabitants, the most recent of whom is named Lockwood. Lockwood’s name suggests that he, too, is fixed inside a locked space, but ironically, he leaves at the end of the novel, while all other characters, even the dead ones, stay. Dysfunctional family dynamics ensure that characters’ emotions run high, and according to Gilbert and Gubar, the Edenic paradise of Catherine and Heathcliff’s youth is as transient as childhood itself, making adulthood a trial for the soulmates, who find relief only in death.
