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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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Captivity and Consciousness in George Eliot’s Fiction”
Chapter 13 Summary: “Made Keen by Loss: George Eliot’s Veiled Vision”
The authors begin this chapter with a description of George Eliot’s reaction to American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe’s claim that she was visited by “the spectral presence of Charlotte Brontë” (444). Eliot may have found Stowe’s tale of “spirit-communication” amusing, but she went on to write The Lifted Veil, a novella concerning a protagonist with powers of extrasensory perception. This example of contradictory behavior gives Gilbert and Gubar reason to describe Eliot as a woman writer with an “ambivalent sense of herself” (445).
The protagonist of The Lifted Veil, a man named Latimer, can see into the future. His hallucinations make him miserable because he is unable to change anything about his future; the events he foresees are not at all in his control. Some literary critics believe that Latimer shares many qualities with his author, and Gilbert and Gubar compare him to William Crimsworth, the title character of Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor.
According to Gilbert and Gubar, one important link between Latimer and Eliot is their shared belief that “imaginative vision” is a negative condition. In addition, Latimer’s pained and unhappy situation in the world echoes the plight of many women, who are regarded, like him, as “secondary” to others. Both Eliot and Latimer have a sensitivity to the needs of family that conflict with their own interests. Latimer’s cursed state as a poet who is unable to create art parallels Eliot’s experience as a woman who was denied the same power Latimer seeks.
Eliot’s identification with her professional life as an editor and a translator indicates that she values the meaning of someone else’s words more than her own. This anxiety of authorship inspires Eliot to write about characters “whose passivity, illness, and impotence are directly related to their visionary insight” (451). Latimer is one of several of Eliot’s characters who display this tendency. Her novels Daniel Deronda and Romola also contain weak characters disabled by their vision, and Gilbert and Gubar link some of them to Latimer because they all portray a heroic version of Milton’s Satan. For Eliot, Satan is not Eve’s alter-ego; Satan is simply a man who “diminishes women by reducing them to mere creatures, or worse still, characters” (457). Eliot’s creation of such characters, who seemingly represent Eliot, is proof of her own ambivalence about herself and other females.
In this chapter, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate the far reach of Milton’s influence, arguing that Eliot’s complex relationship with her sex is comparable to Milton’s depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost. For example, the murder plots in The Lifted Veil are especially dark because Latimer knows exactly how the plans will unfold thanks to his supernatural powers. As his wife Bertha plots to poison him and kill him, the authors note a similarity here to Eve’s offer of the poison apple to Adam. Through the character of Bertha and her actions, Gilbert and Gubar argue that Eliot is revealing her own version of “the myth of feminine evil” (466), which functions as evidence of Eliot’s internalized sexism. Though Eliot identifies with a female literary tradition, she perceives herself as the stereotypical monstrous woman; though this vision enables her to deny the limitations of the woman-as-angel stereotype purported by male writers of her time, it also leaves her alienated and struck down by her own self-hatred.
Despite Eliot’s ambivalence towards the Romantic movement in literature, a movement that ostensibly enabled some of her own unconventional life choices, elements of a “uniquely female gothicism” can be identified in The Lifted Veil (458). These gothic elements concern blatant misogyny, evidenced by moments in the novella when Eliot distances herself from the character Latimer. For example, Latimer is drawn to female beauty, and while Eliot understands his tendency to appreciate a woman’s appearance, she is careful to warn readers not to judge such appearances too quickly. The authors point out that Eliot’s own sense of victimization is directly linked to the Romantic male gaze; Eliot was not considered beautiful, and she was often rejected for her appearance. These rejections by men may explain Eliot’s ambivalence towards the free love espoused by Romanticism, an attitude that allows men significantly more freedom than women.
Chapter 14 Summary: “George Eliot as the Angel of Destruction”
Gilbert and Gubar begin this chapter with a discussion of two American women writers and their shared anxiety regarding female roles in patriarchal society. Margaret Fuller, the American journalist and critic, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author and abolitionist, were contemporaries of Eliot. This discussion illuminates Gilbert and Gubar’s suggestion that Eliot believed herself to be an “angel of destruction” (491).
In Eliot’s collection of short stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, she illustrates for her readers the value of compassion and the universality of “common human frailties” (484). Three different clergymen narrate the individual stories of the collection, and their maleness, as well as the title of the collection, serve as a kind of disguise that hides the true messages of Eliot’s writing. The actual content of the stories concerns a contradiction between the narrator’s treatment of women and the author’s “vengeance” on the narrator.
Gilbert and Gubar compare Eliot to several of her characters: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Romola de’ Bardi of Romola, and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda, whose title suggests a focus on male concerns. In the cases of Romola and Gwendolen, Eliot explores her own experiences with marriage; Eliot’s partner at this time, George Henry Lewes, was married to another woman, giving her insight into the situation of “dispossessed women.” All of Eliot’s women are angry about their positions in society, and they express their rage through “murderous thoughts and acts” while acting the part of altruistic angels (496).
Because Eliot’s women characters are often gentle and angelic in their demeanor, their violent thoughts can come as a surprise. In Middlemarch, the state of being married gives wives the opportunity to consider their situations and then to act on their frustrations, even just in their imaginations. Dorothea’s marriage to the much older Casaubon, for example, serves Casaubon well, but Dorothea is left alone as her husband focuses his time and his limited energy on his melancholy studies. Celia, Dorothea’s sister, observes “the deathliness of their marriage” early on (503), but Dorothea notices the diseased state of their relationship too late, and her feelings of dissatisfaction intensify. Casaubon dies before Dorothea acts on her violent imaginings, but the acuteness of her guilt suggests that she is somehow complicit in his demise. The presence of foils to her character, like Mary Garth, who nurses the character of Featherstone on his deathbed, and Nicholas Bulstrode, a seemingly pious Methodist banker, emphasize the intensity of Dorothea’s dark imaginings.
Dorothea’s marriage to Will Ladislaw is an exception to Eliot’s pattern of depicting marriage as a generally disappointing experience for wives. Though Will is well educated, Dorothea’s family feels he is ill-suited to her. Eliot’s characterization of Will as a man “mythically linked with female power and female inspiration” suggests that he is not a member of the patriarchy (529). Will’s family background is described in matrilineal terms, and “he too is a secretary, not an author” (529). Dorothea marries Will for love, and their relationship is a success thanks to his identification with female power and the limited nature of his own power as a non-creative male in Victorian society.
The chapter concludes with a return to the discussion of Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though both women were able to relate to Eliot’s struggle with the subordinate position of women in patriarchal society, Fuller and Stowe somehow made the most of their situations in their own ways. Fuller’s writings and life choices reveal that she did not submit to her position; in fact, Fuller imagined a better life for women. Stowe embraced her position in society, and she enjoyed a successful career as a writer while simultaneously embodying traditional female roles of wife and mother.
Part 5 Analysis
Gilbert and Gubar’s discussion of George Eliot’s ambivalence towards women supports the scholarly assertion that George Eliot would never have considered herself a feminist. Eliot’s ambivalence is apparent in the complex relationship that appears to exist between herself as the author and her literary creations; at different points in different novels, a narrator might treat a female character badly, and Eliot as the author and all-powerful creator then punishes the narrator for such bad behavior. Eliot’s duality reveals her two-sided nature: On one hand, Eliot prefers to identify herself with a male name and announce herself as an editor and translator, and on the other, she focuses her own creative energies on complex depictions of women’s lives. On one hand, Eliot asserts her authority over her creations like an omnipotent god who reigns over weak mortals, but on the other hand, she identifies with characters who are disabled by their own powers of imagination. Clearly, Eliot’s writing does not fit neatly into feminist literary theory, but the complexity of her writing clearly reflects the complexity of one woman’s experience in the 19th century.
In Chapter 13, Gilbert and Gubar examine the symbol of the veil as well as the symbol of food, both of which are objects linked with women. A feminist reading of these objects, as well as Eliot’s depictions of marriage, reveal Eliot’s belief that women are just as capable of negative emotion as positive emotion. Veils suggest demure modesty, but at the same time, they hide and conceal the truth about a woman’s appearance. Food can nourish, but food can disguise poison, like Eve’s apple in the Garden of Eden. Dorothea of Middlemarch appears pious, but her murderous thoughts towards her husband reflect a complex psychological truth about humans. The duality of humans, women included, means that angelic impulses can coexist with monstrous ones, just as head coverings and food items that may seem alluring can hide ugliness and injury.
Details of Eliot’s unconventional personal life illuminate her perceptions of the family dynamic of marriage, an important theme throughout The Madwoman. Eliot’s relationship of 23 years with George Henry Lewes was radical in its unconventionality; Lewes had enjoyed an open marriage with his wife for a number of years when he first met Eliot, and he lived with Eliot openly while still married to his wife. From a social standpoint, Eliot lived as the “other woman,” never holding the position of wife that would elevate her status. Though parallels can also be drawn between Eliot’s depiction of Casaubon and Lewes, Eliot herself cannot be tidily compared to her character of Dorothea. Eliot’s ambivalent attitude towards women ensures that she defies easy categorization herself.
