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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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: “Strength in Agony: Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Women”
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Aesthetics of Renunciation”
Though women novelists of the 19th century struggled to make their voices heard, they generally had an easier time than female poets, whose art was widely considered “incompatible” with femaleness. Historically, male critics have diminished poetry by women for its “triviality” and for its “melodramatic” treatment of intellectual subject matter. R. P. Blackmur, a literary critic and poet, regarded Emily Dickinson’s oeuvre as proof of her skill at a domestic hobby comparable to cooking or knitting. Another leading assumption regarding women poets suggests that their poetry must come from a sentimental romantic experience, or from the lack of such an experience. Though prose writers received similar criticism, particular vitriol accompanied male criticism of women poets; women novelists can create demonic characters as an outlet for their experiences with male hostility, but “the women poet must literally become a madwoman [and] enact the diabolical role” herself (545).
The writing of novels is a very different process than the writing of poetry. Most significantly, the writing of novels has practical earning power; the writing of poetry is a purely aesthetic occupation. Thanks to the limitations of the Victorian education system, women had no opportunity to learn the ancient rules of poetry established by classical poets who wrote in Greek and Latin. Male critics often dismiss the knowledge of writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Shelley, who taught themselves the classics, mocking such writers as mere “Bluestockings.” Another important difference between novel-writing and poetry-writing involves the self-sacrificial nature of prose. The deeply personal and self-oriented nature of poetry is an imperfect vehicle for women who are “[b]red to selflessness” (547).
A comparison of English poets Christina Rossetti and John Keats illustrates the difficulty women experience while writing poetry in contrast to the relative ease of the experience for men. In Rossetti’s semi-autobiographical novella Maude, Rossetti’s protagonist’s verses reveal Rossetti’s own anxiety about writing. Many critics argue that the moral of Maude teaches that the woman poet “must die and be replaced by either the wife, the nun, or, most likely, the kindly useful spinster” (552). In contrast, John Keats, from a very young age, followed a self-directed plan to educate himself in order to become a recognized poet. According to Gilbert and Gubar, even his earliest works reveal a confidence that could only originate in “his masculine certainty that he was a lord of creation” (553). In the United States, a similar comparison between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman reveals a similar message of “female self-effacement and male self-assertion” (554).
Women poets of the 19th century in both the United States and England received less scrutiny than their older counterparts because the writing of poetry was equated to the playing of the piano and other genteel pastimes. Emily Dickinson wrote of this denigrating comparison, linking herself to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other poets like Christina Rossetti, who also comments on the insult in Maude. Another complex issue regarding women poets lies in the inconsistent approach to their names. For example, Emily Dickinson is often referred to by her first name, while other women poets are identified with a “Mrs.,” a title that depends entirely on the institution of marriage.
The absence of a female poetry tradition is another challenge that faces women poets. Without a past tradition, women poets enter new territory unmarked by established poetic ideals that warrant preservation. Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem Goblin Market explores the notion that writing poetry is possible despite these difficulties; her message is disguised in a morality tale warning young women of the dangers of giving in to temptation. In the poem, a young woman named Laura gives in to a compulsion to eat fruit sold by goblins; the curse of the fruit leads to “physical barrenness” and a slow but steady physical withering. No men appear in the poem at all, only goblin fruit-sellers. The dire consequences of Laura’s choice to eat the goblin fruit bear resemblance to Eve’s impulse to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge; Laura’s barrenness represents Eve’s fall from God’s grace. Laura’s sister Lizzie saves Laura from Laura’s eternal punishment, and Lizzie learns that it is better to starve than to engage in criminal acts of “self-assertion.” Laura transforms back into a feminine domestic ideal, but Lizzie’s act of selfless rescue suggests that she has the power to absolve Laura, much like writing poetry has the power to imagine a matriarchal society without men.
Chapter 16 Summary: “A Woman—White: Emily Dickinson’s Yarn of Pearl”
According to Gilbert and Gubar, the poetry of American poet Emily Dickinson is “the speech of a fictional character” (583), reflecting the persona Dickinson creates in her verse rather than her true self. This persona takes different forms: While other writers discussed in the book write about angels of destruction, orphan children, and madwomen, Dickinson’s poetic voice suggests that she has become all three. As a recluse and agoraphobe, Dickinson “enact[s] precisely the melodramatic romances and gothic plots” that her isolation denies her (585).
By implementing a “persistent child pose” in her poetry (587), Dickinson suggests that a complex relationship exists between her female self, who is submissive, and her masculine self, who is assertive. By using the voice of a child in her verse, Dickinson explores her imaginings of herself as daughter, as a “scholar/slave” to a master, and as a nobody in the presence of a higher power. Dickinson lived in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, her whole adult life, so as Dickinson grows older, her perpetual childhood in literary form takes a dark turn; even her imaginings of a playful child state could not release her fully from her adult state of confinement.
Dickinson’s childish voice enables her innovative writing style, a style characterized by deliberate grammatical errors and unexpected arrangements of words. Her acts of child-like imitation allow her to use the naïve outlook of a child to her creative advantage, and Dickinson’s poetry is often whimsical and ironic in tone thanks to her “child mask” despite serious subject matter. For example, some of her poems contain images of “a kindly Victorian Father God” parenting a young daughter (592), and Dickinson’s parodies of a repressive household modeled on her own childhood disguise feelings of pain and tension.
The romantic scenarios that play out in some of Dickinson’s poems suggest that her attitude towards male authority is ambiguous. She writes about her love for a Master who has no name, but she describes this individual in neither divine nor human terms. Her tone in these poems often contrasts with the rebellious tone of her child persona, reflecting her ambivalence towards the Master to whom she addresses her verses. While it is possible that the Master represents Dickinson’s father, a Puritan, a lawyer and “a remote, powerful, and grim patriarch” (597), it is also possible that the Master represents God or a conflated male figure that combines the two.
At times, the poet resents her attachment to this Master—called Nobodaddy by the authors, who borrow the term from William Blake—as evidenced by the agoraphobic imagery she employs in her writing. To Dickinson, her actual love and passion feels as confining as a prison cell. Dickinson is also confined to the limitations of her romantic attachment as it exists in her imagination; this particular form of romantic “mental slavery” and its inevitable plotlines represent the position of women in patriarchal society, whose aspirations to love are, in the words of Margaret Fuller, their “whole existence.”
A thorough investigation of Dickinson’s literal white dress and her figurative use of the color white in her poetry invites comparisons to other writers who employ white imagery. Like Herman Melville, whose white whale represents “enigma, paradox, and irony” (614), Dickinson considers white to be representative of a combination of principles. For Dickinson, white symbolizes energy, creativity, isolation, eternity, and death. The authors point out that in the 19th century, white was a color linked with women and the Victorian female ideal. White represents chaste virginity and angelic purity, as the fairy tale of Snow White and the white gowns of bridal wear attest. While the color white is sometimes an indication of female vulnerability, white can also represent female power, as in the case of “the mythic moon-white figure of Diana the huntress” (616). Critics may never be able to explain with certainty Dickinson’s choice to wear white and to use white as a metaphor, but the fact that white was linked with death in Victorian times suggests that, to Dickinson, her white dress may have been a metaphorical shroud. The dress as shroud makes for a visible sign of her imprisonment as a single woman trapped inside her father’s home for her entire adult life. Dickinson’s death imagery often functions as a metaphor for insanity as well as a means by which society can keep women quiet.
Women of Dickinson’s time and social position typically knew how to sew, and the prevalence of spider imagery in Dickinson’s poems links this domestic creative process to the sinister practice of entrapment. Dickinson also sewed her own poems into small pamphlets called fascicles, seeking to self-publish her work “as a conscious literary artist” (641). The imagery of a spider’s quietly industrious web-weaving combines with the image of Dickinson’s own work with needle and thread to suggest that she, like other women writers in England and the United States, was “silently subversive” in her pursuit of an artistic life.
Part 6 Analysis
The hostility of male critics towards female poets discussed in Chapter 15 all but invites a feminist rebuttal. The mere fact that Gilbert and Gubar devote a book of this length to women’s art suggests that women’s art is just as important as the aesthetic creations of men. Furthermore, the authors wrote this book during the 1970s, which was the heyday of second-wave feminism. One project of second-wave feminism involved drawing attention to positive images of women in art as a reaction to the pervasiveness of negative female imagery in art and popular culture. As Gilbert, Gubar, and female poets through the ages would agree, women are more than just art objects; they are artists themselves.
Another feminist message that is consistent with the overarching theme of the book is visible in the discussion of male privilege in Chapter 15. Victorian men had access to the classics and other foundational texts of education, but women did not, and worse, women who sought to educate themselves were denigrated for their interest in subject areas reserved for men. Male privilege is also evidenced by John Keats’s youthful certainty regarding his own artistic potential. As a young man entitled to an education and supported by the long-established history of male literary genius, Keats exhibited no signs of the authorial anxiety that characterizes the work of all women mentioned in The Madwoman in the Attic.
Gilbert and Gubar’s choice to perform a close reading of Dickinson’s poetry as a domestic talent is interesting because the exploration draws positive attention to household activities that typically symbolize female drudgery. When the authors link Dickinson’s artistic expression with her sewing, a prim, ladylike activity, Dickinson emerges as a witchy woman whose power is quietly hidden from view. Spiders are linked with witches as well as mythic characters like Ariadne and Penelope of Homer’s The Odyssey; because both Ariadne and Penelope were involved in acts of deceit, their connection to Dickinson is apt. By writing poetry disguised as childish ruminations, Dickinson deceives readers who fail to look carefully at the details and the subtext of her words. By writing from the privacy of her father’s house, Dickinson worked in the same unobtrusive manner as a spider in the corner of a room, appearing suddenly to observers and shocking them just by the fact of existing.
