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11. Ghosts in the Attic: Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and the Female Gothic
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203 11 Ghosts in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and the Female Gothic Carol Margaret Davison Nearly thirty years after its initial publication,Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (1979) remains an influential and groundbreaking work of feminist literary criticism. Despite the problems attendant on the application of a critical master theory to a broad cross-section of literary texts, the major insights of Madwoman still stand up under scrutiny. Indeed, its sixteen chapters devoted to the principal canonical works of the nineteenth century produced by women writers are rare in their sustained and cogent analysis and rich evidentiary detail. As reflected in the existing critical literature and relevant discussion groups, Madwoman has been, and remains, valuable to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature and women ’s studies. As Solveig C. Robinson has noted, Madwoman’s “influence can be traced through many branches of contemporary critical thought and in many works on the history and psychology of nineteenth-century literature.”1 Its impact on feminist literary criticism has been especially pronounced: the idea that women’s texts are palimpsests, encoding doubleness in the form of a dominant and a muted story, has left a particularly indelible stamp on the field of women’s studies. Significantly, despite its innumerable points of contact with and tremendous relevance to Gothic studies, Gilbert and Gubar’s landmark work has 204 Carol Margaret Davison been generally ignored by specialists in that field. In the rare instance where it has been recognized, the response has been either one of celebration or indictment. Susanne Becker, for example, takes her cue from Margaret Atwood in her interpretation of the “madwoman in the attic” as an “attractive ”figure for inclusion in what she calls“feminine fictions”as she encodes both imprisonment within and liberation from sociocultural constraints as played out in narrative.2 At the other end of the critical spectrum, Alison Milbank condemns Madwoman as exemplifying what she calls a “male” Gothic paradigm in its orchestration of “narrative tropes of penetration into a secluded and privileged interior—here Western literary history—by a deliberately transgressive protagonist—itself, or the woman writer—who in turn seeks release from the limits to her identity fashioned by society, history and morality.”3 I will return to Milbank’s provocative yet problematic assessment of Madwoman ’s driving paradigm in due course.It is my contention that Madwoman is principally a study of nineteenth-century female Gothic whose recognition by contemporary Gothicists would enrich, among other things, their understanding and conception of the Gothic’s historical trajectory.4 Perhaps most telling is the use of Gothic-inflected tropes that pepper Gilbert and Gubar’s second chapter,“Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Influence.” Likewise, the “curious collocation” between the Gothic and contemporary critical theory that has been identified by David Punter in such key works as Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) and cited as evidence of literary criticism getting unobjectively “too close to its subject matter ” is also on exhibit in Madwoman and bears special consideration in the light of their gender-aware enterprise.5 Like Bloom’s theory on the anxiety of influence, Gilbert and Gubar also produced a work of “literary psychohistory”that exhibits a tremendous anxiety of influence on at least two major counts.6 First, they fail to recognize the centrality of the female Gothic to the female literary “tradition” they identify that defies illness-inducing “male mimicry” (Madwoman, 71). They specifically neglect the works of Ann Radcliffe and The Mysteries of Udolpho, but their madwoman (and Charlotte Brontë’s) is Radcliffe’s long-lost daughter. Especially due to the Gothic’s long-standing association with women readers and writers and Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist agenda, the selection of the female Gothic as their primary heuristic template is an extremely canny choice. Second, despite their acknowledgment of Ellen Moers’s category of the female Gothic, coined in an article in 1974 in the New York Review of Books and more popularly disseminated in 1976 in her Literary Women, they also perpetuate some of the biases upheld by the 1970s literary critical establishment that denied the Gothic any authority and vilified and marginalized it [44.200.230.43] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:19 GMT) Ghosts in the Attic 205 as a peculiarly “feminized” form.7 One of the foremost...