Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

2. Modeling the Madwoman: Feminist Movements and the Academy

34 2 Modeling the Madwoman Feminist Movements and the Academy Marlene Tromp The most significant collaborative books in my library are The Madwoman in the Attic; Feminist Revolution, an analysis of the methods and practices of second-wave feminism; and Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, an articulation of the significance and work of third-wave feminism .1 While the coincidence of scholarly and feminist collaboration might not seem a particularly remarkable fact, it is striking given the role that these books have played in speaking to and stimulating the second and third waves of the feminist movement. In this essay, I want to explore the relationship between not just the content of Gilbert and Gubar’s work, but their practices and strategies, which I will examine in their historical feminist context in the United States. I will argue that, in spite of the critiques launched against Gilbert and Gubar for what their book did not do, the work was revolutionary for the academy and beyond. Moreover, I will suggest that the utopian vision of feminist practice—clearly part of what prompted the book—mirrored and was mirrored by feminists working throughout the culture. This vision, as I see it, continues to be vital for women and academics and can inspire us to continue the work feminists before us have done. To explore the central themes of this essay, I examine the academic and popular reception of Gilbert and Gubar’s work as the dialogue appears in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist literary criticism, and the place of Gilbert and Gubar’s work in a new field, was being defined. Further, I situate Modeling the Madwoman 35 Madwoman in its context in the early feminist movement and the arguments being made about feminist activism and strategies. I especially attend to the evaluation of Gilbert and Gubar’s practices and the feminist model provided by the book, a model that, I argue, reflected the feminist activism “in the streets” in the 1970s. I have culled this information from published scholarly reaction as well as the writings of feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s.2 To my knowledge, in spite of all that has been written on Madwoman, no one has yet ventured into the archives of feminist activism when studying this influential work. Additionally, in order to explore more reflective feminist evaluations of Gilbert and Gubar’s project (as second and third “wavers” from the 1990s and 2000s have sought to position and understand the impact of Madwoman), I look to those assessments presented in both published arguments and responses when I contacted 400 academics from public and private institutions and in each state in the United States.3 Finally, I ask what the practices of Madwoman in the Attic and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar —their intellectual and professional courage, their sense of community, their commitment to their lives both inside and outside the academy—can teach us for the next phases of feminism. Life Study Gilbert and Gubar indicate in the preface to Madwoman that they“inevitably ended up reading our own lives as well as the texts we study” (Madwoman , xiii). Sandra Gilbert offered a term for this practice in an essay she published on feminist criticism in 1979: “For most scholars of literature by women . . . research into heretofore forgotten or rejected materials seems to have become a kind of re-search for their own lives—that is, a crucial species of Life Study, and thus an essential rereading of history in the interest of what Rich has called ‘survival.’” The body of work of Gilbert and Gubar and Madwoman in particular call for a consciousness of the relationship between “Life Study” and activism on the streets. As Gilbert articulated it, “I believe that the work of feminist critics in academic departments is an essential component of work in the ‘real’ world, because English departments are workplaces and mind-shaping structures as powerful and ‘real’ as, for example, factories, farms, or prisons.”4 My essay is, in many ways, about “experience” and what it means—politically, socially, practically—to be a woman and a feminist in the United States, as well as the relationship of those social locations to the academy. For all of these reasons, I will open, as so many feminist arguments do, by indicating what experiences brought me to this project. 36 Marlene Tromp This article really began when I...