In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

60 3 Gilbert and Gubar’s Daughters The Madwoman in the Attic’s Spectre in Milton Studies Carol Blessing When I was a graduate student in the later 1980s, some of my female classmates had sworn off studying John Milton’s works, particularly Paradise Lost, because of the author’s sexism. My (male) Milton course professor summarily announced early in the semester that we would not be discussing the purported misogynistic constructions of Eve, as apparently his previous classes had become derailed by the presence of The Madwoman in the Attic’s discussion of “Milton’s bogey,” the condemnation of the great poet. Interestingly, Milton’s sexism is still the primary topic my undergraduates wish to discuss, without my provocation and without reading Madwoman; when I send them forth to research the issue’s scholarship, they inevitably encounter responses to Gilbert’s and Gubar’s volume. While The Madwoman in the Attic began as a book aimed at rereading women writers in the light of patriarchal influences and their encounters with, and rebellion against, the long male-centered literary tradition, the book has reverberated beyond its primary focus. Section 6,“Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,”1 arguably the best-known portion of the work, revolutionized Milton studies. Basing their argument upon the words of the first feminist literary critic, Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar cast Milton as the archetypal misogynist whose work exacerbated negative views of women and burgeoning women writers. Neither Gilbert nor Gubar would claim to be Milton scholars, but their work Gilbert and Gubar’s Daughters 61 appropriated a provocative selection from Virginia Woolf’s journal, some of which was also incorporated into A Room of One’s Own, combining it with their laudable rhetorical skills and ability to make fascinating connections. Read through Romantic and feminist lenses, the premier British epic became an object of condemnation but also potential freedom for literary women. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights become subversions of Paradise Lost, God, creation myths, and heaven and hell. Madwoman did not merely relegate Eve’s evil nature to negative female stereotypes but re-created her as a Romantic antihero, willing to rebel both against the primordial male authority of the Creator and her husband. Thus, Eve was metamorphosed into an exemplar for female writers who could overcome Harold Bloom’s literary anxiety of influence by looking to themselves as models; Eve became the ultimate archetype of the female writer in her alienation. What Milton scholars fixated upon, though, was not the potentially liberatory aspect of Madwoman’s analysis but the ways in which Milton had been brought to task, tried, and executed as the overbearing patriarch of English letters. Shortly after Madwoman’s publication, critics began addressing its critiques, some agreeing, but most firing back in defense of Milton. Although Virginia Woolf was by 1918 “an experienced, widely published literary critic”according to Gilbert and Gubar, her discussion of John Milton was not widely influential in readings of Paradise Lost prior to 1979 (Madwoman , 190). Woolf had termed Milton “the first of the masculinists,” whose influence Gilbert and Gubar expanded to cast a shadow over not only female writers who came after but all females by implication, as the daughters of Eve: “The story that Milton, ‘the first of the masculinists,’ most notably tells to women is of course the story of woman’s secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also, for her, the garden of poetry” (Madwoman, 191). In Gilbert’s and Gubar’s reading, Milton’s Eve exceeded her Genesis misdeeds to become a creature aligned with Satan, Sin, and Death even before her fall, made not in God’s image but Adam’s, irredeemably lost. The authors expanded Woolf’s comments on Milton, then, into not only an apologia for women readers and writers but also a new way of reading Milton’s work. For a volume ostensibly focusing on Romantic and Victorian literature, Madwoman made deep inroads into seventeenth-century scholarship by bringing gendered readings of Paradise Lost to the forefront, realigning Milton studies so thoroughly that any contemporary reading of Paradise Lost must now address issues of cultural, biblical, and literary patriarchy and Milton’s misogyny. Eve became the central figure of the epic, with the genderdivisive summation of Adam and Eve’s relation to the...

Share