Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” After Thirty Years (review)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s pioneering 1979 book did more than any other single work of its kind or era to launch the vibrant American scholarly field of feminist literary criticism. Building on the work of Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, Mary Ellman, Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and others publishing in the feminist 1970s—and behind them Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf—The Madwoman in the Attic attracted as much public attention as a work of literary criticism can and served for a time as academic feminism’s public face. Passionately argued in a richly figurative style, it had its detractors as well as its admirers, and it received prize nominations and popular as well as scholarly reviews. After William E. Cain’s volume Making Feminist History: The Literary Scholarship of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1994), which contains updates, responses, and assessments by recognized feminist literary critics as well as by Gilbert and Gubar themselves, and after sharp appraisals by Rita Felski, Janet Gezari, and others, it is hard to imagine what more could be said about this book’s significance for its own day and for feminist criticism as an enterprise.¹ This thirtieth anniversary volume, however, is positioned to register changes in feminist criticism that were just emerging in the 1990s, and hence this volume’s utility in both embodying and assessing the developments of thirty years. The Madwoman in the Attic continues to inspire, despite or because of its limitations.

The chapters of this new assessment can be divided roughly into four groups. Two chapters helpfully review how The Madwoman in the Attic polarized critical communities and launched ongoing debates. Carol Blessing describes Milton critics dividing into defenders of Milton’s feminism on the one hand and, on the other, those who appreciated The Madwoman in the Attic’s account of the “bogey” nineteenth-century women writers found him to be. Similarly, Narin Hassan’s chapter on postcolonial critiques points out the productiveness of The Madwoman in the Attic’s politically vulnerable reading of Bertha as Jane Eyre’s serviceable double; Gayatri Spivak’s taking Gilbert and Gubar to task launched a rich if contentious dialogue about the relation of feminism to nineteenth-century imperialism and racism.

Another set of chapters finds The Madwoman in the Attic a point of departure for critical trends that Gilbert and Gubar could not have anticipated. Madeleine Wood rereads Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a novel of trauma, arguing for a postfeminist, depoliticized vision of the novel. Hila Shachar uses The Madwoman in the Attic for measuring the degree of feminism present in film versions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Like Hassan, Danielle Russell reviews the productive controversy over Bertha Mason and then uses it to supplement Gilbert and Gubar’s white canon with a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Katey Castellano’s chapter recognizes The Madwoman in the Attic as a rich source of inspiration for ecofeminism, where the treatment of nature as subject not object echoes Gilbert and Gubar’s claims for women authors and their heroines.

The largest group of essays focuses on the limitations of Gilbert and Gubar’s vision—limitations deriving from the 1970s liberal feminist assumptions that led them to conflate the author’s psyche with her characters and kept them from seeing how white and highbrow their literary canon is. Lucia Aiello’s chapter on Emily Dickinson finds that Gilbert and Gubar’s conflation of the poet with her speakers keeps them from seeing Dickinson’s positive alternatives to the lyric poet’s conventional “I.” Four essays critique Gilbert and Gubar’s choice of authors. The chapters by Keren Fite and by Tamara Silvia Wagner claim that the “madwoman” paradigm fails to account for nineteenth-century sensational and popular women writers whose politics were conservative or who lacked the high ambitions...