Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic

It took about a century for the angel in the house to join forces with the madwoman in the attic. According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, even when this angel occupied the foreground in nineteenth century novels, she was shadowed by her dark twin. Beneath the placid brook, the turbulent whirlpool churned. This split image had a long history in romance, and a famous nineteenth century version in Thackeray's bitter picture of Becky Sharp as a 'fiendish marine cannibal' towards the end of Vanity Fair. But Gilbert and Gubar were the first to unite the angel and the madwoman in a single being, applaud her expressive transgressions, and identify her with the woman writer. When the monster-woman rose from the depths to the attic, mostly because Charlotte Brontë had located her there in the novel that gave Gilbert and Gubar their title and provided 'a paradigm of many distinctively female anxieties and abilities' (p. xii), she staked a new claim to her legitimate share of the house of fiction.¹

Female literary critics were just lining up to make this claim good in 1979, when The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination was published. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing had appeared a year earlier, preceded by Ellen Moers's Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976). All these books signalled feminist criticism's turn from what Showalter would later call 'feminist critique' – the analysis (and correction) of the representation of women in literature by men – to 'gynocritics', which focused on literature by women.² The word that Showalter invented is awkward partly because it looks as if it should be referring to the critics themselves rather than to their discourse. In fact, a new interpretative community of readers, as well as a new community of writers, was coming into being. Women were establishing a considerably larger presence in the academy, and they were doing this without having to give up the prospect of children. Literature by the well-known women writers who first figured in the new studies had attracted attention before, but not in the context of the female culture or subculture that feminist critics were now identifying. Women as writers, and the ground they shared – biological, psychological, linguistic, historical, and cultural – were now the focus of attention. A concordance to the most frequently used words in Madwoman in the Attic (available at Amazon.com) reveals that the three that appear most often are female, women, and own. Defining and celebrating the difference in women's writing powered the next phase of feminist criticism. Gilbert and Gubar restricted themselves to familiar names – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson – but the new interest in women as writers, combined with the perception that some women's writing had been dismissed because it failed to conform to dominant male paradigms, led to the important efforts of the next two decades to recover the work of previously neglected women writers.

Madwoman in the Attic was immediately a popular as well as an academic success. In the United States it was a runner-up for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It sold widely and held out the hope, however briefly, that there was an audience outside the academy for literary criticism of the sort that academic rather than trade presses publish. Its unusual success has to be understood in relation to the time of its publication, especially in the United States, as well as to its method. Women (and men) were beginning to be seen as differently gendered, with differently socialised experiences and different cultural contexts for reading and writing. For a large number of readers, Gilbert and Gubar's account of how nineteenth-century women's writing had been shaped by 'gender strife' brought the emergence of gender as a category of analysis to full consciousness.³ Moreover, Madwoman in the Attic represented women writers as...