A Conversation with Sandra M. Gilbert

A CONVERSATION WITH SANDRA M. GILBERT Sandra M. Gilbert Sandra Gilbert, critic and Professor of English at Princeton University, is co-author (with Susan Gubar) of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Imagination which was a nominee of the National Book Critics Circle Award and runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, among them the Ms. Woman-of-the-Year Award. Her most recent book of poems, Emily's Bread, was published by Norton in 1984. This interview was conducted in February, 1986, in Columbia, Missouri. A Conversation with Sandra M. Gilbert / Garrett Hongo and Catherine Parke Interviewer: You are one of the leading feminist scholar-critics and a poet, as well. Tell us about your background and how you came to do what you're doing now. Gilbert: I grew up in Queens and had a very good, sound, conventional undergraduate education, which means that I never studied any significant literature by women and I never had a woman teacher from my first year in college until I received my Ph.D. from Columbia. Interviewer: Did you ever stop to think about that? Gilbert: I don't understand what any of us of my generation thought we were doing. Here were all these young women going to graduate school, imagining a future for ourselves as professors. But from what we knew, a professor was a large gray haired man in a tweed jacket with heavy manly shoes. And none of us fit that description at all so there must have been some strange schizophrenic quality about our thinking. Interviewer: Do you remember anyone from that time who remains a special influence? Gilbert: Yes, the single most powerful influence on me intellectually was, and in many ways still is, my teacher from Cornell, M.H. Abrams, whom, in fact, we worked very closely with on the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, because he's the general editor of English textbooks at Norton. He was a very magical and exciting figure for me when I was an undergraduate. I loved the way he talked The Missouri Review · 89 and taught about literary history. He made things coherent and made you feel as though, if you thought long and hard enough, you might actually be able to understand the way the past shapes the present. He also fostered a very important kind of critical skepticism. Interviewer: Has your feminism affected your relationship with Abrams? Gilbert: He was quite supportive of our work on the anthology, though I think he felt we had to be careful about being too radical in the period introductions. When we seemed to be saying sort of nasty things about Spenser or Milton, he'd write back a long marginal note, and we'd try to qualify it a bit. But he never told us not to say anything we wanted to say. Interviewer: Did you also begin your creative writing at Cornell? Gilbert: Yes, I worked on Epoch with Baxter Hathaway. And one never felt in that environment that being a regular English major and studying creative writing were incompatible activities. As a matter of fact, I remember a teacher, Arthur Mizener, who was encouraging me to go on to graduate school, had also gotten a letter from Knopf saying, "Do you have any undergraduate poets that you would recommend to us?" At that time I had become a Mademoiselle guest editor, and in fact I was in the same position that Sylvia Plath had held, which is why I feel some kind of strange bond with her. At any rate, I worked with the same editor Plath worked with, a very, very serious woman, as you may know from reading The Bell Jar, and much more serious than any of us could ever understand when we were so young; I was only 20 at the time. I told her about this letter from Knopf, and she arranged for me to go out to lunch with her and the Knopf editor. After a fancy New York lunch, the editor turned...