Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

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

The impact of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) on feminist literary criticism is undisputed as is the importance of their discussion of “Snow White” for fairy-tale studies.1 The analysis of the tale forms the final part of the introductory chapter to The Madwoman in the Attic. Whereas the rest of the book focuses on literature written by woman authors, in “The Queen’s Looking Glass” Gilbert and Gubar explore the origin of nineteenth-century women’s unease with authorship through the analysis of metaphors of male writing, as well as the representation of women in texts written by men. “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” is the famous opening phrase of their first chapter (Madwoman 3). Given the relatively small number of woman authors in history and in the literary canon, the image of women in literature has come to be dominated by male writers, Gilbert and Gubar argue. The “male expectations and designs” of what it means to be a woman prove to be limiting and biased. Gilbert and Gubar identify “two mythic masks male artists have fastened Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic 4 216 Chapter 4 over her human face both to lessen their dread of her ‘inconsistency’ and [ . . . ] to possess her more thoroughly” (Madwoman 17). On the one hand, they discern the pervasive idealist image of the angel, the woman who is selfless and pure; on the other hand, stands the female monster, the woman who is active, aggressive, and unfeminine. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the enraged monster is Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic after whom Gilbert and Gubar’s book is named. In the Grimms’ tale of “Snow White,” the two extremes are embodied by the angelic Snow White and her wicked stepmother. In contrast to Marcia Lieberman, who mainly puts forward character identification as the reading strategy that the fairy tale stimulates, Gilbert and Gubar stress literature’s ability to speak simultaneously on different levels: “No human creature can be completely silenced by a text or by an image. Just as stories notoriously have the habit of ‘getting away’ from their authors, human beings since Eden have had a habit of defying authority, both divine and literary” (Madwoman 17). And whereas Lieberman envisages the fairy tale’s primary implied reader as a female child, Gilbert and Gubar recognize the relevance of “Snow White” for adult readers as a multilayered text that provides insight into the construction and possible subversion of the two female archetypes. The reflection on Snow White’s and her stepmother’s imprisonment in and possible escape from the stereotypes they have come to embody is continued in the various contemporary retellings and illustrated versions of “Snow White” that are discussed in this chapter. I will focus on three aspects of Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis: the function of the mirror, the deconstruction of the angel and the monster, and the development of the woman author. Although Gilbert and Gubar’s view of “Snow White” proves to be the most pervasive, my analysis will show that the retellings, too, have “the habit of ‘getting away,’” not only from their authors but also from the critical intertexts with which they can be linked. Patriarchy and Female Entrapment: The Voice in the Mirror Gilbert and Gubar read the Grimms’ tale of “Snow White” as the literary reflection of woman’s confinement in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture . The tale stages the battle between the two mythic images with which patriarchy has tried to grasp women: the angel and the witch. On the surface level, it is the angel who conquers and the witch who is defeated and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic 217 punished. The tale thus seems to comply with patriarchal ideology, whose fears and ideals are confirmed and transmitted. Yet, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that every woman in patriarchy is entrapped in both these images, which do not oppose but succeed each other. The first queen, the wicked queen, and Snow White are all read as female role models that do not exclude each other but between which every woman has to negotiate. The three female figures in the tale are thus, in a sense, one and the same. Patriarchy can only master woman if she is restricted and confined, Gilbert and Gubar argue...