The Madwoman In The Attic Book Analysis

In the history of literature, women have been boxed into specific patriarchal labels by male writers, making it very difficult for female artists to escape.  In the excerpt from The Madwoman In The Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars describe these defined ideals set on female artists and demonstrate the rigorous action of women transcending these labels to reach accuracy. They describe how to fully remove this women must not only break away from these ideals in their literature but also in themselves as an artist. 

For centuries, male authors have produced extreme images for women, either a female was an “angel” or a “monster” with no in-between. At the beginning of the expert, both Gilbert and Gubar preface this duty of transcending as “a difficult task at best” for even positive images of women provided by males still expressed “negative energies.” They argue that for female artists, to obtain literary agency, they need to venture into a “looking glass” and have to first face these misogynistic images and understand their origins. After this, women had to “murder” these ideals to reach self-definition, and allow the female to establish “herself” for who she is and not the “herself” that men set her out to be. Women were described as “eternal types” and as a female author, Virginia Woolf stated, to, break free, women needed to kill “the angel in the house” meaning that real female representations of women have been killed and forgotten. Which all relates to this idea that female artists have only been portrayed in “male imagery.”  

In the analysis of the question “Is Female to male as nature is to culture?” Sherry Ortner, an anthropologist, explains that men set standards of  women being painted as witches and “menstrual pollution” or they were perceived as mothers and goddesses. Ortner also shows the idea that women can appear from multiple different points of view, and either stand both “under and over” the “sphere” of cultural dominance. But this dominance was hard to obtain, for women in the middle ages were never portrayed to be “a madonna in heaven” but they were established as “an angel in the house” which follows this misogynistic idea that women were meant to be domestic, an idea defined by men. Having these standards not only trapped women and stopped them from flourishing not only as female authors but just as females. She described that these ideals needed to be faced. To explain, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, a woman gets painted the trope of being a madwoman locked in an attic by her husband, who intended to shelter and shut her out from the world, but really wanted to control her, for he matched the ideals and believed she was too much of a “monster.” This is a clear relation to Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, for Rhy takes this recurring symbol of women being written as a madwoman, and wrote a sequel to Jane Eyre. which takes this idea of a monster, and makes the protagonist, Antionette human and real. Concluding that at the end of transcending these ideals, it will lead to a “life of significant action” and once broken free, it will release the woman of her divineness. 

These ideals limited women for a long time when it came to literature. For not only did it make it difficult for female writers to strive, but it also created unrealistic and false female characters to represent the gender. But the idea spoken by Gilbert and Gubar of transcending through understanding is what led females to shatter these images and take back the untrue pictures of women. Which allowed female authors now to write freely and portray women in a way that was lifelike and sympathizable.