A Prey to Madness

...Do the violent images all these writers employ have a common denominator in their experience as women...

...Writers & Writing A PREY TO MADNESS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL What nightmare inspired a quiet teenage mother to create Frankenstein1 Was it necessary for the Bronte sisters and Mary Ann Evans to publish under masculine pseudonyms...

...Why did Emily Dickinson choose to immure herself in her parents' house all her life and write poems in secret, when she might have exercised her vivacious talents on the world at large...

...These questions are addressed in a radical new study, The Madwoman in the Attic The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (Yale, 719 pp , $25 00), by feminist critics Sandra in Gilbert and Susan Gubar As their central postulate they assert that the female imagination differs significantly from the male And because the woman writer is treated as an interloper in that male club called the English Literary Tradition, they argue, to the extent that her work is not merely imitative it has to be subversive Outwardly "one of the boys," she clandestinely foments rebellion against their values and revises their mythology "Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures which both their authors and their authors' submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable ' They must be careful, however, to disguise their feminine perspective as a masculine one, for to be caught rebelling would be fatal The male archangels who guard the Miltonic literary bastion would cast the offenders into the outer darkness of "lady novelists" and "female poetasters ' Yet ignorance or denial of the female imagination, Gilbert and Gubar insist, has hitherto prevented an authoritative interpretation of their subjects' works—a lack they seek to remedy in this volume The madwoman referred to in the title is Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre Though her husband denies her existence and locks her in the attic, she eludes her keeper at night to haunt the sleeping members of his household like the spirit of Darkness Gilbert and Gubar perceptively demonstrate that rather than the stock Gothic bogy critics have usually seen, Bertha is really the character all women fear to become?intemperate and unchaste," as Mr Rochester describes her, aggressive to the point of murderous half-beast/half witch He contrasts the demure Jane Eyre, his "good fairy," with this demon, but Jane knows the anger she was capable of during her repressive childhood and is afraid that in the role of Rochester's mistress she might be driven to lose her control and find herself taking Bertha's place in the attic Jane and Bertha are, in a sense, doubles The madwoman can also be seen as a fictional release for the dark, repressed side of Charlotte Bronte's life, straining against unendurable frustrations The authors trace their twin preoccupations with confinement and monstrosity through the novels of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot Noting that Austen might at first seem an outsider to this company, they contend that her writing, too, is a "cover story" that conceals resentment Her heroines defend themselves against male gibes about woman's proverbial inconstancy and flightiness with their only weapon, wit, although Austen, in the role of Fate, often comes to their aid before book's end by humbling their powerful opponents "Men have every advantage in telling their own story," remarks Anne Eliott during one barbed exchange in Persuasion "The pen has been in their hands ' Women, she dryly adds, "live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey on us " Milton, the grim patriarch of Romanticism and something of a misogynist, forced his daughters to read Latin and Greek aloud to him in his blindness, a task the girls bitterly objected to because they could not understand the languages Gilbert and Gubar liken 19th-century women writers to Milton's daughters trying to cast off their yoke Mary Shelley rewrote his creation story in Frankenstein, Emily Bronte reversed the values of his heaven and hell in Wuther-mg Heights, and George Eliot criticized the ambiguous results of compelling dutiful sacrifices But all these women paid the price of suffering from the classical anxiety of rebellious children Wishing to be accepted on their own terms, they needed at the same time to be approved of on Milton's This double-bind, in which the very aggressive powers required to create are reckoned unwomanly, drives women to write with repressed violence It was a reading of Paradise Lost, our critics infer, that gave Mary Shelley her famous nightmare In the resulting novel, she subverts the Miltomc order When Frankenstein peruses that epic, he is convinced that he is the is "the new Adam", simultaneously he fulfills many of the roles Milton assigned to the put-upon Eve As for the Brontes and George Eliot, they hid behind masculine names because they worried that their subject matter might be thought unfemimne The American poet Emily Dickinson, a devout admirer of these female English novelists, was so impressed by the figure of the madwoman in the attic that she decided to take the role upon herself Dressed ever in white, she kept to her room, writing "half-cracked" notes or poems to people she refused to see This persona was deliberately cultivated, Gilbert and Gubar insist, because so long as she knew that others thought her crazy, she did not need to worry about the unorthodoxy of her verse, madness was a pose that gave her artistic freedom "When what her world called 'sanity' threatened, she steadied her hold on [madness] in which she imagined fierce flights of escape like the one Milton's Eve takes " The close textual readings Gilbert and Gubar give the novels are often insightful and valuable Moreover, the critics display scholarly responsibility in not forcing their material to fit their argument They do not attempt to portray their authors as modern feminists, or suggest that they were attempting to overthrow their societies, these novelists, after all, were conservative about most everything except their art Gubar's perceptions about Jane Austen are delicate and, ultimately, poignant Gilbert's study of Milton's ambiguous influence on Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte is brilliant and original Her portrait of Charlotte Bronte burns with an emotional conviction very much in the spirit of that passionate writer s work George Eliot presents more of a problem Her themes arc not so succinct and her complex personality is harder to capture It is too bad that so much space is wasted on "The Litted Veil," a Gothic story ol little merit that is being given too much attention by critics after years of deserved neglect Still, Gubar offers fascinating insights into the influence of the American feminists Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beech-er Stowe on Eliot The English novelist praised Fuller s sense of "the Nemesis lurking in the vices of the oppressed " While she found this quality lacking in Stowe's fiction, Uncle Tom's Cabin served to bolster her faith in "the possibility of a uniquely female tradition in literature characterized by love rather than anger' Thus Eliot meted out strong punishments to her characters, yet allowed her heroines to develop "resources that transform the vindictive noose of the author's revengeful plot into a kind of lifeline held out to other creatures threading their way through the labyrinth" of an unhappy and imperfect world In contrast to the largely persuasive mid-section of The Madwoman in the Attic, the theoretical introduction and the two chapters on women poets at the end are shrill and combative Out come the feminist bludgeons ("patriarchal society") coupled merrily with the Freudian (pens equal peruses) Gilbert and Grubar claim that their theory of the 'anxiety of female authorship" was inspired by Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence " "For our purposes," they announce sententiously, "Bloom's historical construct is useful not only because it helps identify and define the psychosexual context in which so much Western literature was authored, but also because it can help us distinguish the anxiety and achievements of female writers from those of male writers ' They fail to realize, though, that Bloom's is not a theory of social influence, it holds that human nature would dictate the same literary pattern under any conditions Gilbert and Gubar appear to believe that "society" was responsible for the schizophrenia of the 19th-century woman writer, just as they think that Freud's theories are "an analysis of patriarchal society" rather than a statement about basic human nature They are reminiscent of the Marxist critics who are convinced that if society were changed, our attitudes would alter as well The real inspiration for this book seems not to be Harold Bloom but Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One s Own the authors quote reverently on innumerable occasions Unfortunately, Gilbert and Gubar mistake her aphorisms lor profundity, where Woolf trips lightly, they galumph (Even if Woolf took the ideas presented in that essay as seriously as her disciples do, her treatment of them was superficial ) Dubious judgment is evident as well in the treatment of poetry Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tedious " Aurora Leigh" is defended because these critics like its "message " Because they have no ear for Emily Dickinson's nuance, their readings make her into one of the worst poets of all time' I wanted this book to be better than it is, for Gilbert and Gubar ha\e seized on a powerlul image and some strong ideas Alas, their combination of the original and the rigid gives The Madwoman in the Attic, like many of its subjects, a schizophremic personality It is a put that so much intelligence and insight should give way to questionable theorizing and simplistic jargon...