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Much of Madwoman Is Divinest Sense: The Madwoman In The Attic
Date of Review: Aug 17, 2003
The Bottom Line: Like I said in the pros, but also read it for flawless pitch and energetic writing style.
Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar perhaps don't belong to but certainly visit that peculiar brand of zealous critics called champions, and throughout their energetic and galvanizing collection of essays "The Madwoman In The Attic" they indulge in the bracing confrontational language that has come to define essay writing mode for the past thirty years. "For the most part, 18th Century satirists limited their depiction of the female monster to low mimetic equivalents like...(Jonathan) Swift's corroding coquettes. But there were several important avatars of the monster woman who retained the allegorical anatomy of their more fantastic precursors" they write in "The Queen's Looking Glass" -- a fine example of their trenchant but lively style.
So just what are they talking about, you ask? Who is this "madwoman", who are these coquettes, avatars, monster women? Gilbert and Gubar's book marvelously establishes Emily Dickinson, The Brontes, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot among a few others as being among the first purveyors of a still-unique literary theme: womanhood's self-perception through the creation of art.
Many critics teachers and students interpret Shelley's Frankenstein as a re-telling and slight parody of Milton's Paradise Lost, a reflection of female "helllishness" and male "heavenliness", the story of how "what misery Eve's inabstinence/Shall bring on men." (p. 221). Art of course is not created in a vaccuum or by a solitary artist at a desk in a tower. Even Emily Dickinson read voraciously. The heaven and hell themes covered by all authors mentioned warrants an incisive look into Milton's Paradise Lost also.
Through what other mirrors and discourses besides the great literature of men could they refine and define perceptions of self and womanhood in the 19th Century? If you wanted Heaven and Hell, Paradise Lost was your paradigm. The creation of art by women has historically been seen and very often prosecuted as unnatural acts.
With themes and historical background laid down and its passions and humors well balanced and in place, The Madwoman in the Attic holds up well after 25 years, with consistently crisp and bold style well grounded in literary tradition. If you're going to rip Milton a new one, best to know him inside and out and Gilbert and Gubar quite clearly do. They also admire the color and quality of his writing even while concluding that "Milton did not see Eve. He saw his cook."
Their chapters on all the female authors are equally penetrating, and Milton seems to be if not the sun than at least the nexus around which each gravitates and reacts "like Milton's daughters". What centrally attracted me to this book were such chapters as "Shelley's Monstrous Eve" "Emily Bronte's Bible of Hell" and of course Milton. We male artists have our myths, our seven or eight basic stories we retell and retell. Gilbert and Gubar make many salient points but never bow down and never boo-hoo how art over the centuries has subjugated women in general.
"The Madwoman In The Attic" always maintains a narrow but deep focus on the literature and the writers who wrote their novels and poems for among other reasons and impetuses, as part of an imaginative search for an independent, self-sufficient definition of womanhood. I expected the book to delve a little more into the social history behind the authors and their works (i.e. what they were experiencing in their day to day lives), but that's only through reading many essays also published around the time of the book's first publication. "Madwoman" keeps its focus and control to a fault, and that's not a problem.
And in the case of Frankenstein, to scare the daylights out of 8 year olds of both genders (and 14 year olds and 23 year olds and 33 year olds). In the case of Emily Dickinson, 20 year olds. "And then a plank in Reason, broke,/ And I dropped down and down--/And hit a World, at every plunge..."tell truth, but tell it slant"
In the case of Frankenstein, if you've only seen the movie(s), read the book. This is the only case where I will say the book is far, far better. And this book makes me want to reread Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. George Eliot? -- uhnm, well -- hey at least I'm thinking about it.
