Gilbert and Gubar as feminist critics.

It is unquestionably true that Madwoman in the Attic is an ambitious and substantial work of criticism and
scholarship. It offers important feminist rereadings of many of the major texts by women writers in the 19th
century. In it, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate an impressive command not only of the primary texts but also
of the biographies, letters, juvenilia, and criticism of the writers covered; the range of allusion goes beyond
the 19th century to include 17th- and 18th-century literature, as well as myth, fairy tale, psychoanalytic
literature, and literary theory. The book provides more than a series of illuminating readings: these readings
arise out of a general theory about the problems faced by the female literary subculture in the 19th century
and about the techniques which evolved among women writers to deal with these problems.

Gilbert and Gubar begin with the assumption that 19th-century women writers had a different relationship
with their literary predecessors than their brothers had. The woman writer, before being able to move on to
self-definition, had to struggle with the two ―paradigmatic polarities‖, angel or monster, in terms of which
she was defined by male writers and which were so alien to her sense of herself as a woman and as a writer.
In creating versions of the self in her fiction, therefore, with the help of her female precursors she radically
revised those conventions. Monsters appear, yes, but they are madwomen, burning down the patriarchal
mansion. Angels show up as well, but strangely afflicted with anorexia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, aphasia,

and amnesia. Moreover, the angel and the monster seem strangely related, the madwoman acting
out the subversive impulses of the good heroine and, as the authors would have it, of her creator. Further,
since those impulses cannot be expressed directly by any woman who wants the approval of her culture, she
writes conventional novels or poetry with concealed levels of meaning, ―palimpsestic works ―whose
surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning.

Given their interest in male predecessors, it is not surprising that a section of the book is concerned with that
great Nobodaddy among male writers, Milton. The authors‘ expressed concern with Milton is in his effect
on creative women, not in what he may have intended by his portrayal of females (both Eve and Sin) in
Paradise Lost. Nevertheless, that distinction is lost when the authors offer their feminist reading of the epic
rather than focusing on the articulated distress of women writers from Wollstonecraft on about his portrayal
of Eve. This reading of Milton forms the background for the analysis of two other works which they
consider responses to Paradise Lost: Frankenstein, which articulates Shelley‘s acquiescence in Milton‘s
cosmology, and Wuthering Heights, an attempt to rewrite the epic ―so as to make it a more accurate mirror
of female experience‖. The choice of Frankenstein seems reasonable enough, given the prominent references
to Milton in that book, and their reading is a valuable extension of the work done recently by Ellen Moers
and others to see it as a text written by a woman. Wuthering Heights seems at first an irritatingly eccentric
choice, as they themselves admit; despite the weakness of the connection, however, their focus on the
heaven/ hell imagery in the book turns out to be extremely fruitful.

This book originated from work Gilbert and Gubar did on Charlotte Brontë, on whom each of them has
previously published articles. Brontë, more than any other novelist in the 19th century, has received
attention from feminist critics, primarily because of the passionate rebelliousness that has so disturbed critics
as different as Miss Rigby and Virginia Woolf. The section on Brontë is the strongest in the book: without
being redundant, they build on recent feminist perceptions about her work, which in Brontë‘s case have

surely provided explanations of puzzling or disturbing elements that have been ignored by conventional
criticism. The endings of her novels are a primary focus; when a novel like Shirley concludes with the
prospective bridegroom saying that his bride ―gnaws her chain,‖ a radical dissatisfaction with the
conventional happy ending and with what marriage meant in reality to women might reasonably be inferred.
Their discussion of the significance of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (who provided the title for their book) is
particularly good: they see her as the embodiment of Jane‘s anger, which far more than her sexuality
disturbed Victorian critics. Their treatment of Villette focuses on the even more oblique ways in which
Lucy‘s repressed rage at being perhaps the most deprived heroine in English fiction is displayed: through
imagery, through the unreliable narration, through her use of other female characters—nuns, young girls,
witches—to represent aspects of herself, and so on.