This document provides biographical information about literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and summarizes their landmark 1979 book "The Madwoman in the Attic". The book analyzes how 19th century patriarchal society imposed strict gender roles that oppressed women and influenced female authors. It explores how women writers struggled for artistic self-definition within this context, experiencing "anxiety of authorship" in having to establish their authority and rewrite social conventions. The document also reviews the historical women's rights movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries that aimed to challenge women's subordinate status in society.

1. SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR’S
THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC:THE
WOMAN WRITER AND THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY LITERARY IMAGINATION(1979)

2. SANDRA M. GILBERT
Born – New York City
 U.G – Cornell University
 M.A – New York University
 PhD in English Literature – Columbia University
 Works:

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Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H.Lawrence (1973)
Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy(1995)
Six Books of Poetry: In the Fourth World(1978)
Summer Kitchen(1983)
Emily’s Bread(1984)
Blood Pressure(1988)
Ghost Volcano(1995)
Kissing the Bread(2000)

3. SUSAN GUBAR
Born – New York City
 PhD – University of Lowa (1972)
 Works


Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American
Culture(1997)
 Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century(2000)
 Co-edited Works:
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
For Adult Users Only: The Dilemmas of Violent Pornography (1989)
with Joan, Hof
English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism(1992) with
Jonathan Kamholtz

4. SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar – Young Professors at
Indiana University (1973)
 Ms.Magazine - Women of the Year
Works:
 The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions
in English(1985) (Editors)
 Co-edited Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essay on Women
Poets(1979)
 The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic(1986)
 Three Sequel to Mad Women in the Attic on Women and
Modernism titled No Man’s Land: The Place of Women Writer
in the Twentieth Century
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The War of the Words
Sex Changes
Letters from the Front

5. THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY:
Slaves
 Caged birds
 Social penalties were too high – could not have children
or cohabit with man
 Uneducated
 Banned from Universities
 Low paid jobs
 Reproductive machine
 In mid century 30% women over 20 were unmarried
 Spinsters were forced to emigrate
 Marriage is a vow to obey husband
 Properties were inherited by their husband


6. 19TH CENTURY MAJOR WOMEN WRITERS:
Jane
Austen
Emily Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
George Eliot
Anne Bronte
Christina Rossetti
Elizabeth Barret Browning

7. FOCUSES ON NINETEENTH CENTURY WOMEN
WRITERS:
Women’s
right to own their properties
Mother’s right to custody of their
children
Ownership of her body
Women’s suffrage

8. FEMINISM
 Feminism
- equal rights between the
sexes(political, economic and social).
(Empowerment)
 First Wave Feminism
 Began in United Kingdom and United
States
 19th Century
 Focus – Promotion of equal
contract, marriage, parenting and
property rights for women

9. Second
Wave Feminism:
Early 1960’s to late 1980’s (the end
of 19th century)
Focus – gaining political power, the
right for women’s suffrage
The key factor is education
(The education of women and of
men)

10. INFECTION IN THE SENTENCE: THE
WOMEN WRITER AND THE ANXIETY OF
AUTHORSHIP
The
Mad Woman in the Attic is a
landmark of American feminism.
Encapsulates the strength and
limitations of the 1st decade of 2nd
wave feminism.

11.  Gilbert
and Gubar seeks to define the patriarchal
culture in the nineteenth century
 The basic question of feminist according to
Gilbert and Gubar,
 When Queen is looking glass speaks with
Kings voice
Does Queen try to sound like the King?
How about the Queen’s own voice?
Does she talk back to him in her own
vocabulary, own timbre, insisting on her own
view point?

12. 19th century writers assimilates consciously
or unconsciously deny the achievements of their
predecessors.
 As Miller pointed out Harold Bloom’s the “anxiety
of influence” fears not for their own creation but
for their predecessors.
 Bloom’s sequential relationship between literary
artists is the relationship of father and son.
 A man can only became a poet.
 Bloom’s literary history is intensively male
dominant and also patriarchal.
 The

13.  Bloom
describes metaphorically, the poetic
process as a sexual encounter between male
poet and female muse.
 Inevitable questions of Bloomian poetics:
 Does she annihilate forefather as a foremother?
 Does she have a muse? What is its sex?
 The dynamics of Western literary history is male
and patriarchal too.
 Bloom’s every literary text is surrounded by
psychosexual as well as sociosexual.

14.  (Freud)Feminist
Theorist Judith Millet remarked
“psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a
patriarchal society, but an analysis of one”.
 Like wise Bloom’s model is also an analysis not
for a recommendation.
 Freud’s theory of male and psychosexual
development is not symmetry between boys and
girls growth(Oedipus Complex balanced Electra
Complex).
 But the woman writer could not experience the
same the “anxiety of influence” rather even more
primary “anxiety of authorship”.

15.  Unlike
male counterpart, the female writer must
struggle against the effect of socialization which
makes the will of male precursors(exist before).
 The female writers battle for self-creation
involves revisionary process.
 At the same time the female writers battle is not
against her male precursor’s reading of the world
but against his reading of her.
 Woman writers, in order to define herself as an
author before they must redefine the terms of her
socialization.

16.  In
patriarchal society woman writer
experiences her gender as painful
obstacle.
 Mitchell pointed out “the inferiorized and
alternative (second sex)psychology of
women under patriarchy”.
 Inferioization mark the woman writer’s
struggle for artistic self-definition and
differentiation of her efforts from selfcreation.

17. A word dropped careless on a page
May stimulate an eye
When folded on perpetual seam
The wrinkled maker lie
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may in hale Despair
At Distances of centuries
-Emily Dickinson

18. We may inhale Despair
 On the one hand, all those patriarchal text seeks
to deny female autonomy and authority.
 The other, all those foremothers conveyed their
traditional authorship of anxiety to their
bewildered female counterparts.
 Despair about Annie Gottlieb (American poet and
essayist)
 Despair inhaled not only from the infection
suffered from by her physical mother but literary
mothers too.

19.  Social
Scientists and Social Historians like
Jessie Bernard, Phyllis Chester, Noami
Weisstein and Pauline Bart found that patriarchal
socialization literally makes women as sick both
physically and mentally.
 (Freud) Hysteria, this disease occurs throughout
19th century.
 The mental illness caused by the female
reproductive system.
 Anorexia (the loss of appetite) caused primarily
adolescent girls.
 Agoraphobia (fear of open or public) frequently
affected by middle-aged housewives.

20. CONCLUSION
19th century women were suffered
both mentally as well as physically.
 This chapter analyses both the psyche
and the physical illness of women.
 This also endeavors the women as
well as men in that 19th century
society.
 The women were treated as a robot.
 The

21.  The
women are not a born free but they
are made by society(Simon de Bevouir).
 Women were considered only as flesh of
the body rather than human.
 Both the first wave and second wave
feminism made to think the re-vision of
the literary texts as well as the life of
women in the society.
 Not only in U.S and U.K but also every
where of this universe.

22. REFERENCES
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
 library.duke.edu/exhibits/
britishwriters/
 The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism
 www.hastingspress.co.uk/history/19/ov
erview.htms
 www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/feminism

23. www.npr.org
› Arts &
Life › Books › Book Reviews
www.rlwclarke.net/.../05CGilbertandG
ubarAnxietyofAuthorship.pdf
voices.yahoo.com/feminism-wavesbrief-overwiew-first-second568867.html

24. THANK YOU