This date commemorates the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This novel is renowned for its inclusion of the groundbreaking character Bertha Mason. Characterized as a strange wild animal who was locked away from civilization in an attic, Bertha was not a madwoman, but she was the madwoman. That is, she constituted significant research and debate, and was a turning point towards a feminist use of the madwoman trope. By connecting the depiction of Bertha with the context of Jane Eyre, feminist undertones can be detected. Charlotte Brontë uses the character of the madwoman to demonstrate the justification for female anger—that female fury is not “irrational” in its extremity, that any woman could fall to “madness” simply in their anger at their role in society.

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by Taylor Hunter

By this point in cultural evolution, the Madwoman had been depicted from many perspectives, yet the perspective of the Madwoman herself was not explored. Through The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman “gives the mad woman pen and paper, and ultimately a voice of her own. We hear from her directly and in detail” (O’Farrell). Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses her narrator to provide a female account of a woman’s descent to madness, giving the madwoman a voice and demonstrating her sympathetically, pointing to the male-defined narrative that pains women as villains but men as heroes or victims.

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by Taylor Hunter

The Madwoman in the Attic:  The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar was published in 1979 by the Yale University Press. This piece explored how women writers "both battled and internalized" the limitations and expectations set for their gender in the nineteenth century, and how that affected their writing. According to Gilbert and Gubar, writing was seen as a creative process akin to the Judeo-Christian tradition of divine creation by God, which led to writing being portrayed as a naturally male activity, and one that was dominated by male sexuality. Gilbert and Gubar argue that this produced an internal struggle in women writers, who were met with personal and societal resistance, leading to to "madness" of women writers and characters. This text revolutionized the way nineteenth century women writers, characters, and readers are analyzed and interpreted by literary and feminist scholars.

Source:  

Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1st ed., Yale University Press, 1979.

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by Anna Calabrese

Several editions of The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have been published since its initial publication in 1979. Once such version, the 2020 release, includes and introduction written by Lisa Appignanesi, who attempts to contextualize the piece and include information about its relevance to the Gothic genre. Appignanesi notes how even though the text was written in 1979, it still remains relevant due to its exploration of Gothic and feminist literary themes such as "entrapment, enclosure, self-starvation, and gaslighting". These themes can be seen in almost any piece of literature that includes any kind of "madwoman", a woman who has become separate from society and social norms. The clearest example of this is, perhaps, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which includes a woman whose relatively "abnormal" behavior leads to her entrapment by her husband, causing a kind of "madness" that is described as less than human. Appignanesi's explanation of this "madness" of nineteenth century women is that they are "partially trapped in their time's myth of the natural, as we all inevitably are, [and] these writers' self-division led to what they sometimes experienced or conjured as madness," (XII).

Source:

Appignanesi, Lisa, et al. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed., Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2020, pp. XI-XVII. Veritas Paperback.

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by Anna Calabrese