If Kate Millett politicized literary sexuality and Elaine Showalter reconstructed women’s literary history, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar transformed feminist literary criticism by reinterpreting nineteenth-century women’s writing as a covert struggle for authorship. Their landmark study, The Madwoman in the Attic, remains one of the most influential works in Anglo-American feminist criticism.
Their intervention is neither strictly ideological critique nor purely archival reconstruction. It is psycho-symbolic literary analysis grounded in close reading of canonical women writers. They argue that nineteenth-century women authors wrote under conditions of “anxiety of authorship”—a structural tension produced by patriarchal literary tradition that denied women authority to create.
This essay examines Gilbert and Gubar’s theoretical framework, their reconfiguration of literary symbolism, their method of reading, and their enduring influence.
The Anxiety of Authorship
Drawing implicitly on Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence,” Gilbert and Gubar argue that Bloom’s model presumes male literary lineage. Women writers, lacking legitimate female precursors and excluded from canonical authority, experience a different anxiety—not anxiety of influence but anxiety of authorship itself.
The woman writer confronts a culture that defines creativity as masculine. Authorship is metaphorically paternal. Thus, to write is to transgress.
This structural exclusion shapes narrative form, character construction, and symbolic patterns in women’s literature.
Angel and Monster: The Split Female Image
Gilbert and Gubar identify a recurring binary in patriarchal culture:
- The Angel (self-sacrificing, pure, submissive, domestic)
- The Monster (mad, sexual, rebellious, destructive)
This dichotomy appears not only in male-authored texts but within women’s writing itself. Because female authors internalize cultural expectations, their narratives often split female characters into compliant and transgressive doubles.
This split becomes a central interpretive key.
The Madwoman as Repressed Rage
Their most famous reading centers on Jane Eyre. Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic,” is interpreted not merely as gothic villain but as Jane’s repressed anger—her silenced fury against patriarchal confinement.
Jane’s apparent moral restraint is doubled by Bertha’s destructive energy.
Thus, the attic becomes symbolic space of female rage hidden within domestic architecture.
The same logic applies to:
- Frankenstein
- The Goblin Market
- Emily Dickinson’s lyric voice
In each case, female creativity appears encoded through fragmentation, doubling, enclosure, or spectral presence.
Gothic, Confinement, and Spatial Metaphor
Gilbert and Gubar emphasize spatial imagery: attics, locked rooms, houses, mirrors, prisons. Domestic space becomes metaphor for intellectual confinement.
The gothic mode—madness, ghosts, doubles, fire—provides symbolic vocabulary for rebellion.
The woman writer must smuggle protest into acceptable narrative forms.
Narrative Strategy Under Constraint
Because overt feminist rebellion was socially dangerous in the nineteenth century, women writers often deploy indirection:
- Allegory
- Gothic doubling
- Fragmented narration
- Symbolic violence
Gilbert and Gubar argue that these narrative strategies are not merely aesthetic choices; they are survival mechanisms within patriarchal culture.
Psycho-Symbolic Feminist Criticism
Their approach blends:
- Close reading
- Psychoanalytic symbolism
- Historical context
- Feminist ideology critique
They treat literary motifs as symptomatic expressions of structural oppression.
Unlike Showalter’s institutional emphasis, Gilbert and Gubar foreground psychological and symbolic struggle.
Critiques and Revisions
Their model has been criticized for:
- Universalizing “woman writer” experience.
- Overemphasizing repression and rage.
- Focusing heavily on white, nineteenth-century authors.
Later feminist critics—especially Black feminists and postcolonial scholars—argue that race and empire complicate the “madwoman” paradigm.
Yet despite critiques, the book permanently reshaped feminist readings of Victorian literature.
Comparison Within Anglo-American Feminism
- Millett exposes patriarchal ideology in male texts.
- Showalter constructs women’s literary tradition historically.
- Gilbert & Gubar analyze symbolic structures within women’s writing.
Their work bridges political critique and aesthetic analysis.
Theoretical Contribution
Gilbert and Gubar’s enduring insight is that women’s writing often encodes suppressed rebellion through doubling and gothic excess. Patriarchal culture produces psychic division; literature registers that division symbolically.
They transform “madness” from pathology into narrative protest.
Conceptual Summary Table
| Theoretical Axis | Gilbert & Gubar’s Position | Literary Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Authorship | Women excluded from paternal canon | Anxiety of authorship |
| Angel/Monster Binary | Cultural split female image | Doubling in narrative |
| Madwoman | Repressed female rage | Gothic protest |
| Space | Domestic confinement metaphor | Attics, rooms, houses symbolic |
| Method | Psycho-symbolic close reading | Literature as coded rebellion |
| Goal | Reveal hidden feminist subtext | Revalue women’s writing |
Concluding Perspective
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar give Anglo-American feminist criticism its most memorable metaphor: the madwoman in the attic. Through their psycho-symbolic method, they reveal women’s nineteenth-century literature as site of suppressed authorship, coded protest, and divided identity.
Their work consolidates feminist criticism as both historical reconstruction and symbolic interpretation.
