English 2200F/G Chapter : Week 10 - Gilbert & Gubar, Mulvey, Sedgwick Textbook Notes
23 Dec 2011
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Gilbert & gubar the mad woman in the attic. The book develops the notion that women writers can be understood as a group and understood as participating in quite a different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers. Gilbert and gubar argue that the influential oedipal model to describe the relation of post- Enlightenment male writers to each other does not fit the entirely different situation of women in a male-dominated literary tradition. Gilbert and gubar thus substitute the secret sisterhood of role models who show that women can write. They also make evident the high costs women writers pay for success. The madwoman in the attic stands for everything the woman writer must try to repress though never with complete success in order to write books acceptable by male standards. Employing a psychological approach to literature, they focus on the psychic cost of repression and on bodily symptoms that are interpreted as responses to societal oppression.
