Gilbert and Gubar's the Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years

297 Pages·2009·3.6 MB·English

by  Annette R. Federico

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Copyright © 2009 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilbert and Gubar’s The madwoman in the attic after thirty years / edited with an introduc-
tion by Annette R. Federico ; foreword by Sandra M. Gilbert.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1869-8 (cloth edition : alk. paper)
1. Gilbert, Sandra M. Madwoman in the attic. 2. Gubar, Susan, 1944- Madwoman in the attic.
3. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—
Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Federico, Annette, 1960-
PR115.G54 2009
820.9’9287—dc22
2009034323
This paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Design and composition: Jennifer Cropp
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Minion, Bernhard Modern, and Trajan Pro
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To Susan Federico
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Contents
Foreword:
Conversions of the Mind ix
! Sandra M. Gilbert
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: 1
“Bursting All the Doors”:
The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years
! Annette R. Federico
27
1. After Gilbert and Gubar:
Madwomen Inspired by Madwoman
! Susan Fraiman
34
2. Modeling the Madwoman:
Feminist Movements and the Academy
! Marlene Tromp
60
3. Gilbert and Gubar’s Daughters:
The Madwoman in the Attic’s Spectre in Milton Studies
! Carol Blessing
4. Feminism to Ecofeminism: 76
The Legacy of Gilbert and Gubar’s Readings of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man
! Katey Castellano 94
5. Enclosing Fantasies:
Jane Eyre
! Madeleine Wood
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viii Contents
6. Jane Eyre’s Doubles?
Colonial Progress and the Tradition of New Woman Writing in India 1 1 1
! Narin Hassan
7. Revisiting the Attic:
Recognizing the Shared Spaces of Jane Eyre and Beloved 1 2 7
! Danielle Russell
8. The Legacy of Hell:
Wuthering Heights on Film and Gilbert and Gubar’s Feminist Poetics 1 4 9
! Hila Shachar
9. The Veiled, the Masked, and the Civil War Woman:
Louisa May Alcott and the Madwoman Allegory 1 7 0
! Keren Fite
10. Sensationalizing Women’s Writing:
Madwomen in Attics, the Sensational Canon, and Generic Confinement 1 8 3
! Tamara Silvia Wagner
11. Ghosts in the Attic:
Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and the Female Gothic 2 0 3
! Carol Margaret Davison
12. Elizabeth Gaskell:
A Well-Tempered Madness 2 17
! Thomas P. Fair
13. Mimesis and Poiesis:
Reflections on Gilbert and Gubar’s Reading of Emily Dickinson 2 3 7
! Lucia Aiello
Contributors 257

Index 2 61
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Foreword
Conversions of the Mind
Sandra M. Gilbert
Note: Because Susan Gubar has been coping with a serious illness, I’ve
drafted this foreword on my own. But I hope I’ve spoken for both of us in
recounting the excitement, energy, and even joy with which we wrote The
Madwoman in the Attic, and, equally important, the pleasure that the re-
sponsiveness of our readers inspires in us.
At the risk of hyperbole, we want to say that there’s a kind of ecstasy for
us in reading Annette Federico’s collection, just as we experienced a kind of
ecstasy in writing Madwoman. No, not ecstasy meaning a fashionable street
drug, and not ecstasy in the sexual, mystical sense so famously defined by
John Donne. But yes, “ecstasy” signifying, as the American Heritage Diction-
ary puts it, “intense joy or delight” and having as its root the “Greek ekstasis”
meaning both “astonishment” and a kind of displacement of the ordinary. It
isn’t, after all, usual to read a book about a book that one wrote many years
ago, and it’s especially joyful, delightful, and even astonishing when the
writers whose essays are included in that new book are kind, sympathetic—
indeed flattering—and of course (from our point of view) exceptional-
ly astute in their analyses of our thought. But then, as the contributors to
Federico’s volume seem so clearly to understand, our experience in writing
Madwoman wasn’t a quotidian scholarly experience. The book—or rather,
the idea and plan for the book—seized us in a way that we felt was truly
astonishing: we were taken out of ourselves, that is, transported out of our
“regular” academic and personal lives by a series of epiphanies that altered
our thinking, our careers, and even our selves with what now seems like ex-
ceptional speed. In the poem about Elizabeth Barrett Browning that begins
ix
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