madwomen

[susanmcgee48176]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Lynn - horsenstuff at ..." 
<horsenstuff at ...> wrote:
>
> --- Carol <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
> > <snip>
> > BTW, someone mentioned "The Madwoman in the Attic,"
> > which does refer to the mad wife of Mr. Rochester 
> > in "Jane Eyre" but is actually a book of feminist 
> > literary criticism, not a novel. The full title is
> > "Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
> > Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination," and it 
> > was published in 1979. The authors, Sandra Gilbert 
> > and Susan Gubar, are well-known feminist critics 
> > who examine novels by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, 
> > the Brontë sisters, and others for repressed 
> > sexuality or some such thing. <snip>
> 
> 
>
The title is drawn from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which 
Rochester's mad wife Bertha stays locked in the attic.

The text specifically examines Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte 
and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

Gilbert and Gubar examine the notion that women writers of the 19th 
Century were essentially "madwomen" because of the restrictive gender 
categories enforced upon them both privately and professionally. In 
their re-examination of these writers, they argue that madness often 
became a metaphor for suppressed female revolt and anger. They write 
that the madwoman "is usually in some sense that author's double, an 
image of her own anxiety and rage." 

This is more how I remember that book.

Susan