madwomen

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> > > <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>
> > 
Susan responded:
> 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.

Carol responds:

You're quoting a source here, right? Can you cite your source and
provide a link for anyone who's interested?

"Restrictive gender categories" does sound like the sort of phrasing
Gilbert and Gubar would use, but as I'm not a feminist critic, I
haven't incorporated their jargon into my vocabulary, and it's been at
least fifteen years since I read the book.

Carol, who did say that the title, "The Madwoman in the Attic," refers
specifically to the mad wife of Mr. Rochester in "Jane Eyre" and did
refer to her as Bertha in another post