The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

The Preface to the first edition of The Madwoman in the Attic contains a brief explanation of the guiding principles of the book. The authors, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, identify one key discovery: that the women writers of the 19th century who best represent the literary female history of this time period were all “literally and figuratively confined” in physical and artistic spaces created by men (xi). As Gilbert and Gubar examine this confinement in closer detail, patterns of images and conflicts emerge, and these patterns form the basis of their literary analysis throughout the book’s essays. Another trait that the women writers of the 19th century share is the need to break free from this state of captivity “through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society” (xii).

Gilbert and Gubar credit social historians and feminist literary critics for their important work around women’s history and literature, all of which informs The Madwoman in the Attic. Thanks to these scholarly advances, the relationship between women’s writing and “male metaphors” is clearer, and Gilbert and Gubar acknowledge that the connections between experience and metaphor, action and reaction are important to the understanding of women writers like

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