SOURCE: “An Interview with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,” in Critical Texts: A Review of Theory and Criticism, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1989, pp. 17–38.

[In the following interview conducted by Rosdeitcher, Gubar and Gilbert discuss a variety of topics such as their work, women writers, feminist criticism, their critics, and their writing partnership.]

[Rosdeitcher:] I'd like to begin with a discussion of The Madwoman in the Attic, which has come to be regarded as one of the founding texts of American feminist criticism. What did you feel were the most pressing issues it raised at the time of its publication?

[Gubar:] Well, Sandra and I began thinking about The Madwoman in 1974, and as we were working on it a generation of feminist literary critics had begun to emerge, working primarily on issues of images of women in male literature and then on the recovery of the neglected or misread female literary tradition. The best example of the first category, images of women in male-authored literature, would be something like Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, which came out quite early.

In the second category, as we were writing, we were reading Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Pat Spacks's Female Imagination, and then Elaine Showalter's book, A Literature of Their Own. Both of those projects, images of women and the recovery of neglected or misread women, were obviously part of the impetus for the writing of The Madwoman in the Attic; that is, we were looking at texts by women from Jane Austen through George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson in order to understand them as a response to male-authored images of women in Victorian literature.

At the same time, we were also fascinated by theories of literary history which seemed skewed by issues of gender that were not fully articulated, that were hidden inside, let's say, Harold Bloom's idea about the anxiety of influence. So finally we were trying not only to recover a neglected tradition, not only to read books that we thought were fascinating by linking them to each other and to a set of common themes or strategies—say, doubling or schizophrenia, disease, imprisonment—but also to figure out the dynamics of literary influence for women, and that was how we arrived at the concept of the “anxiety of authorship.” We wanted to understand what it meant for the nineteenth-century woman writer to grapple with a predominantly male literary inheritance. How did that effort instill feelings of anxiety that then led her to subvert the conventions of genres she inherited because they were male-defined?

[Gilbert:] While everything that Susan says is absolutely true—especially in what I guess we'd all consider a “professional sense”—I'd like to add something more personal about how I, and I guess both of us, experienced our work on The Madwoman. We had never actually planned to write a book together; in fact, what happened was that we taught a course together in response to a need expressed to us at Indiana University in the fall of 1974. The department thought there should be courses on, of all things, women writers—and Susan and I discovered we were both interested in that subject. We got together and made up a syllabus, rather naively, out of all the books by women writers we felt we wanted to reread (or, indeed, to read, carefully, for the first time). Neither of us was trained in that field (which was in any case not then considered a “field”). I had specialized in modern British literature; Susan in eighteenth-century prose fiction. But I had just been rereading Little Women,Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights with my youngest child, then nine years old (a girl). And I thought I could, suddenly, see all kinds of mysterious and somewhat mystifying connections among these works. Susan, as I recall, was planning to write something about Villette. So we welcomed the chance to teach the course, although both of us, as I also remember, were fairly ignorant about what would now be called feminist theory. We'd read Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Kate Millett, but not much else. Most of the other stuff came out after we'd started writing the book.

After some struggle (I wanted at first to call the course “Upstairs/Downstairs,” in honor of the TV program that was then popular), we compromised on a different title: The Madwoman in the Attic. I think that was because, after doing all this reading with my daughter Susanna, I had become fascinated by the figure of Bertha Mason Rochester, the infamous attic-bound first wife in Jane Eyre. I had vague, quite inchoate feelings that she had something to do with, on the one hand, Jo March (in Little Women) and, on the other hand, Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights). I had odd ideas about doubles, but I couldn't have explained much more than this. I was really a poet and a critic of poetry, just beginning to learn how to read and analyze fiction!

But when Susan and I started to teach the course something magical happened. All the books—novels, poems, short stories, even essays—seemed to have significant relationships to each other. Thematic, stylistic, all kinds of connections. Neither of us, I should say, had ever studied any of these works in such a (female) context. I can say for myself, indeed, that I'd never studied most of them at all. In eight years of college and graduate school, I'd only read a few books by women—for example, Jane Austen's Emma, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, a few Dickinson poems—that was pretty much it! And those works had been defined, conventionally, in terms of the history of the novel, the history of modernism, the Victorian tradition, or the American Renaissance. So, suddenly rereading them, along with other works, in this remarkably new way was utterly transformative. Susan and I used to call each other almost every night, literally screaming with excitement about the connections we saw. There was, we suddenly understood, what is now identified as a “female literary tradition”—a tradition that crosses all the usual geographic, generic, and historical boundaries. It was after that intellectual metamorphosis, as I recall, that we understood we wanted to write a book. More specifically, we were seized by the idea that we had to write a book about this. And it was then, too, that we began to read, with great passion, all the terrific criticism then beginning to appear—that is, works such as the ones Susan has mentioned: Moers’ and Spacks's books, Judy Fetterley's The Resisting Reader, all of Elaine Showalter's work, and so forth.

In what way do you see women transforming male genres?

[Gilbert:] I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you mean by “male genres.” Genres that are inherently or essentially male? Genres for the most part constructed by male writers? On the assumption that you mean the latter (since I don't think there are any such things as inherently masculine genres), I'd say that women sometimes feel alienated from certain literary forms that reflect a particular kind of male psychosexual development, forms that emphasize, for example, a “homosocial bonding” (to use a phrase Eve Sedgwick has popularized) with male-dominated tradition. I'm thinking of the pastoral elegy, the epic, the verse tragedy, all of which, in one way or another, represent the western literary tradition to itself, as it were—justifying God's ways to “man,” offering the poet a consoling way of confronting mortality through visions of aesthetic resurrection, and so forth. These are modes in which, as we found in working on the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, women writers only very infrequently write, either because (and we're not sure of the answer here) they don't need to, or they can't.

Compare Emily Dickinson with Walt Whitman, for instance. This odd couple founded American poetry as we now know it, its mother and father, and they have a lot more in common: they were radical innovators, artistic revolutionaries, brilliant performers of the self in a culture that hardly knew how to respond to what appeared to be their profoundly idiosyncratic texts. Yet while Dickinson seems in many ways linguistically and generically isolated from the art of her precursors (she almost always writes in what John Crowe Ransom called “folk meter”—that is, in the prosodic form of the Protestant hymnal—and never attempts difficult “classical” genres), Whitman alludes (for instance, in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”) to the pastoral elegy and (in “Out of the Cradle”) to the standard Romantic poem of initiation (e.g., Wordsworth's “Intimations Ode”) as well as, arguably (in “Song of Myself”), to such a quasi-epic as The Prelude. But this isn't to say that Dickinson is inferior to Whitman, or that Whitman is less “original” than Dickinson. Merely to say that they are strikingly different in their relationship to hegemonic (that is, male-created) genres.

[Gubar:] Well, but to a certain extent when you are dealing, let's say, with the history of the novel and you are facing the traditions established by male authors like Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, then the nineteenth-century woman writer might feel that she is confronted by conventions that need to be altered for her to experience her anger at those very scripts, her sense of discomfort. In her juvenilia, for example, Jane Austen parodied the sentimental epistolary novel most famously deployed by Richardson. And we dealt with that revisionary impulse, Sandra did, in her discussion of Frankenstein as a revision and a critique of Milton's Paradise Lost. When you think about Lucy Snowe in Villette, you can see the way in which Brontë is trying to come to terms with literary traditions linked to the Lucy of Wordsworth's famous poems, traditions related to the silencing of the heroine whose death really becomes a kind of impetus for the male poet, almost a source of inspiration. So the question of women resisting or reshaping what is inherited is a very important one.

I wonder if you could discuss the reception of The Madwoman, how you think it has affected later works of criticism?

[Gubar:] Well, The Madwoman was a lucky book because it received a very wonderful review in The New York Times, and it was then the runner up for the Pulitzer Prize and, I think, the National Book Critics Circle Award, so it got a lot of attention, much of it very good.

It received some critical reviews, one by Mary Jacobus in Signs that asked important questions about our conceptualization of historical change and the monolithic figure of the madwoman. So I would say the critical reviews were serious ones and posed important problems that we then went on to grapple with in later works. But for the most part that book has gotten the best reviews of anything we've published.

[Gilbert:] Yes, true. It was a lucky book, and we did learn a lot from skeptical reviews. But to be frank, I'd have to say that such a rapid success was in a way problematic for us. It has certainly meant a lot of anxiety about the “sequel,” which is what our latest work, the three-volume No Man's Land, supposedly is. Can one suffer from an anxiety of (one's own) influencing? I think perhaps we do, and have. I think that precisely because The Madwoman did elaborate a kind of monolithic “plot”—a plot for nineteenth-century (and earlier) women's literature that I believe we both still see in such work—we feared that we might be expected to, perhaps we ought to, come up with a comparable “plot” for feminism-and-modernism. But as you know, if you've been reading the successive volumes of No Man's Land, we feel that the plot becomes far more complicated in a post-suffrage, post-women-in-the-professions era; in fact, the plot has now become plots.

In some ways, your critical strategies seem to differ between Madwoman in the Attic and No Man's Land. In The Madwoman you describe the mapping of a female literary history as not only the project of twentieth-century feminist critics but also of the nineteenth-century women's literature you discuss. You seem to participate in the task their works imply by telling “the story of the woman artist who enters the cavern of her own mind and finds there the scattered leaves not only of her own power but of the tradition which might have generated that power” (98). When in the twentieth century the relationship between women writers and their female precursors becomes more complex, partly because such precursors are known, your own assessment about what constitutes an empowering strategy seems different. In your chapter, “Sexual Linguistics,” for example, you suggest that the revision of theories about women's relation to language is a common strategy of feminist texts including your own. Does this difference reflect a change in your own critical assumptions? Did your reading of twentieth-century writers elicit a change in these assumptions?

[Gilbert:] I don't think our critical assumptions, such as they are—and they're fairly pragmatic—have changed significantly. I think we're still working as literary/cultural historians, albeit fairly newfangled ones. But to the extent that we find the Bloomian/Freudian model of literary psycho-history an appealing one—which needs nevertheless to be radically revised by feminist critics—we've had to factor in a whole set of profoundly new phenomena: the visibility of female precursors for both female and male writers; the entrance of women into the literary marketplace; the asymmetries of male and female history in the last century or so—of, that is, a history in which middle-class white women on, as we like to say, “both sides of the Atlantic,” have increasingly gained public power while their male contemporaries have lost many of their great expectations, etcetera, etcetera. And that's why, as I just remarked, the “plot” of The Madwoman, such as it was, has become a complex of “plots.”

[Gubar:] I'm not sure that our critical assumptions haven't changed. Putting together the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women impressed on both of us, I suspect, the diversity of women's literary accomplishments in the twentieth century. That book intervened between The Madwoman and the first volume of No Man's Land. Also, as Sandra has just suggested, we've begun focusing on the interactions of men and women in an historical age when literary women did have scribbling sibling rivalries with their male contemporaries. So, for example, we study modernism in The War of the Words not only in terms of the anxiety of a rising middle class, the Great War, the dark Satanic mills of industrialization, and the death of God, but also in terms of male anxiety about women's prominence in the literary marketplace. We're not arguing that those other factors aren't important—clearly they are—but that there was yet another anxiety for such writers as Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Hemingway: a sexual anxiety fostered by the powerful female matrilineage established in the nineteenth century.

At the same time, we are now beginning to think that in the twentieth century, the woman writer facing a female literary past, seeing very visible female precursors like Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, had to come to terms with her relationship to her female precursors. To what extent does that matrilineage become empowering because it establishes models for female creativity? To what extent does it foster a sense of belatedness, the feeling among twentieth-century literary women that they are no longer in a position of primacy as pioneers? Also is there therefore a sense of a kind of rivalry with the past? If the nature of the past is one of disease, of anger, of isolation, what does it mean to become a woman writer in the twentieth century? These are the ideas with which we grappled when we wrote the chapter in The War of the Words on “The Female Affiliation Complex.”

So you suggest that women writers are in fact ambivalent about this inheritance?

[Gubar:] We had originally thought that it would be very empowering. Our first idea was that in the nineteenth century the woman writer had no female precursors.

[Gilbert:] And so, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “England has had many learned ladies, but where are the poetesses? I look everywhere for grandmothers and find none.” In other words, for nineteenth-century women writers, we felt, the very concept of a literary matrilineage was sort of a turn-on. You can certainly see this in some of Emily Dickinson's writings about Barrett Browning—for instance, in the poem that begins “I think I was enchanted / When first a sombre Girl— / I read that Foreign Lady—.” And you can obviously see it, too, in the Barrett Browning remark I just quoted. And yet, and yet …

[Gubar:] So we assumed that in the twentieth century when literary women looked back and found literary mothers and grandmothers they would be ecstatic. But what we found was something much more complex, something much more problematic.

[Gilbert:] We found, in fact, something that does suggest rivalry as well as reverence. Or anyway something that suggests a kind of nervousness about ancestresses. If Charlotte Brontë was, as Virginia Woolf thinks (and says in A Room of One's Own), a powerfully originatory figure, what does that mean for her granddaughters? Can they share in her imaginative strength, or did she use it all up, use up the genre, the audience, the metaphors, the language? And if they can share her strength, does that mean they must also share her pain?

To what extent do you think all female writers are engaged in coming to terms with a specifically female literary past?

[Gubar:] Oh, I think they are up to the present day. Margaret Drabble asks, how happy was Emma when she married Mr. Knightly? Did she enjoy being in bed with him? Margaret Atwood rewrites Jane Eyre in Lady Oracle, and Erica Jong frequently laments the fact that there is no female Chaucer, that her ancestresses from Emily Dickinson through Virginia Woolf were severe or suicidal. This is an issue that is very perplexing still today. When Adrienne Rich confronts Emily Dickinson, she does write a lyrical essay celebrating “Vesuvius At Home,” but she also composes a poem about Emily Dickinson in which she suggests that Dickinson had it out “on her own premises” in part because she was a “woman, masculine/in single-mindedness,” a woman her mentor considered “half-cracked.”

[Gilbert:] And similarly both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton worry about “whining and quailing” like Edna St. Vincent Millay or Sara Teasdale. They worry, that is, about seeming to be “lady poets” or “poetesses.” Yet even while they suffer from these anxieties, each in her own way pays homage to female precursors. Plath says of Virginia Woolf that “her books make mine possible” and Anne Sexton writes a beautiful tribute to Plath, after Plath's suicide. In the same mode, Elizabeth Bishop complains in a letter that art is art and gender gender, so never the twain shall (or should) meet, but composes her inspiring and inspired “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” All these mixed messages and the ambiguities they represent are brilliantly summarized, by the way, in Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls, where a group of celebrated women from history and literature meet at a dinner party and reveal both the triumphs and the tribulations of the female past.

Are you saying that you no longer focus on the madwoman or on the tradition in English, but on multiple responses to crucial historical events?

[Gilbert:] Yes, I guess that's one thing we're saying. Throughout the twentieth century, as women have increasingly moved into the public sphere, our history has become ever more complicated. The battle of the sexes that we described in volume I of No Man's Land, The War of the Words, necessarily required a whole range of strategies from participants on both sides, male and female, and it also fostered enormous sociocultural changes—which, in volume 2 of this series, we've called “sex changes.” And those changes meant that some of the women we're studying in volume 3, Letters from the Front, are so conscious of the artifice of gender that they become, in effect, what we've called “female female impersonators.” I'm thinking, for example, of Edna Millay, who posed as a kind of weary, witty femme fatale, and of Marianne Moore, who posed as a sardonic, school-marmish “old maid”—and also, ultimately, as a female George Washington Crossing the Delaware. But you could make a comparable argument about H. D. or even more recent writers, like Plath and Jong. And of course at the same time, male writers—a number of them equally conscious of the arbitrariness of sex roles—are resorting to strategies of their own, often strategies involving theories of self and mask, personality and costume.

[Gubar:] Yes, that's why there's a chapter in Sexchanges, on literary responses to the Great War, a chapter on transvestism (in the writings of both male and female modernists), and another on the emergence for the first time of a consciously defined lesbian literary community. Renée Vivien writes quite differently from Amy Lowell or Gertrude Stein, but all three were attempting to establish a new kind of poetry, one that could speak the desires of homosexual women who felt themselves to be alienated both from patriarchal literary conventions and from a female tradition that excluded or marginalized them.

In relation to the battle of the sexes that Sandra just mentioned, by the way, we're not arguing that Zora Neale Hurston solved the problem of literary daughterhood in the same way that Virginia Woolf did. Or the same way that Susan Glaspell did. But twentieth-century literary women often grappled with similar difficulties; for example, Hurston's “Sweat,” Woolf's legend about Professor Von X, and Glaspell's “Trifles” all deal with women's response to an escalation in sex-antagonism.

How do you perceive the relationship between strategies of feminist criticism and those of other oppressed groups such as black or third-world critics?

[Gubar:] Well, whenever I go out on the road to give lectures and I meet people interested in black literary criticism, I'm struck by how similar the endeavors are. But I'm also very aware that the metaphorical identification between white women and blacks has occasioned a number of slippages.

Let me begin with the first point, the commonality of the enterprises. It seems to me that black literary critics, like feminist critics, are concerned with recalcitrant and vexing images in literature—in the black literary tradition, the minstrel, the Uncle Tom, the Jezebel, the Topsy figure. Both feminist critics and black studies scholars seek to excavate lost or neglected traditions by recovering texts frequently out of print, unavailable, or untaught. Methodologically, too, there are similar emphases on personal reactions to texts that are read for their ideological significance. Of course black feminist literary criticism—by people like Mary Helen Washington, Deborah McDowell, and Barbara Christian—seeks to negotiate between both critical enterprises.

On the other hand, anyone who has done any work on suffrage history knows that there is a long tradition of somehow equating white women metaphorically with blacks. It goes way back to Stanton and Anthony if not before, when they talked about the way the woman and the Negro, as they say, have been denied a name, voting privileges, property rights, legal power, and so forth. And you can see in the suffrage movement that this analogy sometimes allowed white women to argue in competition with the claims of abolitionists, or later, civil rights activists, that white women somehow should take precedence over blacks. The result is what one critic has called a debilitating competition of victimization between blacks and women.

[Gilbert:] I would like to interject here that there is an interesting basic problem which supports the notion of “commonality” even while it subverts that concept. I mean the idea of “otherness,” which has been used for centuries in patriarchal western culture (and no doubt in many other societies too) to define both sexual and racial “others” as inferiors, outlanders, barbarians. Certainly throughout the imperialist nineteenth century, in both Britain and the United States, women and the colonized, women and slaves or blacks, were at least in part equated, even while male leaders claimed that women who were “ladies” must be somehow saved or protected from the potential depredations of the colonized (mutinous Indians, for example) or of, say, recently freed slaves. Despite a lot of genteel ideology, in other words, and a lot of heated rhetoric, these groups were analogically linked to each other. Almost through a kind of social homeopathy, I'd say. Sander Gilman has done some very interesting work on this, as has Lewis Wurgaft, but there's much more to be done, focusing on writers from Cooper to Haggard, from Kipling to Twain.

[Gubar:] And I think that when you approach black literary history from a feminist point of view, you arrive at some interesting results too. I recently drafted a chapter for volume three, Letters from the Front, on the Harlem Renaissance and women novelists, specifically Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, and it seems to me that these women are responding to the issues of feminism, but in a different way from their white contemporaries. It also seems to me that literary history in the black tradition may not be as male-dominated, or not in the same way. From the very inception (as far as we can tell) of black literary history, with Phillis Wheatley all the way through Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins to more contemporary times, black literary women were very prominent in the Afro-American tradition. Of course, literacy was frequently denied both male and female slaves in the South. And so the dynamics of literary influence function somewhat differently.

[Gilbert:] In fact, if we look at contemporary writing in the United States, it's clear that many of our most powerful current writers are black women: Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor. And then look at the other marvelous writers who are from ethnic minorities: Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, and on and on. Does what we consider “marginality” really foster empowerment? If so, only for women? For both sexes but in different ways? These are issues that obviously need study.

What do you take to be the relationship between sexual and racial identities?

[Gubar:] The female novelist I am working on—Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston—are all concerned with that problem; that is, how do you come to terms with racist and sexist or misogynist images? I think that each one answers this question differently. Fauset has been faulted by contemporary black feminist critics for being a kind of ladylike, decorous anti-feminist, but I suspect that her novels have not yet been fully understood or appreciated. For Fauset, black women have a responsibility to reconstruct black manhood precisely because of the onslaughts of a society dedicated to mythologizing black male sexuality in such a way as to justify lynching.

[Gilbert:] Perhaps we should also add here the obvious point that in a racist society, members of an oppressed racial minority are almost always at an even greater economic and social risk than people of the dominant group—i.e. women—who are subordinated or oppressed because of their gender. Is it necessary to say this? Clearly a white “lady” of a certain class, despite all the constraints of the “pedestal,” has privileges that her working-class black counterpart doesn't have. Alice James had access, after all, to luxuries that certainly weren't available to Harriet E. Adams Wilson, the author of Our Nig!

I'd like to go on to how you use psychoanalysis in your work. One critic of No Man's Land suggests that in your telling of the “one metastory of gender strife,” you foreground the patriarchal structure of the Freudian “family romance.” Although it is clear that you seek to historicize Freud's work by pointing out that he, too, was responding to threats of increasing female power and changing concepts of femininity, how do you negotiate between your critique of Freud and your uses of his theories?

[Gilbert:] I'd begin by saying that we are inclined to use Freud in much the way that such other feminist/psychoanalytic critics as Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose do. Our Freud, in other words, is a Freud mediated through, on the one hand, Lacan (who makes Freud literary/linguistic) and, on the other hand, through, well, let's say, Foucault—that is, through a study of the ideology of institutions that interrogates the assumptions of so-called “theory” as rigorously as it questions any other social or cultural precepts. But since I don't want to seem merely to be repeating the lessons of the masters, let me reiterate how much we've learned from feminists like Mitchell and Rose. What I think they demonstrate to us is both the accuracy of Freud's descriptions and the fallibility of his prescriptions. This is the course I know we tried to follow—negotiating between description and prescription—throughout the most quasi-psychoanalytic of our chapters, which I guess would be chapter two of The Madwoman and chapters three and four of The War of the Words. Freud's genius was that he looked through the flesh of the patriarchal family and saw its bones. But (to pursue the metaphor, in which I'm now entrapped), since he himself lived under the skin of the family romance, or it lived in his blood, he had fundamentally to acquiesce in its imperatives even while, with his characteristic pessimism, he analyzed them.

[Gubar:] Let me just add that we see the affiliation complex for the woman writer in the twentieth century following the stages of evolution that Freud maps out in the growing girl; that is, for Freud, the healthy girl solves the Oedipal dilemma by translating her desire for the mother to her desire for the father. That would be the literary woman, we argue, who turns toward male literary history in her definition of herself as a writer. And then, Freud says, the “immature” woman who renounces the father suffers from frigidity, and we discuss the renunciation of aesthetic desire in the female literary tradition. Finally, we analyze what Freud sees as another immature move, when the girl remains trapped in her relationship with the mother, as an affiliation of the woman writer with her matrilineal past.

One of the things we're doing, then, is revising Freud's valuations. What he sees as a regressive move, that is, the girl's attachment to the mother, we see as a healthy effort on the part of the woman writer to come to terms with her literary grandmothers. At the same time, we question Freud's notion that the growing girl (or by extension the female artist) sticks to one path. A given woman writer can fit into all three categories, can position herself in various works in different stances toward the past. It is surely significant that Freud was writing at the time when the patriarchal family was breaking down, because he was writing about structures that were changing but that were also deeply recalcitrant: the family, the child, the mother, and the father. To the extent that he tried to explain how babies become boys and girls, he provided a vocabulary, if nothing else, for coming to terms with the engendering of identity and creativity.

How do you respond to the problem raised by some critics that this vocabulary itself inscribes and perpetuates patriarchal relations?

[Gilbert:] I don't think it needs to. Description isn't prescription. Analysis is, in fact, the opposite of ideology. It seems to me that we can only escape the dynamics that shape us if we are conscious of them, as in the old statement about those who don't know history being condemned to repeat it. Maybe we could say that those who don't know family history are condemned to repeat it.

[Gubar:] Analysis the antithesis of ideology? We'll get it for that! Well, again I would move towards the women writers themselves and what they say about this. Maybe a useful example here would be someone like H. D. H. D. went through an analysis with Freud after she had been mentored by proponents of what she viewed as a great patrilineage, people like Lawrence, Aldington, and Pound. What H. D. does in the middle of her career is she stops publishing poetry. After writing a number of poems about the hostility and competition of her male contemporaries, she renounces poetic desire. And at that moment, in her fiction and translations, she begins searching for models of female creativity, turns, in what Freud himself told her was a regressive move, to the recovery of the mother, the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind patriarchal culture, and she writes Trilogy, a poem about her own aesthetic resurrection and about the recovery of the goddess. It seems that there you see a woman coming to terms with Freud personally and poetically in a way that inspires her to write a book-length poem.

[Gilbert:] Or, from another direction, Virginia Woolf might be said to have come differently to terms with the Freudian family romance in, say, To the Lighthouse (even though she doesn't seem even to have read Freud at the time she wrote that novel). What will happen to the daughters—the blood daughters and the spiritual daughters, Lily Briscoe and, maybe, Minta Doyle—when Mrs. Ramsay, the archetypal mother, dies? Is there life after the family romance has disintegrated, and, if so, what is that life? What is the new? If you remember the last section of To the Lighthouse, you will recall, I imagine, that the shape of the new isn't very clear to the Ramsay daughters, who don't know what to send to the lighthouse keeper, or to Lily, who is only comfortable with Mr. Ramsay after their conversation alights on “the blessed island of good boots.” Yet it seems to me that it is, precisely, the dissolution of a Freudian structure on which Woolf meditates here.

And from another direction still, look at how useful Freudian paradigms are for examining the entrapment of Sylvia Plath (or her fictive speaker) in “Daddy”'s “black shoe,” where she can neither breathe nor “achoo.” What happens when the family romance lingers, and malingers, well into the middle of our own era? If we don't recognize it, don't know how caged we are in those old bones, how can we struggle free of it?

[Gubar:] Yes. By studying the patriarchal family we're not seeking to perpetuate it. Isn't it a kind of fiction in America today anyway? I mean does it exist? I don't know if there are many.

[Gilbert:] I'm afraid that I think there are lots. Lots of patriarchal families. Indeed, even if the patriarchal family is a fiction, it's a real one—and one that women all too often have to struggle to maintain, perhaps precisely because it's fictive. Don't you think that's what we're writing about now?

[Gubar:] The powers of supreme fictions—yes, that's what has always concerned not only us as literary critics but many feminist theorists of psychosexual development. When Adrienne Rich writes “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” she too, oddly enough, is beginning to deal with issues raised not only by Nancy Chodorow, but by Freud. Both Chodorow and Kim Chernin examine women's psychological stages of development by confronting and reshaping Freudian paradigms in general and his idea of the pre-Oedipal in particular.

In your work you make use of Freud's notion of Oedipal and pre-Oedipal phases to explain the social construction of identity in patriarchal culture. You maintain that in the pre-Oedipal stage a subject is as yet unmarked by the social determinants of identity such as race and gender, and you support this idea with readings of female modernists. One example occurs in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Janie is not conscious of being black until the age of six when she sees a photograph of herself; in Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House you find Cather postulating the existence of a “prepatriarchal self” in the professor. Could you elaborate your conception of this presocial identity and its value to your work?

[Gilbert:] Pre-Oedipal is very trendy right now, isn't it? I can't help remembering a remark Coppelia Kahn—who is a wonderful psychoanalytic critic—made at a conference I once attended: “Sell Oedipal, buy pre-Oedipal!” But seriously folks …

[Gubar:] I think these ideas, promulgated very differently by Hurston and Cather, have to do with fantasies of the presexual self. I would not read them as psychosexual theories exactly. It seems to me that the nausea Cather feels about gender in The Professor's House, about outmoded modes of femininity and about patriarchal roles that are debilitating to men, is countered by the fantasy of a presexual self. You see that fantasy quite frequently in the works of women writers; the notion, for instance in Katherine Mansfield, that the child is in touch—because she has not gone through this terrible fall into gender—with some ontological fullness that's almost gynandrous. Sandra explored this in her chapter on Wuthering Heights. The young Cathy, before she is bitten by the bulldog, before she is put into the crinoline, wounded, and placed in a parlor, this Cathy feels linked to Heathcliff and not split up, not feminized or entrapped in some kind of a role. This utopian yearning in women's literature reflects the longing for the child's self which represents a self before gender, a paradise lost.

I think though, in terms of our own theories, that you are really referring to a notion we propounded in the last chapter of The War of the Words, “Sexual Linguistics.” There what we were trying to counter was the idea that language in itself is necessarily, quintessentially patriarchal. We were discussing some women's sense that the language we have inherited is confining because it is male-dominated. And yet, many literary women feel that they are entitled to a primary relationship to language, that they are not necessarily alienated from language.

[Gilbert:] Basically, in our chapter (and our earlier essay) on “Sexual Linguistics,” we were trying to come to terms with Julia Kristeva's argument that the “social contract” is inextricably entangled with the “symbolic contract.” Working out of Lacanian assumptions, Kristeva has claimed that the child is inducted into society, through the Oedipus complex, at the same moment when she or he is initiated into language; hence, girl children, “always already” (as the saying goes) marginalized in patriarchal culture/society, are always already excluded from some sort of primary access to language, whose syntax is a sort of “guarantee” of sociocultural hierarchies. We tried to demonstrate in our chapter that this isn't necessarily so. First, we tried to do this by situating current feminist concepts of a “woman's language” in a history of female and male linguistic fantasies—a kind of utopian linguistics or a series of linguistic utopias that go back pretty far and that certainly characterize literary modernism in England, the United States, and France.

Then, we questioned the idea that the child's linguistic socialization has to occur at the same moment as her/his basic acculturation. Babies start learning language very early—as we know because we're both mothers. In Freudian or Lacanian terms, they start talking even before they enter the so-called “Oedipus.” And in most societies and families they learn language from their mothers (or from a female care-giver), not from—or not directly from—“patriarchs,” even when their moms are ostensibly functioning as “agents of patriarchy.” The mother, as we should all remember, has enormous verbal power. So speaking pragmatically, empirically, it seems really possible to question the conflation of the “social contract” (which does tell the child who and what he or she is, structurally, in a culture that subordinates women and girls) with the “symbolic contract” (which tells the child that she or he has to speak in order to be).

You have been criticized by such critics as Mary Jacobus and Toril Moi as maintaining an essentialist theory of gender. Since you explicitly state throughout your work that gender is a social construct, this criticism perhaps reflects a difference in the way you conceptualize gender. How would you describe that difference between your own concept of gender and that of your critics?

[Gubar:] Well, I would begin by thinking about both the political and historical implications of what I take to be Mary Jacobus's and Toril Moi's point. They seem to be working on the assumptions established by such people as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes that there is no subject, that we can all enjoy ourselves on the free-play ground of the signifier, that the author is dead, that there is a kind of interplay between signs that means that meaning is indecipherable. And it seems to me that one needs to think about the political ramifications of such assumptions. The best response I have heard was by Henry Louis Gates, who said, “Isn't it interesting that there is no subject just at that moment when blacks and women are entering the academy.” What does that do for us? What does that do to us?

[Gilbert:] The “feminine,” according to some of these theorists—and I'm approximately quoting one of that group—is not what some critics “quite banally understand” as any work signed by a woman. In other words (and we find this in the writings of Cixous and Kristeva as well), in the view of such thinkers lots of male writers are better at “inscribing” what's called “the feminine” than many women are. But what does this notion mean about “the feminine”? What, then, is “the feminine”? Alas, “the feminine” here seems not to have anything to do with any sort of experiential reality (and I understand that the word “reality” is a problematic signifier pointing to a tenuous concept), but rather with a whole set of stereotypes: the unconscious, darkness, rebelliousness, fluidity, etc. etc. Ah, the wonderful, watery “feminine”! It seems to leak and gush through the writings of Joyce, Artaud, Bataille. Whereas George Eliot and Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë—and probably Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison—are a bunch of linear, binary-haunted men.

I think I'm saying that in this particular definition—the one that dissolves authors into linguistic fields and assumes that any notion of history is identical with “essentialism”—“the feminine” is anything that you want it to be. Anything that you desire. The wildness, the disruption, the fantastic language about which you've been dreaming. (I guess you can see how this fits in with the fantasy of a utopian language that we were discussing earlier!) Never mind what Adrienne Rich talks about as the “absorbed drudging” author (forgive me for using such a word as author) crouched at her desk. If the little marks made by her pen as it traces free-playing signifiers don't come out just the way you, the feminist critic, want them to, well then they're not “feminine.”

[Gubar:] Of course, the older I get the more convinced I am that gender constructs are transformed over time, that they are radically different in different societal and cultural contexts, but that they are extraordinarily resilient. And they resurface over and over again. I would say this about racial constructs as well. Ideas about gender, about the nature of masculinity, the nature of femininity, do transform themselves in different periods but they are extremely powerful. By talking about the free-play of the signifier, one is defusing that power as it is experienced in women's lives. Elaine Showalter speaks about women critics feeling on their pulses what they are writing about when she talks about an experiential base to feminist criticism, and I think there's some truth to that.

So gender constructs are less fluid than some critics suggest?

[Gilbert:] It seems to me that they are differently fluid, and I think that's what Susan was just saying. They're historically fluid: obviously Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century free love advocate, was responding to a very different social context from the one in which Gloria Steinem, or Helen Gurley Brown, finds herself. Sexual liberation, as we understand the concept, meant in nineteenth-century America something very different from what it means today. As did “the feminine.” And “the feminine” meant something rather different for James Joyce than what it probably means for Hélène Cixous or Mary Jacobus or Toril Moi. I think history, insofar as we can understand it, or can understand parts of it, aspects of it, is so subtly nuanced that we have to be awfully careful not to see in it merely the shapes of our desire. Although, of course, we'll always see those too!

[Gubar:] We spoke about the desire for gender fluidity as it appears in images of the child, and we also trace it in the icon of the cross-dresser, the androgyne. I think the desire for sexual fluidity in a book like Orlando is absolutely clear. But even that novel was written out of Woolf's consciousness that women have found it difficult to achieve rooms of their own, or 500 pounds a year. I think the desire for gender fluidity is an important utopian yearning and is reflected in the work of Moi and Jacobus and Nelly Furman and many other people. But I'm not convinced that gender fluidity is an everyday reality.

Given your sense that the author's signature is, as you say, inflected in her or his work, how do you perceive the role of men in feminism?

[Gubar:] Well, I think that the difference between The Madwoman—to get back to your earlier question—and No Man's Land, in part, is a move away from isolating the female literary tradition and a move toward understanding the interactions in the twentieth century between male and female literary traditions and figures. What does modernism have to do with a crisis in masculinity and anxiety about the “no man”? Our interest in that question means that we focus now not only on definitions of femininity, but on evolving definitions of masculinity. Clearly this is an important subject for male critics too. I think many male critics today—one thinks of Terry Eagleton, and, alas, one also thinks of Frank Lentricchia—are using ideas about the engendering of literary history that were developed by feminist critics. And for the most part I think that's a healthy and important development in feminist thinking. I get worried when it's combative or appropriative.

[Gilbert:] Or, worse still, when it's patronizing. As in a certain kind of “more feminist than thou” stance, in which the male critic assumes that now he has entered the field he can instruct these poor benighted women in how they ought to go about their work. Not that we don't think that we feminist critics can sometimes be, in our own embattled way, matronizing. But at the very least, conflicts among feminist critics (and I think of the issues you just raised about Moi and Jacobus) are, like disputes among Afro-American critics, in some sense family quarrels, and family quarrels among people who understand themselves to have been marginalized for all too long. It is crucial to us that we can now take our work seriously enough to fight about it. But there's something odd, something distasteful, something suspect, about the position of a critic who claims to dispute our conclusions because he understands all our assumptions without having, as it were, inhabited our premises!

Could you elaborate some of the problems? In what way do you find Lentricchia's use of feminism, for instance, particularly suspect?

[Gubar:]. Well, in an interview published in this very journal, Professor Lentricchia does something which he also did in an earlier attack on The Madwoman. It seems to me that he wages the kind of rhetorical war of words that I think we've been tracing in the pages of No Man's Land. He says in the interview that feminists come to him and say, “We don't like Gilbert and Gubar either, but we don't piss on our generals in public.” Now, I wouldn't expect anyone to say that to me, but actually I wouldn't expect them to say it to anybody. Now, maybe that's naive of me.

[Gilbert:] No, no, certainly not. Think about it, after all. There's a certain implicit, or maybe explicit, sexism here. I mean, can you really imagine a woman saying that? Wouldn't it be pretty hard, and fairly embarrassing, for a woman to “piss on her general” in public? Anatomically, that is? So maybe, for all his ostensible “feminism,” Lentricchia is revealing his hidden assumptions: about hierarchy (generals), and pissing (in public, standing up?). Susan, we've been saying that anatomy isn't destiny; but what if it is? What if we feminists can't piss on our generals in public? What if our genitals determine the way we deal with our generals?

[Gubar:] Still, I don't think Lentricchia represents the vast majority of male critics in this country. I think that a number of men are producing important books, including the one that Alice Jardine did with Paul Smith, Men in Feminism, which includes fascinating essays by people like Robert Scholes and Stephen Heath. So I wouldn't see Lentricchia's positioning of himself as paradigmatic, and furthermore, he takes that combative role with men, too. So it might just be his problem.

[Gilbert:] Oh, I agree. Jonathan Culler, Larry Lipking, Uli Knoepflmacher—we can all name a number of men who are doing interesting work in gender studies. But I find it significant that I want to call it “gender studies.” In some part of myself, I'm really political enough to want to continue seeing feminism as a women's movement. We must all understand the inflections, imperatives, dynamics, of gender—in our culture, our society, our literature. But feminism is originally, and specifically, about addressing and redressing what Mary Wollstonecraft once called “the wrongs of women.” Let's not forget that. I'm agreeing, in other words, with a fundamental point that my colleague Elaine Showalter made in her essay on “Critical Cross-Dressing.”

As a final question, I'd like to ask you about your collaboration. It is tempting to see this as another facet of a specifically feminist strategy. How do you regard your collaboration?

[Gilbert:] I think that what I tried to say earlier about the personal origins of The Madwoman has a lot to do with the origins of our collaboration, too. Just as The Madwoman didn't come out of a willed, intentional, intellectual experience but rather out of an idea that really seized us, so our collaboration wasn't the result of a conscious political decision. It was something exciting and fascinating that happened to us, the way the book did. We taught a class together, we got a set of ideas together. Quite without forethought, we had what I've sometimes called a “conversion experience.” One autumn the scales fell from our eyes in Bloomington, Indiana, just as the leaves were falling from the trees. We understood that there was what we had never been taught there was: a female literary tradition! And since we had figured it out together, we had to write about it together. And the fact that the collaboration worked, is still working, had and does continue to have something to do with what is now called “feminist process.” But not with intentional political process. Rather, with the notion that the political (or the poetical) is the personal. I'd say we felt our ideas, at that point, with a passion that could only lead to friendship.

[Gubar:] I know that people do speak to us after lectures or write to us about the collaboration because they view it as an ideological decision, a commitment that decenters authority, decentralizes the author, and represents a kind of communality or partnership which they see as feminist. But I have to say for us, as Sandra just did, that it was not embarked upon for any political or ideological reason, and I think it would be pretty dangerous for someone to collaborate with someone else for those purposes because I think collaboration involves a kind of interchange that has to be based upon personal affection and camaraderie. For me, it's different and luckier than writing alone, and it's a great pleasure.

The one way it does conform, for me, to those political ideas has to do with some of the critiques you've mentioned from Jacobus through Moi to Lentricchia. It's very daunting to get the kind of criticism that we get. All of those people you've mentioned feel that they are more radical than we are. But we get it from the other side, too. We just encountered an article written by Jeffrey Hart, who claims that the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women “enshrines works whose inclusion is not literary quality but resentment.” And who argues that Sandra and I are radical militants who are destroying the excellence of the humanistic inheritance that should be represented through, basically, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. To the extent that we are attacked by ultra-conservatives as well as radicals who don't think we're “feminist enough,” collaboration really is a solace because it's easier to laugh with someone else. And you can reassure each other that at least you think what you're doing is important and what you believe in.

[Gilbert:] True. Sometimes I feel that—given the Scylla and Charybdis out there, from a Lentricchia who feels that our feminist colleagues should “piss on their generals” to a Jeffrey Hart who sees us as destroying Western Civilization—collaboration is a very special solace. I mean, collaboration is an existential pleasure. It's like having someone else around to hold your hand while you leap into the abyss. How often does that happen, after all?