[In the following essay, Auerbach commends Guber and Gilbert's “liberated” readings of nineteenth-century women writers in The Madwoman in the Attic.]

Feminist criticism seemed to spring alive in the 1970s when Kate Millett's Sexual Politics smashed into patriarchal myths about womanhood; it is fitting that The Madwoman in the Attic should finish out the decade by recomposing this mythology in feminist terms. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's rich compendium of the images, fears, and dreams of power that haunted nineteenth-century woman writers is a definitive, if not totally consistent, study of the mythos of subversion out of which the woman's tradition arose.

The Madwoman in the Attic begins by indicting an overweening patriarchal culture that imposed Otherness on its women by forcing on them the twin myths of angel and monster. Though Gilbert and Gubar seem at first to share Virginia Woolf's gallant intention of killing both the angel in the house and the monster out of it, their book suggests that they are half in love with their antagonists’ projections; their composite paradigm, the madwoman in the attic, is a haunting figure who blends angel and monster in a new, unforgettable shape that is woman's own.

Just as Gilbert and Gubar find conventional male images behind the incendiary force of Jane Eyre, so they elaborate upon Harold Bloom's Oedipal paradigm of literary criticism to define a woman's art that rises in wounded resistance from the assault of the male pen/penis. The heart of their book is a feminization of William Blake's myth of Albion, whereby the giant form of a single woman artist, Gertrude Stein's “mother of us all,” writes first like Jane Austen in pseudoangelic code, then “falls” into the Gothic/Satanic mode with Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley, then dizzily withdraws from the searing patriarchal sun into the convoluted feints and personae of George Eliot and Emily Dickinson. Though this myth rests on assumptions that do not always make historical sense, it does reconstruct the traditional canon of woman writers in a resonant way.

Many individual readings, particularly the long central section on Charlotte Brontë, will be familiar to feminist critics already saturated in the nineteenth-century woman's tradition; in general, The Madwoman in the Attic is less a revolutionary manifesto than a bible of revolution, giving definitive form to the collective work of a decade. Gilbert/Gubar (who for the purpose of this review exist as one corporate giant form) admittedly build on the work of Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter; but whereas Moers and Showalter presented themselves as literary historians, restoring the “lost Atlantis” of the woman's tradition to the continent of English literature, Gilbert/Gubar is a sibylline persona, reweaving the threads of a timeless tapestry.

Moreover, while Moers and Showalter stressed the masked strength of their hidden continent, Gilbert/Gubar present us with a community of radical anxiety, blended by the dis/ease engendered by the male pen/penis. Their writing madwoman reverses Edmund Wilson's paradigm, for the bow of her ambition strikes open the wound oppression generates: “the pulse of ambition seems itself to be an impulse of disease, the harbinger of a wound, or at least a headache” (p. 330). Their free woman is one who can break out of male authorization to tell her own story, but the art discussed is radically maimed. The book's central aim is to translate the coded essence of an essentially duplicitous canon, and it yearns implicitly for a literary atmosphere which would allow a Jane Austen or an Emily Dickinson to speak out, free from wiles and disguises. But the critic in me doubts whether Austen or Dickinson should have put their cards on the table. A wound does regenerate into a perfectly apposite bow, and I wonder whether a less oppressed art would be a more memorable legacy.

Like the madwoman in the attic herself, then, this book has the flaws inherent in its strength. For one thing, though much literary criticism ignores history, Gilbert/Gubar defy it. Thus, they argue less by amassing evidence than by weaving a pastiche whereby one woman artist speaks for all in a timeless world. It is brilliantly suggestive to cite Emily Dickinson as a gloss on Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath as a spokeswoman for Emily Brontë's Catherine, May Sarton as an image of George Eliot's female Gothic, but it also disturbs me in its blurring of individual contours. For me, the choric method within which the argument takes shape works best when some documented kinship is available; for example, a brilliant discussion of “Milton's cook” places Emily Brontë's Nelly Dean by citing Charlotte's distilled portrait of Emily in Shirley, as the sister artists combine to slay Milton's bogey and restore the primacy of the first woman. The family bond here is literal and essential. Elsewhere in the book, I feared the reconstruction of a corporate womanhood as undifferentiated as the angels and monsters Gilbert/Gubar began by wanting to slay.

Similarly, the book posits a patriarchal oppressor who is more gargantuan than any I have met, in the nineteenth century or our own. It begins with a rhetorical question that does not stay for an answer: “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” (p. 3). “Well, no,” I mumbled, but the book galloped off without my qualifications, assuming a universal conspiracy between writing and patriarchy and ignoring an equally timeless and, for me, even more oppressive metaphorical equation between literary creativity and childbirth. Throughout the book, Gilbert/Gubar seem to me too quick to erect a giant straw penis to explain the shapes of woman's art, thereby reverting to Virginia Woolf's stinging definition of woman's primal role: “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

Thus, while I think it is a brilliant idea to discuss the impact of Milton's misogyny on woman's art, the book entangles Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights so deeply in Paradise Lost as almost to rob these great novels of autonomous life, ignoring Milton's similar impact on canonical works by men, such as Tom Jones and Great Expectations. While it is indisputable that repression and resistance are the germs of woman's art, too much deconstructive power may be conceded here to a spectral antagonist, too little to the restorative creations of the artist herself.

There is a more perplexing way in which giant hand of man rests on this book. Male myths about womanhood which many of us have found dubiously compelling buttress the authors’ own mythology with no analysis of their validity in a woman's pantheon. The first quotation in the book evokes George MacDonald's femme fatale, Lilith, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's outsize Astarte Syriaca illustrates the introductory quest for a feminist poetics. In fact, all six of the prefatory illustrations are paintings by men; in a book that strains toward isolating the undiluted female voice, we need a discussion of the status of these male images. At one point, the authors conclude a fervent discussion of woman's need to free herself from the prison of character in a male-conceived plot by citing Chaucer's wife of Bath as if she too were writing the book; a later discussion of the female hell of Wuthering Heights is supported by Robert Graves's The White Goddess. One recurrent motif rests upon a dashing feminist interpretation of Snow White, a tale which many feminist folklorists deplore. While I admire the authors’ boldness in appropriating traditional male stereotypes of womanhood, I miss an attempt to place them. Few feminist readers will grant Graves's white goddess the imaginative integrity of the madwoman in the attic without some impulse toward demystification. Here and elsewhere, patriarchal structures are granted a power they do not seem to have earned.

But one of the strengths of this strong and massive book is its intensification of the reader's urgency to break free and tell her own story. The impact and excitement of the demands it makes, the questions it asks, and the readings it establishes transcend its sometimes shaky methods and generalizations. Many readers will probably approach a book of this length and density by reading around in it piecemeal at need, and the individual readings are always compelling and definitive: never again can Mary Shelley be seen as the domestic angel to Percy's Prometheus, Jane Austen and George Eliot as the obedient dolls of patriarchy who inflict sense and renunciation on their rebellious readers, or Charlotte Brontë as patriarchy's flattering scapegoat, the frustrated spinster who longs only for a mate. Though like the authors they write about, in abstaining from attacking their male antagonists directly, not deigning even to cite traditional critics, Gilbert and Gubar have won the battle of the books: the madwoman has been unleashed from her hiding place, and the rage and power cloaked in the woman's tradition are out of the attic at last. Such a jubilant achievement assures us that woman writers of the nineteenth century can never again be adored and patronized in the old way.