Sandra M. Gilbert. In Memoriam

We read in the New York Times among other news sources about the death of the pioneering literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert (1934-2024)  who revolutionized how we read and understand women's literature. Her most celebrated work, "The Madwoman in the Attic," co-authored with Susan Gubar, stands as a transformative text that fundamentally reimagined the landscape of 19th-century literature, with a particular resonance for the works of the Brontë sisters.

Published in 1979, "The Madwoman in the Attic" was more than a scholarly text—it was a radical reinterpretation of female literary expression. Gilbert and Gubar introduced a revolutionary lens through which to view women writers, particularly those of the 19th century like Charlotte and Emily Brontë. They argued that the seemingly "mad" or rebellious female characters in these works were not mere plot devices, but powerful proxies for the authors' own suppressed rage and rebellion against patriarchal constraints.

In their landmark analysis, Gilbert and Gubar saw Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" as a quintessential example of this narrative strategy. Bertha Mason, the infamous "madwoman" locked in the attic, was not just a plot obstacle, but a complex symbolic representation of the protagonist's own thwarted desires and social frustrations. This character became a metaphorical embodiment of the creative and emotional restrictions imposed on women during the Victorian era.
Their breakthrough was to uncover the narrative strategies that Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson and others deployed to gain literary autonomy and to protest an oppressive literary patriarchy.

The madwomen and harridans of Brontë, Austen and others were proxies for the authors’ own rage and rebellion, Ms. Gilbert and Ms. Gubar declared. So, too, was Shelley’s “Frankenstein”: her monster, herself. (..)
The book became a feminist blockbuster, joining second-wave feminist classics like Kate Millet’s “Sexual Politics” (1970) and Elaine Showalter’s “A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing” (1977), which traced the legacy of gender discrimination in the arts. (...

They thought of calling their course Upstairs, Downstairs, but settled on The Madwoman in the Attic, in homage to the madwoman who haunts Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” otherwise known as the first Mrs. Rochester. The patterns that began to emerge as they taught those works — what they described as a distinct feminine imagination and literary tradition — were thrilling to them. (Penelope Green)