Literary Theory

Sandra Gilbert (1936-) and Susan Gubar (1944-): “second-wave feminism” (still “essentialist,” sometimes separatist and opposed to assimilation, universal view of patriarchy, influenced by Freud and Lacan, not postmodern, before interrogation of constructedness of gender identity, also with leaders who grew up before feminist movement). The dominant mode of feminism among the post-40 generation and institutional women’s studies, particularly outside of coastal cities and research universities. Strong lingering influence in historicist scholarship.

Madwoman in the Attic (1978): drawing on Harold Bloom (see “Orpheus Bruno” in Pooh) and his theory about the Anxiety of Influence (that authors struggle in an Oedipal conflict with their predecessors, whom they must overthrow), Gilbert and Gubar argue that women had an “anxiety of authorship” that alienated them from the literary marketplace, which denied women access to authorship (defining them as “monsters or angels” based on their complicity with patriarchy or the “cult of domesticity: purity, piety, submissiveness”). They had to steal the right the same way a slave had to steal his or her freedom. Women writers belong to a “secret sisterhood,” collaborating with each other against patriarchy. The struggle to speak (when men demand that you be silent) has physical consequences, driving women writers to illness and suicide (anorexia, agoraphobia). Consider Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Titus Andronicus, Jane Campion’s The Piano, or Thelma and Louise.

Q. What are some advantages and disadvantages of studying authors according to sex? How separate are the men’s and women’s traditions?

Q. Is literary history exclusively patriarchal? What other kinds of power are enmeshed with it?

Q. Do people only look to precursors who are the same sex (or other identity category)?

Q. Can/should men mentor women? Can/should women mentor men?