English Literature,Topic :- 'Madwoman in the Attic', with the reference of Annette and Antoinette from Wide Sargasso sea.

1. THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC
: ANNETTE - ANTOINETTE
HIMANSHI PARMAR

2. DATE - 5/10/2022
DAY -WEDNESDAY
TIME - 02:00 - 04:30
Name - Himanshi Parmar
Semester - 3 (Three)
Roll Number - 8
Email. Id. - himanshiparmar3004@gmail.com
Enrollment number - 4069206420210025
Paper number - 203
Paper name - Postcolonial Studies
Subject Code - 22408

3. WHAT IS ‘THE MADWOMEN IN THE ATTIC’?
~ Attic means Cage.
~ The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination is a well known book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar written in 1979.
~ Book examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective.
~ Title of this book taken from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife
(née Bertha Mason) is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
~ The book also examines female writers like Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte
Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and
Emily Dickinson etc.
~ According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,Women writers of the 19th century
were forced to portray female characters as either embodying the "angel" or the
"monster”.

4. Against this mentality , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point to Virginia Woolf , who
says that ,
“Women writers must "kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been
‘killed' into art ".
Susan and Sandra also wrote about ,”anxiety of authorship”, that nineteenth century
women writers faced .
A life of feminine submission , ‘Contemplative purity,' is a life of silence , a life that has no
pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must
be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story.
Sandra M. Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The woman writer and The Nineteenth-
Century literary imagination.

5. ABOUT WIDE SARGASSO SEA
~ Wide Sargasso sea is prequel of Charlotte Brontë's novel ‘Jane Eyre’.
~ Wide Sargasso Sea is a well known novel by Dominican-British author Jean
Rhys written in 1966.
~ The novel was first published in October 1966.
~ Major Characters:
Edward Rochester Antoinette Cosway,
Christophine Annette Cosway
Daniel Cosway

6. ANNETTE COSWAY
~ Mother of Antoinette (female
protagonist )
~ Death of husband and son Pierre.
~ Poor financial condition..
~ Remarriage with Mr.Mason and
unhappy relationship.
~ Abused by servants .

7. ANTOINETTE
~ Happy, Jolly but Lonely girl in the beginning of the novel.
There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I
remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked
back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago
when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass
was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now
they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and
who am I?
~ She witnessed abusement of her mother.
~ Marriage with Mr. Rochester for the sake of security of her fortune
and her.
~ Implied Identity as a Bertha.
“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone
else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.”

8. ~ Implied Madness by Rochester.
~ Abuse and ignorance by husband.
~ Betrayal by Rochester
~ Loneliness leads her towards Hallucination and Madness.
~Rochester brings her to England and locks her in his attic, assigning a
servant woman to watch over her.
~ Set fire in the house. Death.
“I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount
Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839.”

9. Present Relevance

10. Literary Relevance
1] Ophelia
~ Female protagonist of Hamlet written by William Shakespeare.
~ Lack of clear vision.Ophelia says to her father, Polonius,
“I do not know, my lord, what I should think”
(Hamlet,Shakespeare).
~ Father's death.
~ Abandoned by Lover.
~ Ophelia’s madness is driven by the loss of the male influences in her life.
~ Heather Brown says that,
Ophelia “is Polonius' pawn, Laertes' chaste sister, and Hamlet's lover. Once these male influences are
removed and these descriptions no longer define Ophelia, she loses her identity and becomes mad.”
~ Death of Ophelia.

11. Pecola
~ Female Protagonist of the bluest Eye novel by Toni
Morrison.
~ Pecola is eleven-year-old.
~ she is black girl who believes that she is ugly and that
having blue eyes would make her beautiful.
~ Abused by her own Father.
~ Distrust by Mother.
~ Called “nasty little black bitch” by his mother.
~ disturbed family environment.
~ Harassed by friends.
~ Gets pregnant by her own father.
~ death of her child.
~ Madness, started believing that she has Blue eyes now.
~ Here Attic is patriarchal society, White mentality.

12. Citation
American Medical Association Diagnostic and Treatment Guideline on Domestic Violence. 1 Sept. 1992.
Brown , Heather. “Gender and Identity in Hamlet.” Share and Discover
Knowledge on SlideShare, Palindromo, 16 May 2014,
https://www.slideshare.net/kimberlyprzybysz/gender-and-identity-in-hamlet.
Chapman, James, editor. Now Domestic Violence Will Include Metal Torment Too.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic : Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar : Free
Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, Rehab Shaban, 20 May 2013,
https://archive.org/details/TheMadwomanInTheAttic.
Lopes, Sofia. “‘A Document in Madness’: A Study on the Insanity of Shakespeare's Ophelia.” ResearchGate,
May 2020,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341200461_A_Document_in_Madness_A_study_on_the_insanity_of_
Shakespeare's_Ophelia.
Rhys, Jean, and Brontë Charlotte. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton, 2007.
Xiao-yan, WANG, and LIU Xi. “Causes of Pecola’s Tragedy in the Bluest Eye.” Journal of Literature and Art
Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 85–89., https://doi.org/10.17265/2159-5836/2014.02.002.

13. Thank you