This groundbreaking book analyzes how women writers have navigated the patriarchal conventions that viewed female creativity as anomalous. It discusses how literature traditionally depicted women in narrow terms as either angels or monsters. The book traces how patriarchal notions of male authority and literary paternity made it difficult for women to establish themselves as authors. It examines how fairy tales like Snow White reinforced the idea that women use art to "kill themselves" by internalizing the male gaze. The book was revolutionary for showing that women have a distinct literary tradition, not defined by male standards, and for inspiring generations of female authors to transcend patriarchal constraints.

1. “The Madwoman in the Attic”
(1979)
Sandra M Gilbert
Susan Gubar
Presented by Fariha Asghar Rao
PhD 2021-25 BZU

2. What the book is about…
 This groundbreaking book on women’s literature is a work of
literary criticism. The major theme is feminism which discusses
patriarchy as the dominant social system and the extreme
difficulty and sometimes the impossibility for female authors to
overcome male dominance in their careers as writers.
 The book was revolutionary because Gilbert and Gubar showed
that literature written by women is not an anomaly, but that there
is, In fact,a distinct female literary tradition to be found.
2

3. Chapter 1
The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity,
Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of
Literary Paternity
3

4. “The artist most essential quality is masterly execution, which is a
kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women…..”
“The male quality is the creative gift”
G.M.Hopkins
Victorian culture with patriarchal notion that the
writer “ fathers” his text just as God fathered the
world.
4

5. AUTHOR/AUTHORITY
 The word author is driven from authority.
 AUTHORITY
 A power to enforce obedience
 A derived or delegated power
 A power to influence action
 A power to inspire belief
 AUTHOR
 A person whose opinion is accepted
 A begetter, father, ancestor
(EDWARD SAID) 5

6.  The very notion of paternity is itself a Legal Fiction.
(Stephen Dedalus: Ulysses)
 A man cannot verify his fatherhood by either sense or reason, after all; that his
child is his is in a sense a tale, he tells himself to explain the infants existence.
6

7. From the sons of Homer to the sons of Ben Johnson, poetic
influence has been described as a filial relationship’ a relationship of
sonship
The fierce struggle at the heart of literary history is a battle between
strong equals, father and sons as mighty opposites, Laius and
Oedipus at the crossroads.
7

8. Finally,
 If the author is owner/possessor of his text and of his
readers attention, he is also owner of the subjects of his
text, the figures, scenes and events.
8

9. Where does women writing finds its place in
patriarchal theory of literature
The fear of Attempting the pen (Anne Finch)
‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story. Education has been
theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands’
(Anne Elliot in Persuation) by Jane Austen
9

10. ANNE FINCHE (1903)
They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or to read, or think or to enquire
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
10

11. Southey to Charlotte Bronte
“Literature is not the business of woman’s life,
and it cannot be”
Male sexuality is associated with the
Assertive presence of literary power;
Female sexuality is associated with
The absence of such power.
11

12. Females are cyphers….
 Since Eve’s daughters have fallen so much lower than Adam's
sons, all females are cyphers__ nullities, vacancies___ existing
merely and cunningly to increase male “Numbers” (either poems
or persons) by pleasuring men’s bodies or their minds…
12

13.  Literary woman is doubly a “cypher” for she is really a “Eunuch”.
 Jane Austen's novels fail because her writings lacks a strong male
thrust..
( Anthony Burgess)
 Literary woman lacks that blood congested genital drive which
energizes every great style
( Willliam Gass)
13

14. Rufus Griswold “ Female Poets of America”
(1842)
 When creative energy appears in a woman, it may be
anomalous, freakish, because as a male characteristic it is
essentially unfeminine.
 ‘Those eggs which are good to eat but cant be hatched’
R.W.Dixson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mary Anne or George Eliot??
14

15. JANE AUSTEN “PERSUATION”
DIALOGUE BWTWEEN CAPTAIN HARVILLE AND ANNE ELLIOT
Captain Harville: all histories are against you-all stories,
prose and verse….I could bring you fifty quotations in a
minute on my side of the argument, and I don’t think I ever
opened a book in my life which had not something to say
upon woman’s inconstancy.
Anne Elliot replies Because the pen has been in male’s
hands.
The women have not only been excluded from authorship
but they have been the subject of male authority.
By God, if wommenn hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hir oratories,
They wolde han writen of men more wikednesse
Than all the mark of adam may redresse
Wife of Bath: Chaucer
15

16. SILENCING, STILLING AND KILLING….
 According to Literary Paternity, an author both generates and imprisons his
fictive creatures, he also silences them by depriving them of autonomy
(independent speech). He silences , stills and kills them.
 Pen and sword…
 Human male nature is symbolized by his ability to hunt or kill; whereas human
female identification is symbolized by her central involvement in giving birth.
 Superiority or authority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that
brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone De Beauvoir
16

17. WOMEN SILENCE
Authored by a male God, killed into a perfect image of herself, the woman
writer’s self contemplation may be said to have begun with a searching glance into
the mirror of the male inscribed literary text.
Her lips were open---not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red.
Whatever it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh, relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge “The Other Side of the Mirror”
17

18. ANGEL OR MONSTER…
 A Narrow representation of women as either angel or
monster in patriarchal text.
 A Woman writer must examine, assimilate, and
transcend the extreme images of “ angel” and “ monster”
which male authors have generated for her.
 Before we women can write, declared Virgina Woolf ,
we must “ kill” the “angel in the house”. In other words,
women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they
themselves have been “killed” into art. And similarly, all
women writers must kill the angels necessary opposite
and double, the “monster” in the house, whose Medusa-
face also kills female creativity.
18

19. IS FEMALE TO MALE AS NATURE TO CULTURE?
Sherry Ortner (Anthropologist)
Woman seems to stand at both the bottom and top of the scale of humanity.
19
CULTURE
FEMINNE SYMBOLS
OF
TRANSCENDENCE
SUBVERSIVE
FEMININE
SYMBOLS

20.  Both the subversive feminine symbols (witches, evil
eye, menstrual pollution, castrating mothers) and the
feminine symbols of transcendence ( mother goddesses,
merciful dispensers of salvation, female symbols of
justice) simply appear outside the sphere of culture’s
hegemony.
20

21. Women as Angel
If women owes her being to the comfort of man, its highly
reasonable that she should be careful and diligent to content and
please him.
Carlyle
The womans power is not for rule, not for battle and her intellect is
not for invention or creation but for sweet ordering of domesticity.
Ruskin
Plainly both writers meant that, enshrined within her home, a
Victorian angel-woman should become her husband’s holy refuge
from the blood and sweat that inevitably accompanies a life of
significant action as well as in her contemplative purity.
21

22. Ridicule of literary women
 Literary women were also ridiculed by the cartoon
figures like Sheridan’s mrs malaprop and fielding’s mrs
slipslop and Smollett’s Tabitha bramble.
 These characters implied that language itself was
literally alien to the female women. In the mouths of
women, vocabulary loses meaning, sentences dissolve,
literary messages are distorted and destroyed.
22

23. WOMEN AS MONSTERS
 Emblems of filthy materiality, committed only to their own
private ends, know dangerous arts. They are powerful but
freakish , deformities and accidents of nature.
 Errour, Monster in Spenser’s Faerie Queen is half woman and
half serpent.
 Sidney’s cecropia
 Shakespeare’s lady Macbeth and Goneril and Regan
 Milton’s sin and even his Eve
 Swift in Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's travels
23

24. Women as Monster
24

25.  The sexual nausea associated with all the monster
women helps explain why so many real women have for
so long expressed loathing or anxiety of their own
female bodies.
 All this testifies to the efforts women have expanded not
just trying to be angels but trying not to become female
monsters.
25

26. THE TITLE OF THE BOOK..
 The title of the book is derived from
Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason, who is
locked away by her husband Mr. Rochester
in the attic of Thornfield Hall.
She is an ominous character, full of
uncontrollable passion, violence,
sensuality, and madness, almost bestial
in her behavior.
 Bertha acts as a foil for Jane’s pure, calm, and controlled nature. However, one could
argue that the lines between angel and monster are blurred and that Bertha is not Jane’s
opposite, but her double. The two women are more similar than initially meets the eye:
Jane possesses some of Bertha’s passion and rebelliousness, acting out as a child and
refusing to submit to a position of inferiority to the men in her life
26

27. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
 Myths and fairy tales state culture discourse with greater accuracy than sophisticated
literary text
(Freud & Jung)
27

28. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
 Snow White and Seven Dwarves ----------------- Snow White and her Wicked Stepmother
 Patriarchy suggests that women use to kill themselves into art.
28
SNOW WHITE STEP MOTHER
FAIR, YOUNG, PALE FAIR, OLDER, FIERCER
A DAUGHTER A MOTHER
SWEET, IGNORANT, PASSIVE ARTFUL, ACTIVE
INNOCENT, SWEET NULLITY SCHEMER, WITTY
Contemplative purity With infinite creative energy
ANGEL WITCHMONSTER

29. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
 Both Snow White and Queen are locked in a magic looking glass,
an enchanted and enchanting glass coffin.
29

30. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
Beginning..
 Queen sitting and sewing framed by a window, pricks her finger, bleeds,
thereby assumed the cycle of sexuality and birth.
 All the motifs of
Sewing, snow, blood,
enclosure are related
to female lives.
30

31. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
First Queen and Second Q UEEN
31
Both are framed in
glass.
The first Queen
looked outward, still
had prospects.
The second Queen is
doomed to the
inward search.
(Narcissism)

32. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
 Absence of the King from the story.
 King is present in the voice of looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgement
that rules the Queen’s --- and every woman’s --- self evaluation.
 It is he who decides Who Is the ‘fairest of all’.
 The Queen becomes Maddened, rebellious,
witchlike and must be replaced by his angelically
Innocent and dutiful daughter.
 The king no longer appears in story but his voice resides now in Queen’s
mirror/in her mind. His rules are internalized by her.
32

33. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’
The First Death Plot..
 The huntsman as a patriarchal/father figure
who Dominates, controls and subdues wild
beasts.
 The queen has foolishly asked her
patriarchal master to act for her.
 Patriarchy’s angelic daughter cannot be
killed by him
33

34.  The seven Dwarves represents her own Dwarfed powers.
 They are her Stunted Selfhood, can do little to help save her from the
Queen.
 Her life with them is an important part of her education in Submissive
Femininity, for in serving them she learns essential lessons of service,
of selflessness, of domesticity.
Finally,
 Snow white is a housekeeping angel in a Tiny house conveys the
story’s attitude towards woman’s world and woman’s work.
 The realm of domesticity is a Miniaturized Kingdom in which the best
of women is not only like a dwarf but like a dwarf’s servant.
34

35. ‘THE JUNIPER TREE’
 A Version of snow white in which a boy’s mother tries to kill him.
 The dead boy is transformed not into a silent art object but into a
furious golden bird who sings a song of vengeance against his
murderess and finally crushes her to death with a millstone.
 The male child shows a development of the power of speech.
 The women have been told that their art is the art of silence.
 Story of procne and Philomel.
35

36. 36
 The Juniper Tree
 Philomel and Procne

37. CONCLUSION
 Women writers, longing to attempt the pen, have longed
to escape from the many faceted glass coffins of the
patriarchal texts whose properties male authors insisted
that they are.
 Despite the obstacles presented by those twin images of
angel and monster, generations of texts have been
possible for female writers. By the end of 18th century,
women were not only writing, they were conceiving
fictional worlds in which patriarchal images and
conventions were revised. They rose from the glass
coffin and exploded out of the Queen’s looking glass.
37

38. Suggested Reading
38

39. 39