Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and Snow White with a gender-based perspective: ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ and the beginning of feminist literary criticism

When Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847, British women writers were not free to write. When Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote The Madwoman in the Attic, inspired by the character of Bertha Mason in Brontë’s novel, the world was going through feminism’s second wave. It was 1979. Today, almost 50 years later, the publishing house Espinas is releasing a new edition of La loca del desván, the Spanish-language translation of the book, which is considered the first instance of feminist literary criticism, a concatenation of women reclaiming the work of their predecessors.

Alicia de la Fuente, the philologist who helms the Spanish publisher, explains why she decided to take on the task: “It is a book that forms the backbone of feminist literary criticism. It is a text that remains entirely relevant today, and we wanted to make it accessible to everyone.” The essay, which started out as an academic paper, won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Its 750 pages cover the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot — Mary Ann Evans’s pseudonym — and Emily Dickinson, and analyzes them, reading between the lines to re-interpret their creations from a gender-based perspective. Its Spanish translation had been out of print, but Espinas has brought it back to life, and after being met with successful sales, now has a second edition at the printers.

Bertha Mason, the wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, lives her life trapped in the attic of her mansion by the decision of her husband, who believes that she has lost her mind. Mason represents the woman who is marginalized by the patriarchy, dubbed hysteric or crazy when she decides not to fulfill that which is expected of her: to be docile, servile, passive and self-sacrificing. Literary critics Gilbert and Gubar saw in this figure a constantly recurring archetype in the works of Victorian women writers, a way of expressing the malaise and frustration the authors themselves experienced. A way of liberating oneself, and saying that which was forbidden, of exhibiting their experiences in a literary space dominated by men and a patriarchal canon.

In the introduction to the Espinas edition, EL PAÍS journalist Isabel Valdés explains how, in the analysis carried out by the authors, issues appear that continue to concern women: “Beauty, appearance(s), hunger, love, ability and disability, destiny, freedom, desire, sexuality and sex, family, the romanticization of weakness and illness, its association, once again, with beauty.”

Re-reading the literature

For María Adelina Sánchez, University of Granada professor and coordinator of its Erasmus Mundas master’s program in women and gender studies, The Madwoman in the Attic was a major discovery. So much so, that she includes it in the syllabi for all the courses she teaches. “It has changed the way we approach literature,” she says.

The book, Sánchez says, allows one to study works like Frankenstein “not as the story of a creature and its creator, but as what it represented in an autobiographical way for Mary Shelley. How she represented herself through this creature, how she was seen in this world of men.” It also allowed for the inclusion of the work of women in literary studies, a representation that had been heretofore absent in traditional criticism, which dictated what should be studied and how.

In Sánchez’s classrooms, after reading the text her students provide “fantastic” feedback, “because they’re seeing the works with fresh eyes” — from a feminist perspective, she says, or “putting on purple glasses,” a metaphor for seeing the world through the lens of gender. With this metaphoric eyewear, students are able to approach the experiences of writers who were relegated to “the position of madwomen” when, instead of having children and fulfilling their wifely duties, preferred to write.

Something similar takes place in the classes of Francisco José Cortés, a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. The work, he says, impacts students in two ways. The first is how the character of madwoman Bertha Mason is an “ideological construction that plays the role of showing the feminine duality of the good woman and the bad woman”, ideological constructs that represent 19^th-century patriarchy.

Such a duality exists even in the children’s stories of the era. In the book, the authors analyze Snow White, the story that every little girl heard before bed, which speaks of a young woman who must escape her evil stepmother, who envies her for being the fairest in the land. After hiding in the forest, Snow White meets seven dwarves, for whom she cares until falling into disgrace — once again, due to another woman — and is only saved from eternal sleep by the kiss of her true love, the prince, only to end her days fulfilling the role of wife. In this story, the archetypes of angel and devil into which women of the era were cast — and which the scholars discuss in the work — are abundantly clear. There’s the stepmother, a childless, powerful woman who speaks her mind and loses her value when she is no longer the fairest in the land; and Snow White, submissive, beautiful, and devoted to her father, the seven dwarves and the prince who rescues her.

“We fail to see the extreme violence that lies in children’s fairytales against these demonized women who are victims, and we don’t question the male characters who are actually the ones perpetuating the evil,” laments Cortés.

On the other hand, says the professor, by reading The Madwoman in the Attic, his students become interested in the difference between male and female writers. While men have an “anxiety of authorship”, a concept coined by Gilbert and Guber that describes the desire for one’s work to be original, and not influenced by other writers, in order to assure one’s literary genius; women have an “anxiety of influence”, the need to know that they are not alone and that there are other women rebelling through writing, and challenging the literary canon. Cortés considers The Madwoman in the Attic to be “pioneering”, and that it honors the “literary grandmothers” thanks to whom the women of the 20^th and 21^st centuries can write openly.

Those who are missing

In Valdés’ introduction to the book, she questions the absence of writers who are “less English-speaking, less white, less within the canon” in the analysis of Gilbert and Gubar, and lists a few, such as the Peruvians Mercedes Cabello and Clorinda Matto de Turner, the Colombian Josefa Acevedo and the Brazilian Maria Firmina dos Reis. Valdés points out that “today’s filter only serves to make a critical examination of the past that reminds us of — and makes us aware of — its gaps, thereby giving rise to ever-broader geneaologies.”

In her classes, Sánchez teaches the book within the context in which it was written — an “essential” work that has its limitations, but “remains relevant, as long as it is read within its specific context.” When her students study it, she makes sure that they have the tools to understand what a work like this means today, and where further work is needed.

De la Fuente agrees on the extent to which other women writers have been overlooked, and proposes viewing the book as a bridge between different strains of feminism — between how it was understood in the 19^th century, in the 1970s, and today. “I think it’s a text that remains relevant because of the authors it focuses on, but I also believe it helps us to ask why other authors aren’t being discussed,” she notes. The editor would like to see other texts published that engage with this one, and fill in its gaps. Because even today, there are madwomen in the attic everywhere who rebel, and from their attics, write about the experience of being a woman.

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