Crazy Lady With A Pen

Another query for Gilbert and Gubar's work, this one involving the connection of madness to female creativity.


The text mentions that known female author Anne Sexton suggests, "female art... has a 'hidden' but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness"(457).  What with the text's earlier account of the "monster-woman" in comparison with the Evil Queen from the Snow White fairy tale, I was very intrigued by how female madness and the portrayal of the over-thinking woman as mad were both connected by language relating to dance.  The women who write are "dancing the death dance"(457) and the Evil Queen's dance, or, "mad tarantella is plainly unhealthy and metaphorically the result of too much storytelling" (456).  As a patriarchal society has encouraged women to be sickly as a part of their femininity, does it contain a counterpart that encourages the portrayal of female artists as mad creatures caught up in their own dance? If the perfect woman is idealized as the sweet but suffering invalid, is the female writer, once she breaks through the discouragement of others, in fact encouraged to take on the role of madness in creativity?


One part of the text that made it clear to me that the role of female creative madness was meant to be darkly romanticized was the inclusion of the Magaret Atwood passage where the character (a female author herself) steps on glass and feels that she has discovered "the real red shoes, the feet punished for dancing.  You could dance, or have the love of a good man.  But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced they'd cut your feet off" (457).  Anne Sexton had also written a poem about wearing red shoes in connection to female creativity, and the poem was also cited in the text.  With the inclusion of the two inserts, I felt that the authors were pointing out that the mad and creative women had become just as much of an ingrained, romanticized product of patriarchal socialization about womanhood, and it's fascinating.


I think that Gubar and Gilbert were definitely trying to imply that the "angelic invalid", while the ideal good women, does have its ideal negative counterpart.  The mad female author would be a romanticized tragic figure unto herself.  So while a woman is discouraged from writing, especially in the 19th century, once she enters into that zone of creative madness she becomes the intriguing but forbidden tragic figure that people to some degree must have enjoyed.  Is it possible that these two authors are suggesting that the patriarchal society, in creating the positive "angel", created the "mad woman" simultaneously and purposefully?  Did it work?  If Anne Sexton is right, and female art encompasses a necessary madness, have women writers today become that negative icon?  Are they admired and romanticized?


Apparently these socialized female ideals and archetypes are still hanging around.