The Feminist Within

I've never thought of myself as a feminist, but reading Gilbert and Gubar made me feel moments of "girl power!" and "solidarity sister".  These moments in the the text where I felt my feminist outrage surfacing made me wonder: 1.  How are Gilbert and Gubar able to use their words to evoke this emotion from me?  And 2.  If I were a male, would I feel such disgust at their claims?

I responded heavily to the section of their chapter where they focus on "the ways in which patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally" (454).  They use hysteria as their first example.  I've always thought of hysteria as being a gender netural word that can affect men and women alike.  Today hysteria doesn't necessarily have a negative connotation, however that depends upon the context.  Gilbert and Gubar claim that at the time hysteria was thought of to be a mental illness "caused by the female reporductive system" (455).  Excuse my frankness, but what do men know about a woman's cycle?  Perhaps there is an inbalance of hormones during a certain time of the month for most women, but that doesn't mean all women are this way.  And, even if they do have a slight temporary imbalance, this does not mean their mental capacity should be disregarded or discounted.

Essentially this illness (among other "illnesses" that Gilber and Gubar use as examples) is constructed by a patriarchal way of labeling and understanding the world.  "The complex of social prescriptions these diseases parody did not merely urge women to act in ways which would cause them to become ill; nineteenth century cultrue seesm to actually admonished women to be ill" (455).  Men created roles for women that encouraged "illness" in them .  Then, the male figures would belttle women for being ill.  It's a vicious cycle of abuse! 

To make matters worse, on the other hand "a thinking woman was considered such a breach of nature that a Harvard docter reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe graudate he discovered that her uterus had shriveled to the size of a pea" (456).  So, if a woman was smart then men didn't understand that either and diminished those women for not fitting into a patriarchal construct of feminity.  However, if they were to fit into the patriarchal construct, then men would still diminish them for being "ill".  There is no winning!

I think Gilbert and Gubar relied heavily on facts to evoke such emotion from me.  You can't argue with facts.  Gilbert and Gubar showed their research where men actually made hypocritical, contradictory claims regarding how they wanted women to fit into literature.  Reading evidence of people thinking such thoughts that I know from personal experience to be false makes me feel frustrated for those women in the 19th century.

Now I wonder if any current male readers feel as strongly about these issues as I do.  Is it just my individual reading of this text?  Is it because I'm a female, and I have the female experience?  Is it fair to group male readers as one type of audience, or is it just based on each individual and their experience with the topic? 

-Alessandra