Madwoman in the Attic

I thought I would write a bit about the concept of the "Madwoman in the Attic". I was so disappointed the first time I was introduced to Gilbert & Gubar because I thought I had come up with this idea myself. I was, however and as one might expect, enchanted with the idea.

Digressions aside: The Madwoman in the Attic is basically an archetypal situation involving two women, a heroine and her foil, on the necessary backdrop of a patriarchal society. Gilbert and Gubar write, "the vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster [and] sweet dumb Snow White and fierce mad Queen... are major images literary tradition offers women" (449). The heroine of the story takes the Snow White role. She is not always submissive (Jane Eyre, for instance), but she is always bound by the restraints of patriarchal society. Her foil is the mad Queen, the liberated, wild, often literally insane side of the polarity (Cathy Earnshaw, Bertha, the Queen of Hearts, the woman behind the yellow wallpaper). The Madwoman in her role of "monster" is a mirror image of the heroine in her role as "angel". These stories end sometimes simply with the destruction of the madwoman (as in Snow White), but in many of them the madwoman and the heroine are finally synchronized: the two sides of the polarity brought together in one balanced entity.

Take Jane Eyre, for instance, the source of the phrase "Madwoman in the Attic". As Jane deals with Mr. Rochester's general foulness and sense of entitlement, she is also plagued with apparitions of Bertha, Rochester's insane wife who is being kept in the attic. In a psychoanalytical interpretation, which is how the Madwoman in the Attic archetype is uncovered in a text, one might say that Bertha is part of Jane's psyche which has been locked away because is does not fit in with the her Victorian "training in femininity" (Gilbert & Gubar, 455). No, Jane is not stereotypically Victorian, but she is quiet, bookish, and well-behaved. Bertha is everything that is not well-behaved. Interestingly, she is also beautiful, while Jane is plain. When Jane comes in to her own power and leaves Rochester towards the end of the novel, Bertha symbolically enacts Jane's escape by burning down the walls which have imprisoned her. Jane's new-found power can be seen when she returns to Rochester and finds that he has been blinded (by Bertha during her escape, reversing the George Eliot's idea of patriarchy as "a disease of the retina" (Gilbert & Gubar,458)) and she is suddenly more powerful and capable than he.

In an idea not really touched on by Gilbert & Gubar, I believe the Madwoman in the Attic can also be found in literature by men. I mentioned already the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She exists in the text as a perfect polarity for the generally demure, obedient Alice. Consider Alice's constant changes in size as she attempts to fit in with the proportions expected of her in Wonderland, and compare with Gilbert and Gubar's notion that in "learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about-- perhaps even loathing of-- her own flesh. Peering obsessively into the real as well as metaphoric looking glasses that surround her, she desires literally to 'reduce' her own body" (455). I do not think it can be argued Alice is synchronized with the Queen of Hearts until Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in which Alice undertakes a journey to be crowned White Queen and reign alongside the Red Queen, an incarnation of the Queen of Hearts.

There is also the interesting case of the madwoman appearing in the form of vampirism in Dracula, in which Lucy becomes a vampire after a period of living as an invalid. Gilbert and Gubar write that "it is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters" (454). Lucy, an archetypal angel, experiences debilitation and proceeds to turn in to a monster. "Social scientists and historians... have begun to study the ways in which patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick" (Gilbert and Gubar, 454), and Lucy's response to her period of Victorian womanhood as an invalid on the brink of death (which has followed a period of typically Victorian courtships and girlishness) is to set loose the Madwoman in  the Attic, becoming the thing which the men around her dread. Through vampirism Lucy gains a power and agency she never had before, and is able to manipulate the men around her. Her hunting of children signifies womanhood turned on its head. However, in this novel by a man, the newly liberated Lucy is not allowed to live and is destroyed by the men she is threatening.

In summary, the Madwoman in the Attic archetype is a psychoanalytical and feminist lens that can be placed on literature, particularly that of the Victorian period. Gilbert and Gubar use it to identify the influence of patriarchy on the female author and her depictions of womanhood, as well as her own writing. The Amy Lowell poem "The Sisters" deals interestingly with the anxiety of authorship, literary foremothers, and in the Elizabeth Barrett Browning section, disease and dis-ease, but the ultimate example of everything Gilbert and Gubar write about is in Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". I leave you with the final illustration from the story, in which the narrator (an author herself) has liberated her Madwoman in the Attic from behind the yellow wallpaper and overcome the cause of her disease: patriarchy.