Volume 26, Number 20 · December 20, 1979
Re-creating Eve
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
by Sandra M. Gilbert, by Susan Gubar
Yale University Press, 719 pp., $25.00
Women's situation, Charlotte Brontë wrote, involves 'evils—deep-rooted in the foundation of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch: of which we cannot complain; of which it is advisable not too often to think.' Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's closely argued interpretation of nineteenth-century women's writing is concerned to show that, even in writers such as Brontë who were openly concerned with the 'woman question,' pent-up frustration over the evils of which it was best not to think produced images of rage and violence: vicious doubles of submissive heroines, saboteurs of conventional stereotypes, coded messages between innocuous lines. Mad Mrs. Rochester, creeping from the attic to tear and burn, stands for them all.
Review, 2581 words
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