My analysis concerns how feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Bordo, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, critique (or would critique) key female writers such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A commonality among the theorists maintains that we have lived and are still living, perhaps to a lesser degree, in a patriarchal western civilization where female writers over the last two hundred years have written under duress, as have females in general, to the point of getting sick mentally and physically with anorexia (starving oneself to be thin), hysteria (nervousness and depression), and agoraphobia (the fear of open and public places). They discourse on how female authors and their female characters confront this unenviable circumstance.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) wrote The Second Sex (1949) remarkably “in the absence of any organized feminist movement” (Leitch 1261). Indeed, the “Introduction” to her book articulates feminist tenets decades before they became popular with contemporary feminists. She [sardonically] quotes ‘ “The female is a female by virtue of lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness. And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man,’ an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolized in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam” (Beauvoir 3). This independent, rebellious, and articulate defiance continues and progresses with the contemporary discourse of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
The consequences of women’s second class status is articulated by Bardo, who “follows other contemporary feminists (such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar) in noting that women over the last two hundred years are more prone than men to suffer from a number of illnesses that occupy an ill-defined terrain between the physical and the psychological” (Leitch 2254). She relates that Victorian novels did not depict women eating because it was “taboo” which serves as a “suppression of female sexuality” (2254). Now in the twenty-first century “women, feminists included, are starving themselves to death in our culture” (2254). Gilbert and Gubar, (born 1936 and 1944 respectively) in their Madwoman in the Attic (1979) “famously make evident the high costs women writers pay for success. The madwoman in the attic (a reference to Bertha, Rochester’s hidden first wife, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) stands for everything the woman writer must try to repress—though never with complete success—in order to write books acceptable by male standards.
Actually, although I have not read the book recently, my recollection is that the character, Jane Eyre, is an admirable one, with independence, courage, modesty, and intelligence. Perhaps Gilbert and Gubar take issue with the character Bertha Mason Rochester—who is violently insane and kept on the third floor—as a gratuitous female author’s appeasement to the patriarchal order. Bronte’s Bertha recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860-1935) short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) whose main character is having treatment for postpartum depression, which “was not widely understood” at the time (Baym 1682). The female protagonist has been told to eat, rest, sleep, and do without any external stimulation, including company, her baby, reading, exercise, and especially writing. Her husband, who is a doctor, knows what is best for her. It is not surprising that his treatment for her induces his wife/patient into a psychosis manifested by her hallucinating over the women in the yellow wallpaper in her room.
Gilman’s had real life battles with depression and her treating doctor was “Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), a noted American physician, novelist, and specialist in nerve disorders, popularized the ‘rest cure’ in the management of hysteria, nervous breakdowns, disorders” (Baym 1688). Gilman’s short story, and in particular her female character’s husband John’s instructions—of course, a proxy for Dr. Mitchell—was assuredly a protest against medical treatment at the time for the “delicate and fragile female mind,” by the patriarchal society. Gilbert and Gubar note Emily Dickinsin’s observations of ‘ “ infection in the sentence’ which suggests Dickinson’s recognition that literary texts are coercive, imprisoning, fever-inducing; that, since all literature usurps a reader’s interiority, it is an invasion of privacy” (Leitch 1931). Undoubtedly, Dickinson incurred psychosomatic disorders and her artistry was not acknowledged in her lifetime. However, an English contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was, indeed, taken seriously across the Atlantic Ocean.
Her poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” (1852) is an indictment against slavery, miscegnational rape of female African American slaves, while “Aurora Leigh” (1857) underscores and advocates the cause of female artists’ intelligence, creativity, and independence. These messages were very bold for a female writer to make in this patriarchal world, and indeed she was a forerunner to the feminist movement; albeit, it certainly helped that her husband was Robert Browning, a major English poet during the Victorian Age, a favorable support that Emily Dickinson did not enjoy. Neither did the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) enjoy male support when she wrote the novel The Awakening (1899) and the short story “Desiree’s Baby” (1893), both speaking “radically to issues of gender, sexuality, and the American family” (Baym 1602). These extremely courageous, controversial pieces brought on much hostility and ostracizing towards Chopin, however, certainly, absolute high accolades by contemporary feminist/gender theorists. Gilbert and Gubor (as others) are most appreciate of the perseverance of “nineteenth-century women [who] overcame their ‘anxiety of authorship,’ repudiated debilitating patriarchal prescriptions” (Leitch 1938).
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2008. Print
Beauvoir, de Simone. The Second Sex. Marxist.org/…/Introduction.htm. Web 19 April
2011. Print
Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.
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