Knowra The Madwoman in the Attic The Madwoman in the Attic A 1979 study by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar arguing that nineteenth-century women writers confronted male literary traditions that cast women as angels or monsters, often reclaiming the monstrous figure as a form of resistance.
Angel in the House : A Victorian ideal of womanhood defined by domesticity, selflessness, purity, and submission. Gilbert and Gubar set this feminine ideal against the rebellious woman represented by Bertha Mason.
Second-wave feminism : A feminist movement, especially prominent from the 1960s through the 1980s, focused on social, legal, and cultural inequality. Its political and intellectual concerns shaped the book’s recovery of women’s literary histories.
Gynocriticism : A feminist approach that studies women as writers and examines women’s literary traditions. Gilbert and Gubar’s recovery of women authors shares its focus on female literary production.
Wuthering Heights : Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel about the intertwined lives of the Earnshaw and Linton families. The study reads its Gothic imagery and Catherine Earnshaw through its account of female authorship.
Madwoman theory : A feminist literary critical approach that interprets women’s anger and transgression through figures of madness. The book’s central image became a lasting framework for analyzing women characters and writers.
Bertha Mason : The Creole first wife of Edward Rochester, confined in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Gilbert and Gubar read her as Jane’s suppressed anger and a figure of female resistance.
Feminist literary criticism : The study of literature through questions about gender, power, authorship, and representation. The book became a landmark example of this critical approach.
The literary canon : A body of works regarded as central or authoritative within a literary tradition. The study contests a canon that marginalized many nineteenth-century women writers.
The Professor's House : A 1925 novel by Willa Cather about a professor confronting change and loss. Its title inspired Gilbert and Gubar’s metaphor for women’s literary confinement.
Canon revision : The reassessment of which works and authors belong in a literary canon. The study helped motivate renewed attention to overlooked women writers.
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