I am a Madwoman

I first met Gilbert and Gubar in our First Year Intro to English Studies class, and I remember thinking how ridiculous their ideas seemed. Weren't they exaggerating just a bit? After all, I had never experienced oppression because of my sex. Not to my knowledge.

Now that I have read excerpts of their seminal work, "The Madwoman in the Attic," I find myself more hesitant to dismiss their ideas. Their concept of "anxiety of authorship" especially fascinates me.

As I read the first several sentences of their explanation of this phrase, I thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Biographia Literaria. Coleridge distinguishes between the primary and the secondary imagination, stating that the primary imagination belongs to all who take hold of creative ideas generated by experiences of the sublime. The secondary imagination concerns the ability to bring this vision into fruition by actually creating a work based on those ideas. Coleridge's secondary imagination eventually fails him, and he is reduced to plagiarism. I can commiserate with him, not because I plagiarize, but because I often feel the frustration of "writer's block."

However, Gilbert and Gubar go beyond the idea of literary constipation by developing the concept that women writers hesitate because of they fear creating a work inferior to the masterpieces of their male predecessors. They fear not being good enough for posterity, and they believe they can't write as well as Shakespeare or Keats.

I ask myself if this fear has kept me from writing, and I have to admit that it has prevented me from valuing my work. I consider myself just another unremarkable college poet, lacking in ability. Milton had a gift for lyricism. I do not. Therefore, I have not ventured into the realm of poetry for a long time.

Gilbert and Gubar state that the female poet is either isolated or destroyed, and they cite the words of Margaret Atwood: "You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man . . . Finally you overcame your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too, because you wanted to dance." Since I haven't actually worked up the nerve to dance, I can't say that I have metaphorically had my feet chopped off. However, I can identify with the anxiety associated with having to choose between love and literary endeavors. While my current genre of writing is not labeled "creative writing," I consider my undergraduate work as a student critic and researcher just as rewarding and creative. I could see myself as a professor someday, writing books and submitting papers to conferences, but I fear that if I choose this career path, I will never find a husband. It is my opinion that many otherwise "good" men do not want their marriage to be labeled as "Mister and Dr. So-and-So." A well-educated woman can be intimidating, but I suppose the men who are intimidated are not worth marrying anyway. Nevertheless, I fear that I will end up marrying academia and feeling frustrated and lonely. Or becoming disgustingly self-centered. Moreover, I could find myself judged or excluded from certain intellectual and social circles because I am a woman.

I found that Gilbert and Gubar's observations were especially relevant to me as an upperclassman-- or upperclasswoman, if you will. While they aggravated some of my deep-seated fears, at the close of the essay I had been enlightened concerning my circumstances, and I felt as though my emotions had been validated.