Riassunto esame letteratura inglese, Prof Riem, libro consigliato The Madwoman in The Attic, Gubar

Sensibility, for instance, suggest a revolt against the standards of female excellence.

Female creativity is associated with freedom from male domination. The woman's art at least hides the experience of the women's actual place in the world. The Bronte sisters hide behind their art their self-expression by dancing out of the Looking Glass of the male text into the health of female authority. Almost all women of the 19th century were imprisoned in their homes, their fathers' houses. So it is not surprising that spatial imaginary of enclosure and escape characterises much of their writing.

Ellen Moers has recently called 'female gothic' the heroines who inhabit mysteriously houses where they are captured. The imagery of enclosure reflects the woman writer's own discomfort, her sense of powerlessness, her fear that she inhabits alien and incomprehensible places. Imprisonment and escape are pervasive in 19th century literature representing the female tradition.

This period. Primary symbols are houses, ladylike veils and costumes, mirrors, paintings, statues, locked cabinets, drawers, trunks, strong boxes.- many plots return to the phenomenon of the mad double: through the violence of the double the female author enacts desire to escape male houses and male texts. women writers often envision an outbreak that transforms their characters into huge and powerful monsters. a striking story of female confinement and escape is the paradigmatic tale of Jane Eyre that seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak.3 The Parables of the Cave> as Freud pointed out a cave is a female place, womb, the wisdom of inwardness.- the cave shaped anatomy of woman is her destiny, this woman is a prisoner of her own nature.- the womb shaped cave is also a place of female power, but an individual woman is imprisoned, not empowered by such caves.- therefore how does any woman reconcile the cave's negative metaphoric potential

Potential with its positive mythic possibilities? 5/14 we have to understand the meaning not just of male but also female parables of the cave. Women maybe the cave but it is the man who knows the cave, who analyses its meaning. - Sibyls literally wrote upon the book of nature, a goddess's power of maternal creativity. The sibyls were women that the ancient Greeks believed were oracles. The earliest sibyls, according to legend, prophesied at holy sites. Their prophecies were influenced by divine inspiration from a deity; originally at Delphi and Pessinos, the deities were chthonic deities. In Late Antiquity, various writers attested to the existence of sibyls in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor. This last parable is the story of the woman artist who enters the cavern of her own mind and finds there the scattered leaves not only of her own power but of the tradition which might have generated that power. The female artist makes her journey to revitalize the darkness, to

regenerate and give birth. She gives birth to her own mother goddess and her own mother land, reconstructing the Sibyl's leaves.

woman artist tried in the beginning to write like an angel in the house of fiction with a Jane Austen who can concealed her own truth behind a decorous and ladylike facade. As the time passed with the Bronte's and Mary Shelley, the woman writer planned mad or monstrous escapes.

The fact that the cave is and was a place where visions were possible is itself a sign of the power of the cave and a crucial message of the parable of the cave, a message to remind us that the cave is not just a place from which the past is retrieved but the place where the future is conceived.

PART III How Are We Fallen?: Milton's Daughters

Milton's Bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers

Who is Milton's bogey? - It may refer to Milton himself, a patriarchal spectre, or it may refer to Adam who is

Milton's favourite creature, or it may refer to the inferior Eve who has intimidated women and blocked her possibilities of both real and literary. Literary women, readers, and writers have long been confused by the patriarchal definition given by father the God the only creator of all things. Milton's myth of origins summarises a long misogynistic tradition. The question of Milton's misogyny was not in any sense an academic one, since it was only through patriarchal poetry that women learnt their own origin and their history. Women are defined through a misogynistic theology.

Virginia Woolf writes in her diary in 1918 about Paradise Lost that she is puzzled about Milton's sublime 'aloofness and impersonality of the emotion' which leaves her feeling excluded and inferior. Aloofness-reserviertheit. The substance of Milton is made of wonderful, beautiful, and masterly descriptions of the Angel's bodies, battles, flight. Has any great poem ever let in

So little light upon one's own joys and sorrows? Milton's work seem to have little or nothing to do with her own perception of things. Milton's bogey is his cosmology, his vision of what 'men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.' Where 'our' refers to women. For the female imagination Milton is the patriarch of patriarchs.

Eve's temptation speech to Adam in Book 9 is a 'tissue of satanic echoes', with its central argument 'look on me, do not believe' is an anti-religious empiricism embedded in Satan's earlier temptation speech to her. Milton's Eve falls for exactly the same reason that Satan does: because she wants to be as God. Just as Milton's Satan, Eve is gradually reduced from an angelic being to a monstrous and serpentine creature. Just as Satan feeds Eve with the forbidden fruit, so Eve feeds the fruit to Adam.

Her bond with the fiend is strengthened not only by the

There are striking similarities that link her to Satan, but also by the way in which she resembles Sin: the only female figure in Paradise Lost besides Urania, a kind of Angel. Sin is female like Eve, she's serpentine as Satan, she is Satan's daughter. Eve is a secondary creation, made from Adam's rib. Eve's punishment is her condemnation to the anguish of maternity and she becomes a slave to the species. These connections, parallels, and doublings among Satan, Eve, and Sin are shadowy messages, embedded in the text of Paradise Lost. The unholy Trinity of Satan, Sin, and Eve is opposed to the Holy Trinity of God, Christ, and Adam. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragicomic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy.

Satan and Eve are in some sense alienated and rebellious and therefore Byronic figures, the same is true for women writers who are educated to submission. Milton associates Adam, God, Christ, and the angels with visionary prophetic powers.

Poetry and imagination. On the other hand, Milton associates in Paradise Lost the demonic world with Eve, Satan, Sin who are the real dreamers of Paradise Lost. It is not surprising that women identify themselves with the rebellious Satan and with rebellious Eve. Feminism and romantic radicalism are associated in the minds of many women writers to rebellious visionary politics disguised for sexual politics. The result is a formation of a female 'Society of outsiders'. Evils are deep-rooted in the foundation of the social system and women can find no friend in God. Milton's Satan in a certain crucial ways is very much like women and therefore he is enormously attractive to women. If Eve is Sin's as well as Satan's double, then Satan is to Eve what he is to Sin, both a lover and a daddy.

The last bogey of Milton is that he continually calls attention to his own art, defining himself as a type of true artist, the virtues poet who, rather than merely delighting.

Delights while instructing. Heresults as a prophet, a guardian of the secret mysteries of patriarchy justifying the ways of God to man. Milton himself appears to female readers to be God as they themselves were Satan, Eve or Sin. Like a God, for instance, Milton as an epic speaker creates Heaven and Earth, he has mental powers, he knows the consequences of action and event, past, present, and future. He punishes Satan, he is male.

The Romantics admired Milton's bardlike godliness. Wordsworth and Shelley where after all fundamentally masculinist with Milton. Both conceive the poet as a divine ruler.

7. Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve

What was the effect of Milton's bogey upon women writers? What strategies for artistic survival did they develop?

- Under the name Milton women understood Milton as father, politician, bard, assuming the patriarchal vision.

- Since the appearance of Paradise Lost all women writers have been to some extent Milton's daughters.

they are enclosed in a docile submission to male myths and further they aim to achieve equality. these two alternative patterns are the main critical responses in the 19th and 20th century women writer have made specifically to their readings of Paradise Lost. The first alternative is given by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein which represents a monstrous image of rage. The second alternative of Milton's daughters gives Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights through the way she describes an imaginary daughter who studies Greek and Latin in secret, she teaches herself the language of myth, the tongue of power. These two novels express the anxieties about paradise lost best.

Frankenstein (1818) is one of the key romantic readings of Paradise Lost. By parodying Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley narrates the tale of what misery the inabstinence of Eve shall bring on men. The weakness of those traditional readings of Frankenstein overlook its intensely sexual materials.

Mary WollstonecraftGodwin leggeva ripetutamente gli scritti di sua madre mentre cresceva. Sua madre era morta. Studiava incessantemente le opere di sua madre e di suo padre, Mary Shelley potrebbe essere considerata come legata alla sua lettura, poiché i libri sembrano essere genitori surrogati. Mary Shelley era molto interessata alla letteratura romantica e al matrimonio. Studiava le opere dei suoi genitori da sola o insieme a Shelley, cercando indizi sul significato di alcuni testi criptici. Mary Shelley leggeva Paradise Lost, Paradise regained, Comus, Areopagitica, Lycidas dal suo diciassettesimo al suo ventunesimo compleanno, quando era quasi continuamente incinta o impegnata con i bambini. Frankenstein è una storia dell'orrore sulla maternità, è un romanzo romantico sulla storia di un mostro e del suo creatore. È composto da tre cerchi concentrici di narrazione: le lettere di Walton, il racconto di Victor Frankenstein a Walton e il discorso del mostro a Frankenstein. Era un modo per fare ricerca e analizzare un tema emotivamente.unintelligible text, like Paradise Lost. allcharacters, like Shelly herself, appear to be trying to understand their presence in a fallen world, todefine the