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

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Part I: Toward a Feminist Poetics

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

Part IV: The Spectral Selves of Charlotte Brontë

The Preface

Reading the writing of women from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, you can notice the difference of theme and imagery is often geographically, historically, and psychologically distant from each other. It seems to be a distinctively female literary tradition. Throughout this tradition, we find images of enclosure and escape, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors.

The literature produced by women in the 19th century seems to be the first era in which female authorship was no longer seen as anomalous. Two things matter: first, the social position in which 19th-century women writers found themselves, and second, the reading that they themselves did. Enclosed in a male-dominated society, these literary women produced patriarchal poetry. The title Madwoman in the Attic is an allusion to Jane Eyre because the authors see in Charlotte Brontë's readings a paradigm of many distinctively female anxieties and abilities.

The book tries to recover not only a major female literature that had been neglected by a whole neglected female history. Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter demonstrated that 19th-century literature women did have both a literature and a culture of their own. By the 19th century, there was a rich and clearly defined female literary subculture, a community in which women consciously read and related to each other's works.

Part I: Toward a Feminist Poetics

1. The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity; Male Images of Women and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity

Anne Finch (1661 to 1720) expressed her desire for respect as a female poet. She wrote about political ideology, religious orientation, and aesthetic sensibility. She alluded to other female authors: Aphra Behn, Catherine Phillips. She is a poet of the Restoration era.

Authors are men just as God fathered the Western literary civilization: the author, writer, deity, and pater familias are identified. The word authority comes from 'a power to enforce obedience', 'a power that influences action', a person whose opinion is accepted. There is a relationship between authority and author. The author is a person who originates, is the beginner, father, and ancestor, the founder and increaser.

• Taken together, these meanings indicate that a male individual has the power to begin.
• His products are an increase over what had been there previously.
• Authority maintains the continuity of its course.

We can conclude that paternity is a legal fiction, that the mimetic aesthetic that begins with Aristotle—who defines poetry as a mirror held up to nature—descends through Sydney, Shakespeare, and Johnson. The poet is seen like God. The poet makes a mirror universe and encloses the shadows of reality. Similarly, Coleridge's romantic concept of the human 'imagination' is a virile force which echoes 'the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.' The poet is like God the Father, a ruler of fictive worlds.

The literary paternity consists in Western culture of and always through those who generate and imprison characters. The author is a father and procreator. This prevented many women from ever attempting the pen and caused enormous anxiety in generations of those women who were presumptuous enough to dare such an attempt.

The pen had been seen as a tool for men and was alien to women, associated with male's sexuality where female's sexuality is without literary power. Women exist to be acted on by men. They are properties of men as all mythologies say that women are created by, from, and for men.

Robert Southey wrote to Charlotte Brontë that literature is not the business of women. Rufus Griswold defines women who write as anomalous and unfeminine. The speaker of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's 'The Other Side of the Mirror' wants to claim that no human creature can be silenced by a text or image.

In the poem, she describes a woman who is distressed, full of despair, and dreadful. The woman looks in the mirror and wants to set the image she sees free. She doesn't want to be the ghost, the shadow of former male poets who described women as angelic or monstrous. Women themselves shall have the power to create themselves as characters and that's why she wants to trap on the other side of the mirror. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1851 to 1907) was a British novelist and poet and wrote under a pseudonym Anodos, what's the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Virginia Woolf claims that women must kill the aesthetic ideal in art that patriarchal men had created. The creative 'I am' of women is a complex self-definition because what women see in the mirror is a construction of men.

Women are objects of art for men: on the one hand, they are described as angels (for Dante, Petrarca). On the other hand, they are described as monsters (witches, Medusa, Kali, Sphinx, Spenser: in Fairy-Queen: Errour, Duessa, Lucifera). In women writings, they try not to be angels nor monsters by killing oneself into an art object. Women aren't allowed to have autonomy, subjectivity that the pen represents. They are excluded from culture and embody the otherness and the worship of fear.

Kali—the Eternal feminine (das ewig Weibliche) used by Goethe in his Faust draws us to higher spheres. For Goethe, the ideal purity is feminine whereas the ideal action is masculine. In the book of courtesy of 1477, the Eternal feminine is purity, gratefulness, chastity, politeness. These attributes represent the proper acts of a Lady. Women's pleasure is to please man, to devote to others in silence, to be a refuge for men. The Eternal transcendental feminine becomes a mystical otherness of death.

Women are presented as an art object or as a saint. They are doomed to be dead through surrender or selflessness or sacrifice. In Grimm's Fairy Tale Snow White:

• Snow White is represented as an angel: she is fair, young, beautiful, ignorant, passive, the daughter.
• Whereas the stepmother is the monster: she is beautiful, older, active, the mother Queen.

The Looking Glass is the search of the Self, which alludes to narcissism and provokes envy. In fact, female bonding is difficult in patriarchal society because the voice of the Looking Glass sets them against each other. Again, we see that women's art lies in death and silence for Snow White. In order to escape the female pen, women define themselves as Angels or Monsters. By the end of the eighteenth century, women were not only writing but they revised themselves radically.

2. Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship

The polarities of angel and monster: how does such imagery influence the way in which women attempt the pen? Does the Queen try to sound like the king, imitating his point of view? Does she use her own vocabulary, insisting on her own viewpoint?

The psychology of literary history is the tradition of genre, style, and metaphor that males inherit from their forefathers. Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. (born March 5, 1928) is an American literary critic who has been heavily influenced by—and who has heavily influenced—deconstruction. He claims that a literary text is inhabited by a long chain of allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts. The first student of such literary psychohistory has been Harold Bloom.

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Bloom has postulated by applying Freudian structures that literary history arises from the Artist's anxiety of influence. This is the fear that he is not his own creator, that the works of his predecessors assume essential priority over his own writings.

Literary paternity is the relationship of Father and Son. Bloom's model of literary history has been seen as a patriarchal critic to some feminist critics. Bloom sees Milton's fiercely masculine falling Satan as the type of the poet in our culture. Where does the female poet fit in?

Bloom's historical construct is useful to distinguish the anxieties of female writers from those of male writers. Just as in Freud's theories of male and female psychosexual development there is no symmetry between a boy's growth and the girl's, with, say, the male Oedipus Complex balanced by a female Electra complex. Women writers do not fit in Bloom's male-oriented theory which cannot be simply reversed for the situation of the woman writer.

Thus the 'anxiety of influence' that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary 'anxiety of authorship.' Unlike her male counterpart, the female artist must first struggle against the effects of socialization. Her battle is not against the male precursor's reading of the world but against his reading of her. She can begin such a struggle only by actively seeking a female precursor who proves that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible. There is a need for a female model in order to legitimize her own endeavors. The phenomena of inferiority mark the women writer's struggle. Psychosocial and sociosexual differentiation means that there is a distinctive history. In recent years women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have not experienced since the Renaissance or the Romantic era. If contemporary women do attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their 18th and 19th-century foremothers struggled in isolation and alienation like madness.

Emily Dickinson's acute observations about 'infection in the sentence' means that every text in which women are imprisoned can be read as a sentence. Women writers are influenced by the despair from all those patriarchal texts which seek to deny female autonomy and authority. But female writers are even influenced by the despair from all foremothers. By seeking motherly precursors, the woman writer finds only infection or debilitation. Ansteckung oder Schwächung.

Patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally. Hysteria is by definition a female disease. Such diseases of maladjustment to the physical and social environment as anorexia and agoraphobia did and do strike a disproportionate number of women. Agoraphobia is the fear of open or public places. Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about her own flesh. Peering obsessively into the Looking Glass, she desires literally to reduce her own body, provoking anorexia. The female art has a hidden but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness. Surrounded as she is by images of disease, it is no wonder that 19th-century novelists from Austen to Shelley are often both literally and figuratively concerned with disease. There are starved or starving anorexic heroines and other diseases accompany the two classic symptoms of anorexia and agoraphobia: characters suffer from claustrophobia, eye troubles, or amnesia. The nineteenth-century writers have forgotten about their matrilineal heritage of literary strength, their female power although they overcame their anxiety of authorship and recovered their lost foremothers.

As Woolf's comments imply, women who did not apologize for their literary efforts were defined as mad and monstrous. Aphra Behn was the first real professional literary woman in England and considered a somewhat shady lady.

Disguised as a man, a woman writer could move vigorously, protesting not only that they were as good as men but, as writers, they were men. The three Brontë sisters concealed their troublesome femaleness behind the masks of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Women artists confront an identity crisis as well as an anxiety of authorship. Most Western literary genres are essentially male telling stories about men's worlds and using patterns as the rise of the middle-class hero. A female artist must inevitably project herself into male characters and male situations. The use of male models involves the female artist in a dangerous form of psychological self-denial, not wholesomely androgynous but unhealthily hermaphroditic (zwittrig). In addition, the female author finds herself creating works of fiction that subordinate other women into submission. Charlotte Brontë in her first novel, The Professor, analyses the failings of young women of her age by distancing herself as much as possible from the female sex. Mrs. Gaskell once remarked that this desire to appear male made the work of the Brontë sisters technically false.