Susan Gubar

The madwoman in the attic : the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination

I am like the needy knife-grinder — I have no story to tell. — Maria Edgeworth I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors — Emily Dickinson ... the modes of fainting should be all as different as possible and may be made very diverting. — The Girls’ Book of Diversions (ca. (1840) From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! — Carolyn Kizer

The Blank Page and the Issues of Female Creativity

Consider for a moment Ovid’s story of Pygmalion: a king, shocked at the vices of the female disposition, creates a beautiful statue, significantly an ivory statue white as snow, with which he falls in love. Pygmalion brings his lovely statue presents, dresses it, bedecks it with jewels, fondles its curves, takes it to bed, and prays to Venus that his wife be (or be like) his “ivory girl.” When he feels the ivory under his fingers soften, “as wax grows soft in sunshine, made pliable by handling,” Pygmalion is astonished with joy: “It is a body!” Not only has he created life, he has created female life as he would like it to be—pliable, responsive, purely physical. Most important, he has evaded the humiliation, shared by many men, of acknowledging that it is he who is really created out of and from the female body. Our culture is steeped in such myths of male primacy in theological, artistic, and scientific creativity. Christianity, as feminist theologians have shown us, is based on the power of God the Father, who creates the natural world of generation out of nothing. Literary men like Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Ruskin describe the author as priest, prophet, warrior, legislator, or emperor,

The Norton anthology of literature by women : the tradition in English

This edition has been expanded to extend coverage of the Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries, and the 20th century. The text also contains 11 complete works such as Oroonoko, Jane Eyre, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Awakening and Caryl Churchills play, Top Girls.

Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality*

on the one hand, and from Woolf to Irigaray to Cixous on the other, masculinist and feminist theorists alike have toyed with the idea of a culturally determined body language which translates the articulations of the body into that body of articulated terminology we call language. Lately, in particular, linguistically-minded critics have increasingly called attention to the artificiality and indeterminacy of the terms through which we think we know the world, while psycho

Empathic Identification in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and Poetry after Auschwitz

F rom the 1980s on, numerous books and articles on the Shoah have examined the activities of women in the resistance, the roles of wives and mothers in the ghettos, the experiences of female prisoners in concentration camps, and the memoirs some managed to compose. The most trenchant feminist historians and literary critics have scrupulously avoided engaging in a banal competition of victimization between the sexes and deployed concepts of gender developed from analyses of specifically Jewish cultural contexts within an injury understood as a rupture of unprecedented proportions. Yet the concerted effort to bring gender into Holocaust studies has met with considerable opposition, even, “sometimes, outright hostility” (Weitzman and Ofer 1998, 12). This recalcitrance springs from many people’s wariness about deflecting attention away from the Nazis’ determination to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. With their commitment to recording the extent of the calamity so as to deny all those who would deny the Shoah and so as to check lethal racism of this scale from erupting again, scholars in Holocaust studies stress the vulnerability Jewish men and women shared. If the tendency of feminist scholarship to emphasize the ordeals of women fed a fear that the suffering of men would not receive the scrupulous inspection it still requires or fueled a suspicion that what might be needed is an understanding of the disaster’s impact on relationships

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

In this work of feminist literary criticism the authors explore the works of many major 19th-century women writers. They chart a tangible desire expressed for freedom from the restraints of a confining patriarchal society and trace a distinctive female literary tradition.

In the Chemo Colony

When I first agreed to undergo chemotherapy, I found myself haunted by Franz Kafka’s parable “In the Penal Colony.” The grisly short story was easy to translate into language pertinent to my ominous sense of the standard treatment of advanced (and thus probably incurable) ovarian cancer. About to be attached to a remarkable piece of apparatus, the condemned woman tastes fear rising off her tongue as she finds herself led forward into a maze of equipment, but is assured that the machinery should go on working continuously for six hours or six days. If anything were to go wrong, it would only be a small matter that could then be set right at once by the uniformed technician. So my variation began. Positioned on the bed, she gets attached to various IVs, ports, tubes, and monitoring devices. After each session the woman will learn on her body which sentence has been passed and has no chance of putting up a defense. In the perverse scenario replaying in my head, the torture has to be staged and restaged, for as long as it takes, since guilty cells cannot be tolerated. A needle penetrating the skin, an upside down plastic bag, the beep beep beep of a box on an adjacent pole, the drip drip drip of venomous solutions, and then the dreadful side effects—all would knock out the isolated victim until she no longer had the strength to protest or scream. When enlightenment comes at the end of treatment, she deciphers it with her suffering, for now she realizes that the fight against the disease has ended. What else is there for her to do but to give up on being damaged and get on with the practical and protracted business of dying? Allusions to Kafka’s fable flit through accounts of chemotherapy because it describes a brutal apparatus comprised of needles recurrently piercing the skin of a condemned prisoner. As decreed by long-standing

Minstrelsy's Racechanging Numbers: A Postscript to Racechange and the Fictions of Identity

The afterword begins with a discussion of the African-American Captain America character in the Marvel comic book series Truth, a series that points to the persistence in the present of the racial injustice of the past. The afterword then reflects on the ways that the various critics in this issue characterize the mediations on identity performed by twentieth-century narratives that darken or lighten their characters. Finally, the representation of racial transformation in works by Spike Lee, Robert Colescott, Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker is placed in dialogue with the contributors to this special issue.

American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (review)

ments about sentimentalism’s role in U.S. history and its relation to ‘‘masculine sensibility.’’ Here Burstein tackles the difficult question of sentiment’s relation to power. He argues that around 1814, nationalism’s manly temperament took a temporary parting from sensibility and sentiment, opting for a newer, ‘‘more active,’’ and individualist mentality (312). But by the 1840s, the Whigs had effected a new marriage between the ‘‘language of sentiment and power,’’ wedding ‘‘masculine sensibility’’ to ‘‘ ‘a patriot’s nerve’ ’’ (320–21). Here Whigs established their representative claim to, even as they refortified, ‘‘sentimental democracy,’’ which Burstein ultimately means to describe as ‘‘the conjunction of ‘natural’ (generous) feeling and steady, deserved material progress—an automatic expression of moral superiority’’ (323). Those who care about interdisciplinary dialogue will be fascinated and frustrated by turns. Burstein, for instance, only gestures in this chapter toward the puzzle that currently preoccupies literary critics: if sentiment is a national affect, why is its discourse and ideology so overwhelmingly located with women? What are the dynamics, the necessities that propel sentimentalism’s national cloaking and feminine display? Burstein is not especially interested in these questions. But his contribution is significant, providing a basic account of the early nation in terms of sentiment and, for advanced scholars, supporting emerging arguments for clearing the deck in a new consideration of the national dynamics of sentiment, its masculine performances, and its patriotic work.

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature

This treatise describes the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. It describes how modernists have rebelled against the standard image, reimagining themselves as racial aliens and mimicking the strategies of dialect speakers. At the same time, African-American writers have struggled to free themselves from dialect as it has been rendered by white dialect writers.