The Madwoman in the Attic. My silencing and crazy-making protocol system so omitted from public consciousness but "crazy bitch" syndrome is instead constructed as the dominant narrative by crazy-making men and their crazy bitch women. It was a book, it is a book, will it be burned in the future? Will it be banned or just ignored? I submit my programming detail and analysis in this post which I am not at ease to write any commentary on due to silencing of technologies, keyboard hacking terrorist hacking redacting and blacking of my brain by implants and remote technologies and drugging. (torture/rape/mutilation/dream teleportation psycho-trauma on a nightly basis, etc etc etc)

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The Madwoman in the Attic

by Sandra Ellen Mortola, Susan Gubar

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• Study Guide

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar was first published in 1979. It is considered a landmark of feminist literary criticism. A second updated edition appeared in 2000.

The Madwoman in the Attic takes its title from the iconic early-Victorian novel Jane Eyre. In this novel, Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason, has gone mad and is kept locked in an attic. Because Bertha Mason Rochester was a wealthy Creole woman from Jamaica, she represents a sort of monstrous "other" in the nation: passionate, exotic, and mad, demonized by the novelist and the characters of the novel. In Gilbert and Gubar's survey of Victorian female novelists and the portrayal of women in Victorian literature, they consider Bertha to be a prototypical exemplar of the "woman as monster." Among the major authors considered in the book are Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.

Gilbert and Gubar argue that, within the patriarchal environment of Victorian England, women struggled to create an identity as authors. As part of this struggle, their portraits of women bifurcated female nature into two extremes: "the angel in the house" (who was traditionally "good," submissive, and virtuous) and the "madwoman in the attic" (the image of woman's suppressed anger, rage, and power). Neither of these two emblems of femininity, though, are whole or complete women, and many novels by women would have paired characters each representing half of the emotional range—with the monstrous woman often channeling the author's genuine anger at patriarchal oppression.

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50 YEARS OF THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE: SANDRA GILBERT & SUSAN GUBAR. WW Norton. January 23, 2013.

An interview of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic.