Gilbert & Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years

Gilbert & Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, edited by Annette R. Federico; pp. xiii + 272. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2009, $42.50, $30.00 paper, £37.95, £26.50 paper.

The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) was one of the three most transformative works of American literary criticism of the late twentieth century. Along with Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Eve Sedgwick's Between Men (1985), Madwoman introduced a revolutionary way of reading and radically expanded the textual field of nineteenthand twentieth-century literature for students and scholars. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did for feminist literary criticism what Said did for postcolonial writing and Sedgwick did for gay studies-introduced a terminology, a methodology, and a theory. Of course, some reviewers sniped that the readings "seemed extravagant or too insistent" (3), some postfeminists loftily criticized Gilbert and Gubar's "naïve liberalism" or ponderously griped about "their unwillingness to interrogate assumptions about a grounded female subject" (9). Some postcolonialists complained about the absence of minority or third world women writers.

But any great work of criticism that introduces genuinely fresh ideas will attract critics. Madwoman was pathbreaking, especially so (as with Said and Sedgwick) for Victorian studies and the Victorian novel. Gilbert and Gubar, moreover, were entrepreneurial and productive scholars who went on to write two more hefty volumes of feminist criticism, later consolidating their discoveries by editing the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985). Like the great Hollywood studio owners who also established their own chains of movie theatres, Gilbert and Gubar became the moguls of feminist criticism.

This anthology celebrating their achievement includes thirteen essays: stimulating overviews by Susan Fraiman and Marlene Tromp and insightful chapters on Milton studies (Carol Blessing), Mary Shelley (Katey Castellano), the Brontës (Madeline Wood, Narin Hassan, Danielle Russell, and Hila Shachar), Louisa May Alcott (Karen Fite), sensationalism and Charlotte Yonge (Tamara Silvia Wagner), the female gothic (Carol Margaret Davison), Elizabeth Gaskell (Thomas P. Fair), and Emily Dickinson (Lucia Aiello), plus a useful...