The Madwoman in the Attic

Asia-Pacific Science and Culture Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3, 23-41
OPEN ACCESS

ISSN 2220-4504 www.ieit-web.org/apscj

Women’s Secret Language: the Madwoman in the Attic in a Cultural and Psychological Context
JIA Shi 1
1

The University of Iowa

E-Mails: [e-mail] Received: Apr. 2011 / Accepted: May 2011 / In Press: May 2011 / Published: Jun. 2011

Abstract: As an outstanding representative of the second-wave feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic is still useful in handling the relationship between women and language, especially when it is in comparison with other strands of theory. Culturally, women writers’ revision of the existing male discourse that the book suggests bears remarkable resemblance with de Certeau’s tactic against strategy. Psychoanalytically, women writers’ pursuit of successful foremothers corresponds well with Chodorow’s “Pre-Oedipal Gender Configurations”. Hence, the book’s way of secretly gendering the language is firmly grounded. Keywords: Women; Language; Tactic; Pre-Oedipal stage; Criticism

One of the most interesting topics in feminist criticism is the complicated relationship between women and language. Entailed with the social contract, the symbolic system of language resumes and reveals the uneven distribution of power caused by gender difference. To obtain a language of their own, women are in their way to empower themselves and define themselves as women. To further explore the relationship between women and language, this paper is going to center on Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s prominent work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Coming out in 1979 as an outstanding representative theory of the second-wave feminism, the book might seem fraught with deficiencies and blind spots nowadays, especially taking the third-wave feminism into consideration. Nonetheless, I still find it useful in handling the relationship between women and language. In

References: 1. GILBERT, Sandra; Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed.; Yale University Press: New Haven and London, USA and U.K., 2000. 2. DE CERTEAU, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed.; Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, Eds.; Blackwell Publishing: Malden, U.K., 2004. 3. CHODOROW, Nancy. Pre-Oedipal Gender Configurations. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed.; Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, Eds.; Blackwell Publishing: Malden, U.K., 2004. 4. GATES, Henry Louis. Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed.; Vincent Leitch, Eds.; W.W. Norton & Company: New York and London, USA and U.K., 2010. © 2010 by the authors; licensee IEIT, US. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).