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768 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
Bertha is Jane's truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress... 'The novelist who exploits psychological Doubles juxtaposes two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalising the free, uninhibited, often criminal self'Apart from a parenthetical remark about Betha's origin/colour, discussion of the issue of race does not enter this section at all. The very title of the book thus finally serves to erase race as a feminist concern, since the figure of the madwoman in the attic, a direct reference to the character (in Jane Eyre) of Bertha Mason, who is black, is made to stand for a group of white British and USian writers, who in turn represent women in general as maddened by the circumstances of the period.
Every negative stereotype protested by Charlotte Bronte is transformed into a virtue by George Eliot. While Bronte curses the fact than women are denied intellectual development, Eliot admits the terrible effects of this malnourishment but also implies that emotional life is thereby enriched for women. While Bronte shows how difficult it is for women to be assertive, Eliot dramatises the virtues of a uniquely female culture based on supportive camaraderie instead of masculine competition. While Bronte dramatises the suffocating sense of imprisonment born of female confinement, Eliot celebrates the ingenuity of women whose love can make "one little room, an everywhere." And while Bronte envies men the freedom of their authority, Eliot argues that such authority actually keeps men from experiencing their own physical and psychic authenticity.I also enjoyed the highly imaginative and poetic discussion of weaving, sewing and embroidery, presented in the concluding chapters on Emily Dickinson, but relevant to other authors too. I came back to this exploration when reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers describes men knitting and sewing in different contexts, and I saw this as part of her disruptive re/unwriting of gender. The men in question have characteristics that might be seen as wifely or feminine (cooking daily for another man, design skill, attention to detail, pleasure in homemaking and beauty, desire to care for children) and their weaving-work draws attention to these attributes.
As most readers know, the cornerstone of Whitman's epic meditation is a powerful assertion of identity now entitled 'Song of Myself' and in that first edition [of Leaves of Grass, published 1855] called 'Walt Whitman'. Because the 1st edition appeared without its author's name on the title page, some critics have spoken of the work's near 'anonymity', and perhaps, by comparison with those later editions... which were decorated not only with the poet's name and photograph but with facsimilies of his signature, this early version was unusually reticent. But of course what was modesty for Whitman would have been mad self-assertion for Dickinson [...] He didn't need to put his name on the title page because he and his poem were coextensive...Next time I find myself folded up on the tube between men seated legs so far akimbo they block my path I shall remember Emily and Walt, and push back.
Whitman's expansive lines, moreover, continually and swaggeringly declared the enormity of his cosmic/prophetic powers. 'I celebrate myself and sing myself' his poem begins magisterially, 'and what I assume, you shall assume' promising in bardic self-confidence that if you 'stop this day and night with me... you shall possess the origin of all poems.' While Dickinson, the 'slightest in the House,' reconciles herself to being Nobody, Whitman genially enquires 'Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes).' While Dickinson trembles in her room, with the door just ajar, Whitman cries 'Unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!'
...repeatedly, throughout most male literature, a sweet heroine inside the house (...) is opposed to a vicious bitch outside.
Catherine's fall is both fated and unconventional, a fall "upward" from hell to heaven.
Dorothea and Rosamund can only express their dissatisfaction with provincial life by choosing suitors who seem to be possible means of escaping confinement and ennui.
Neither fainting into silence nor self-destructing into verbosity, Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse and Ann Elliot echo their creator in their duplicitous ability to speak with the tact that saves them from suicidal somnambulism on the one hand and contaminating vulgarity on the other, as they exploit the evasions and reservations of feminine gentility.