Abstract
In writing about women’s anger in our last chapter, I am reminded of the passage from The Taming of the Shrew that I quoted in Chapter 3, Katherina’s last desperate outcry before she submits to Petruchio’s “taming”: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,/ Or else my heart concealing it will break. …” In that earlier chapter, as we saw, the sixteenth-century women who gathered in a walled garden in Moderata Fonte’s Venice were not silent, nor were their twenty-first century counterparts, the women in Marjane Satrapi’s Tehran, for whom talk functioned as “ventilation of the heart.” Like these fictional women, Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas were also determined to “tell the anger” of their hearts, and although their hearts still may, in the end, have broken, at least it wasn’t from keeping their mouths shut. In this chapter, by contrast, I’d like to focus on what happens to women when they remain silent—when their anguish and despair are concealed and when their anger is unspoken. These are not untamed shrews, radical reformers, disposable daughters, or writers who need a quiet place to create. These are women we encounter every day of our lives. They are wives and mothers living lives of quiet—and untold— desperation. Like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s first wife, they are madwomen hidden in plain sight. And most important, from our point of view here, in Reading Women’s Worlds they have rooms of their own.
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Chapter 7 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading
The title of this chapter, “Madwomen in the Attic,” pays tribute to the groundbreaking work of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(2nd ed., with a new introduction by Gilbert and Gubar, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Yale Nota Bene, 2000) changed forever the field of literary studies. In their reading of the great novels written by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot, to name only the most familiar examples, Gilbert and Gubar argued, “by projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them. … [T]he madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’sdouble, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (78). The most memorable of these madwomen is Jane Eyre’sBertha Mason Rochester—locked away in the attic in a room of her own. The women who are the principal characters in both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s and Doris Lessing’s short stories find themselves occupying solitary upstairs rooms—and they both are slowly going mad.
For an excellent survey of women’s complicated relationship to medicine and doctors, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s 1978 For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, revised and republished, with a new foreword and afterward, in 2005 (New York: Random House, Anchor Books). Particularly important is Chapter 4, “The Sexual Politics of Sickness,” which discusses the nineteenth-century view of women and illness and, specifically, the rest cure, as devised by Silas Weir Mitchell. Ehrenreich and English include references to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own diagnosis and to “The Yellow Wallpaper” in this chapter. Also extremely useful, particularly for its linking of hysteria not only to class but to race, see Laura Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” American Quarterly52, no. 2 (2000): 246–73.
Conventionally dated to 1852, Florence Nightingale’s “Cassandra” was privately published in 1860, in the second volume of her Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. It was not widely available until 1928, when it appeared as an appendix to Ray Strachey’s The Cause: The History of the British Women’s Movement. Nightingale’s essay is now available in Myra Stark’s Cassandra, an Essay by Florence Nightingale(New York: The Feminist Press, 1979). The text is also available in Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale, edited by Mary Poovey (New York: New York University Press, 1993). The 1936 film starring Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, is not currently available on video or DVD, but you can occasionally catch it on Turner Classic Movies.
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© 2011 Sharon L. Jansen
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Jansen, S.L. (2011). Madwomen in the Attic: Madness and Suicide in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”. In: Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118812_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118812_7
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