711bet Sandra M. Gilbert, Co-Author of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Dies at 87

Updated:2024-12-19 01:45    Views:113

Sandra M. Gilbert, a critic, scholar, poet and co-author of “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination,” a groundbreaking work of literary criticism that became a feminist classic, died on Nov. 10 in Berkeley, Calif. She was 87.

Her death, in a hospital, was caused by end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, her son, Roger Gilbert, said.

“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” Certainly male writers thought it was. And if so, wondered Ms. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, her co-author, in their introduction to “The Madwoman in the Attic,” first published in 1979, where did that leave women? “With what organ can females generate texts?”

With gusto, scholarly rigor and flashes of humor, the authors dug into the macho ethos that had long dominated literature, casting women as either sickly saints or unhinged shrews, and female writers as intellectual lightweights — the “lady authors” and “poetesses” that Nathaniel Hawthorne once decried as “a damned mob of scribbling women.”

Their breakthrough was to uncover the narrative strategies that Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson and others deployed to gain literary autonomy and to protest an oppressive literary patriarchy.

free slots with bonus

The madwomen and harridans of Brontë, Austen and others were proxies for the authors’ own rage and rebellion, Ms. Gilbert and Ms. Gubar declared. So, too, was Shelley’s “Frankenstein”: her monster, herself.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

The Quad alliance has existed for more than a decade, but Mr. Biden was the first president to convene a meeting among the leaders of the nations as a foursome. As the four posed for a photo on Saturday, Mr. Biden was asked whether the alliance would last beyond November. “Way beyond November,” he said.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.711bet

• of
• 711bet
• Sandra
• Gilbert
• Co-Author