Women in Art and Literature

“Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy…she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her “inconstancy” and by identifying her with “eternal types” they have themselves invented to possess her more thoroughly” (812). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in “The Madwoman in the Attic” discuss the liberation of the woman from art and literature by “killing” the “monster” that women have become (aesthetically) through male perspectives and lenses. Both feminist critics describe female writers as having been the “mysterious creature who resides behind the angel or monster image” (812). The article continues stating that women struggle to break away from “male designs” in order to become the ‘I’ in which a female is her own female and not that of a male’s construction. The woman writer, however, knows that she feels pain, confusion and that her image is a male construct that feeds the continued confines of society.
“The Madwoman in the Attic” describes that the woman who inhabits male dominance is altering her vision and self-development as an artist, or simply a woman, in order to maintain the “copy” of herself as opposed to creating her “individuality” (814). Sherry Ortner argues that women psychologically “ [seem] to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating” which, in turn, maintains “symbolic ambiguity” because the woman is denied autonomy and put into a “pen” where she is excluded from culture creating fear, love or loathing.

So, in order for women to stop being this:



The woman must first stop doing this to break away from the patriarchal normative, artistic, hegemonic and societal dominance. It is breaking away from the belief that woman is of gentle mood and spirit always and that she must be a sexualized goddess (men's construction of women) :







































Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. "The Madwoman in the Attic." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 812-24.