Gilbert, Sandra M. & Gubar, Susan

Bio Sketch

Sandra M. Gilbert (1936–2024) and Susan D. Gubar (b. 1944) are the American literary critics whose collaboration founded — with a handful of peers — second-wave feminist literary criticism. Gilbert (B.A. Cornell; M.A. NYU; Ph.D. Columbia, 1968) was Professor of English at the University of California, Davis (1975–2005) and held the C. Barnwell Straut Chair at Princeton (1985–89); she was also a poet and served as president of the Modern Language Association. Gubar (B.A. City College of New York; M.A. Michigan; Ph.D. Iowa) joined Indiana University in 1973, where she became Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies. They met at Indiana in the early 1970s and co-taught a course on literature by women in 1974 whose lectures became The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale UP, 1979) — widely recognized as a central text of second-wave feminism. They co-authored the three-volume No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988–94) and co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), for which Ms. named them Women of the Year (1986); together they received the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), and Gubar the MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement (2020).

Key Works

• *The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination* (1979) — the landmark study of the woman writer's "anxiety of authorship" and the angel/monster doubles of nineteenth-century women's writing; ingested in this wiki as the excerpt "Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence" (excerpt pp. 87–92 of the 1984 Yale edition), via the Intimus anthology (2006).
• The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English (1985) — the co-edited recovery anthology of the women's literary tradition.
• No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (3 vols., 1988–94) — the sequel study of twentieth-century women's writing (The War of the Words; Sexchanges; Letters from the Front).
• Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (1979) — essays on the "double bind of the woman poet."
• Gilbert solo: Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1995); Death's Door (2006); The Culinary Imagination (2014). Gubar solo: Judas: A Biography (2009); Memoir of a Debulked Woman (2012).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with these authors that have pages in this wiki:

• The Madwoman — the woman writer's double and escape-figure; the type their book's title names.
• House-Body Equation — the trope of the woman imagined as house, and its threefold operation (owned object, denied transcendence, glass-coffin reversal).
• Felicitous Space — Bachelard's poetics as gendered blind spot; the "extraordinary discrepancy" between felicitous and negative space.
• Patriarchal Poetics — the system of texts and prohibitions women's writing escapes; "Infection in the sentence breeds."
• Mutedness — the forbidden pen: the woman writer structurally muted by prescription.
• Enclosure — the room, the garret, the paraphernalia of confinement.

Relevance to the Core Research

Gilbert and Gubar give the wiki's interior-design-theory cluster its first literary-feminist foundation: the argument that "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings" (editors' headnote) is precisely the bridge between inscription theory and the interior that the wiki's gender cluster (gender-and-the-interior, separate-spheres, domestic-interior) has been assembling from the design side. Their counter-reading of Bachelard disciplines the wiki's strongest phenomenological tradition (dwelling, inside-outside-dialectic): the "felicitous space" of the house is not a neutral poetics but one with "very different implications for male critics and for female authors" — the critique the felicitous-space and house-body-equation pages now carry. And their reading of The Yellow Wallpaper supplies the power-and-space debate's medical-confinement register: the rest-cure room as a spatial apparatus of gendered power, with the forbidden pen as its muting mechanism.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from these authors' work:

• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (1979/2006) — the Intimus selection from The Madwoman in the Attic (excerpt pp. 87–92; Intimus pp. 121–126), framed by the editors' headnote bringing "research on the interface of women and literature into the discourse on the interior."