Patriarchal Poetics

Definition

Patriarchal poetics names the system of texts, metaphors and interpretive authorities that defines literary production in male terms — the "texts defined by patriarchal poetics" out of which, in Gilbert and Gubar's closing figure, nineteenth-century literary women move "into the open spaces of their own authority" (p. 124). In the excerpt the system is visible at three levels. (1) Metaphor: the house/body equation itself is a poetic system — the womb as "a mythic paradise imaged over and over again in sacred caves, secret shrines, consecrated huts" — whose symbolism "must inevitably have very different implications for male critics and for female authors" (pp. 121–122): the poetics assigns women to the imagery they did not choose. (2) Prescription: the physician's rule in Gilman's tale is a poetics of prohibition — the narrator is forbidden the pen because "with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies" — the woman writer's imagination itself diagnosed as pathology (p. 123). (3) Surface: the wallpaper as "the facade of the patriarchal text" — the "inexplicable text" whose "lame uncertain curves" "plunge off at outrageous angles" and "destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions," its sub-pattern the formless figure skulking behind the "silly and conspicuous front design" (p. 123): the dominant text's front design with the woman visible only "in certain lights." Against it stands the title's project, "Towards a Feminist Poetics": the woman writer writes differently necessarily — per the editors' headnote, "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text" — and the infection is mutual: "Infection in the sentence breeds" (Dickinson) — the sentences of the poetics infect their subjects, and the woman's writing infects them back (Gilman's story changing Weir Mitchell's "treatment of nervous prostration").

Key Thinkers

• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the concept's source: the "texts defined by patriarchal poetics" as the enclosure women's writing escapes; the feminist poetics as the necessary difference of women's writing (per the editors' headnote, the gender of the author's body "inscribed in the text," 1979/2006).
• Emily Dickinson — the concept's aphorist: "Infection in the sentence breeds" — the transmission model of the poetics (not yet paged — see log).
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman — the concept's narrative demonstration: the forbidden pen, the wallpaper as patriarchal text, the story as the instrument that changed its own prescribed "cure" (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• The Madwoman — the system's prisoner and escapee: the "mad" woman as the subject the poetics produces and the writer who gets out of its texts.
• Corporeal Inscription — the mechanism: the editors' claim that "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings" — the poetics as an inscription apparatus.
• Mutedness — the prohibition: the forbidden pen as structural muting; the feminist poetics as the muted discourse written anyway.
• House-Body Equation — the master metaphor of the poetics: the woman assigned the house as her text and her body.
• Authorship — the stakes: the "anxiety of authorship" (the chapter's book context) — the woman writer's problem "in seeing herself as possessing a literary voice at all."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the concept's source: the "speechless woe" and the parallel confinements in "texts, houses, and maternal female bodies" (p. 122); the forbidden pen and the wallpaper as "the facade of the patriarchal text" (p. 123); the escape "out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority" and the infection/cure aphorism (p. 124).
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the poetics' architectural-theory wing, stated from inside Intimus: Woolf's A Room of One's Own deployed as the poetics' counter-programme — "writing by and for women can only be constructed when they write their own history outside patriarchy, epitomised by the need for independent means" — with Shakespeare's sister as the type: "As Woolf realised, Shakespeare's sister could never be, so is the fate of Laugier's sister who would find her maternal space obliterated and her destiny sealed behind masculine modes of thought" (p. 343). The poetics here has an architectural canon: the primitive hut as "a dominant history… fabricated… in the process of which… structure and form is privileged over the decorative and ornamental"; Alberti's partitio, area and proportio dividing "the whole into homogenous parts"; and the theorists' collective desire "to bring the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control" (p. 343). Where Gilbert and Gubar give the poetics' literary operation (the text as facade, the forbidden pen), Taylor gives its architectural canon (Laugier's frontispiece, Alberti's partitio) and its spatial mode of muting — the "maternal space obliterated" at the very origin-image of the discipline that houses the interior. See primitive-hut, gender-and-the-interior, the-madwoman.

Open Questions

• The excerpt gives the poetics only through its metaphors and prohibitions — what is the system's positive content (its canon, its critics, its institutions)? The full chapter ("The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship") supplies Bloom's anxiety of influence as the male model being inverted; does the wiki need that positive account to use the concept?
• "Infection in the sentence breeds" — a model of literary meaning as contagion. Does this make the poetics transmissible (a reader's sentences can be infected by the house/body equation) and, if so, is the cure — "spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as social" — also a writing practice?
• The wallpaper is a decorative surface as well as a text; the patriarchal poetics here manifests as interior ornament ("lame uncertain curves" that "destroy themselves"). Can a feminist poetics of interiors be read off the tale — the pattern peeled off, the room stripped, the self recovered — and what does that reading do to the decorative's claim to be self-expression?