The Madwoman

Definition

The madwoman is the figure of the woman writer's confinement and its escape: the "supposedly 'mad'" woman "sentenced to imprisonment in the 'infected' house of her own body" — in the room, in the marriage, in the patriarchal text — whose "imaginings and creations" are the only freedom the sentence leaves, and who thereby becomes the emblem of "nineteenth-century literary women out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority" (Gilbert & Gubar, p. 124). The concept has two faces. Confinement: the madwoman is the woman whose legitimate feelings, perception and creativity have been criminalized as illness — Gilman's narrator, "suffering from a severe postpartum psychosis," is confined by her "censorious and paternalistic" physician-husband and forbidden the pen; her reading of the room (the "rings and things" as "the paraphernalia of confinement") is the one perception in the story that is true. Escape: the madwoman's double — the woman behind the wallpaper, "both the narrator and the narrator's double" — is freed by joint work ("I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled") and creeps away "as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind," indistinct yet inexorable; the madwoman's "own imaginings and creations, mirages of health and freedom" are "the least of the triumphs… More significant" than the physician's faint (p. 124). The title of Gilbert and Gubar's book names the type: The Madwoman in the Attic — the attic room both the place of the woman writer's confinement and, in Gilman's tale, the site from which the escape is narrated.

Key Thinkers

• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the concept's source: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); the double-figure, the imprisonment-in-the-body sentence, and the escape as literary history ("out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics").
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman — the concept's paradigmatic narrator: The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), "a description of a case of nervous breakdown," the rest-cure room, the double, the creeping escape; Gilman's own cure reported to have changed Weir Mitchell's treatment (not yet paged — see log).
• Sigmund Freud — the double's theorist (1919): "the uncanny harbinger of death"; the madwoman's double is the same figure redeployed as an ally of escape rather than a specter of death. See the-double.

Related Concepts

• The Double — the madwoman's mechanism: the woman behind the pattern "both the narrator and the narrator's double"; the Freudian double (harbinger of death) redeployed as the agent of liberation.
• House-Body Equation — the sentence the madwoman serves: imprisonment "in the 'infected' house of her own body."
• Patriarchal Poetics — the text-layer of the confinement: the wallpaper as "the facade of the patriarchal text"; escape as progress "out of the texts."
• Enclosure — the room: the garret, the rings and things, the gate at the head of the stairs — "instruments that definitively indicate her imprisonment."
• The Uncanny — the affective register: the house "haunt[ed]" by the paper and the figure behind it; the "yellow smell" that "creeps all over the house."
• Mutedness — the prohibition that defines the sentence: "he has forbidden her to touch pen to paper" — the muting of the woman writer as medical prescription.

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" formula and the parallel confinements (p. 122); the rest cure, the forbidden pen, the wallpaper-text (p. 123); the double, the joint peeling-off, the cloud-shadow escape, the cure "spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as social," Plath's "a self to recover, a queen" (p. 124).
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the double's psychoanalytic machinery ("the uncanny harbinger of death"; "every mirror image a spectral double"), the apparatus the madwoman's double redeploys.
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the double's architectural form ("a toppling of the walls… of the imaginary architecture of a self"), companion register of the self's enclosure toppling.
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the therapeutic apparatus's mirror-case: the madwoman's rest-cure room has its period double in Wright's The Complete Home (1879), where room-decoration is prescribed as therapy for Margaret, the "sickly, disabled girl" who, surveying her wall pockets and plants, declares "Don't I look nice! … Why I feel almost well" — "By 'fixing' her house, she had fixed herself" (p. 126). The same equation (house-body equation) that imprisons Gilman's narrator (the room as medical regime) heals Wright's Margaret: the conflation's promise — the room's repair is the self's repair — is genuine in one story and carceral in the other. The difference, on the wiki's reading, is who owns the therapeutic program and what is forbidden: Aunt Sophronia's tasks are freely chosen handiwork; the physician's prescription forbids the pen. The source gives the madwoman's world its daylight twin — the woman whose confinement-therapy works — and thereby sharpens the question the page's open questions already pose about spatial therapy. See enclosure, spatial-therapy.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the madwoman's architectural-theory genealogy, two years before Gilbert & Gubar's Intimus selection in the same anthology: "And what if that confusion and pointlessness is brought within the prison or place of confinement, generating madness as befell the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper?" (p. 342) — the Yellow Wallpaper named as the confinement-madness case inside a reading of the interior's order-impositions; the madwoman's figuration widened to the ordered-plan heroines: Lily Bart's descent "from a rigidly ordered plan to one of complete disorder culminating in her tenement room suicide" read as "the inevitable ending for one that strives to subvert an order that is endemic in a patri-architectural society" (p. 342); and the concept's widest generalization — "Is the nineteenth century practice of covering surfaces both a cry and an attempt to escape this imposed order that in certain circumstances leads to madness and suicide?" (p. 342) — the madwoman's condition extended from the asylum-room to the decorated surface itself, decoration as the confined occupant's "cry" against the patri-architectural order. See house-body-equation, enclosure, power-and-space.

Open Questions

• Is the madwoman's madness a diagnosis imposed from outside (the world "calls" it madness) or a state the narrative also enacts — and does Gilbert and Gubar's reading hold the line, or does their "fairy godmother" language concede that the escape exists only as "mirages"?
• The escape is performed with the double — "I pulled and she shook" — a jointly pulled freedom. Is the madwoman's liberation structurally double (a self recovered only as another self), and what does that imply for the recovered "queen" of Plath's line?
• Gilman's tale converts a medical "cure" into architectural imprisonment; the wiki's spatial therapy (Qureshi) treats interior architecture as healing. Can the two be held together — when is interior design a cure and when is it the rest-cure room?
• The madwoman in the attic — is the attic (Bachelard's daydream-space, Spuybroek's "daydreaming" register) gendered by this archive: the upper floor as the woman writer's assigned room, against the downstairs masculine dining room of Eastlake's house?