Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: Multiple Identity (Multiple Personality) Literary Theory via Feminist Literary Criticism

Gilbert & Gubar’s index does not include multiple personality, per se, but it does include Doubles, Duplicity, Fragmentation of personality, Mirrors, and pseudonyms, all of which have prominent roles in this blog. As they say in Part I. Toward a Feminist Poetics:

“We shall see, then, that the mad double is as crucial to the aggressively sane novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot as she is in the more obviously rebellious stories told by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Both gothic and anti-gothic writers represent themselves as split like Emily Dickinson between the elected nun and damned witch, or like Mary Shelley between the noble, censorious scientist and his enraged, childish monster. In fact, so important is this female schizophrenia [multiple personality] of authorship that, as we hope to show, it links these nineteenth-century writers with such twentieth-century descendants as Virginia Woolf (who projects both ladylike Mrs. Dalloway and crazed Septimus Warren Smith), Doris Lessing (who divides herself between sane Martha Hesse and mad Lynda Coldridge), and Sylvia Plath (who sees herself as both a plaster saint and a dangerous ‘old yellow’ monster)” (1, p. 78).

At one point, Gilbert & Gubar touch on the fact that they are not talking about something unique to women, but which is common psychology among novelists and poets of both genders:

“As Joyce Carol Oates has observed, critics often ‘fail to see how the creative artist shares to varying degrees the personalities of all his characters, even those whom he appears to detest—perhaps, at times, it is these characters he is really closest to’…writers (as Oates implies) do use masks and disguises in most of their work…what Keats called ‘the poetical Character’ in some sense has ‘no self’ because it is so many selves” (1, pp. 68-69).

But they pursue their feminist thesis.

Nevertheless, I recommend their excellent book, especially if you read it in awareness of this blog’s thesis.

1. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Second Edition. New Haven, Yale Nota Bene Yale University Press, 1979/1984/2000.