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From my point of view, the majority of the public, especially in our country, see the work of literature as a mere entertainment, a means to kill time, or as an obligation set by an educational institution for a requirement of a study. But, especially after finish reading Plato’s Republic, what literature is to me is that literature is and has something more than that, something powerful and very influential to the public. Such role of influencing the public may be taken by media nowadays and may be that is also why the majority of public do not realize other definition of literature, especially as an influential thing. Influence through literature can be seen in the case of representation of somebody or of something. So far, for me, representation is a way to distort a real image and to show this distorted image to a group, if not all, of public to influence them in terms of the image or the meaning of the real image. Thus, the one that makes the representation control the public’s view about it. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote a writing about this in Madwoman in the Attic, and it’s about how women being represented by male writers. This writing of mine try to discuss the writing while also trying to give different viewpoint on reading this writing.
The writing made by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, explained the representation of women as angels and monsters in society and in literature or what women are or should be on both worlds according to male writers. Women as angels, or having angelic characteristic, from Gilbert and Gubar’s work, means that women must be pleasing to her husband, doing all her act in selfless manner, submissive, and that “her virtue makes her man “great.” As Monsters, or as having monstrous quality, meaning, women are “trespassing” the boundaries that are set for them, and that boundaries, more or less, are the value men want women to have and to obey them. At least, these are all I got after finish reading their writing.
By making these images of women in their works, men try to control women to not surpass them and to stay still under their control. My first confusion raised here, what is the benefit men get by controlling women?
In all these incarnations – from Errour to Dullness, from Goneril and Regan to Chloe and Caelia – the female monster is a striking illustration of Simon de Beauvoir’s thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man’s ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death.
The above quotation from The Madwoman in the Attic kind of help me out to determine my first confusion. I am quite satisfied when I knew that one of possible reason why men need control or power over women is that of their existence. Before women fight back, for all the oppression they’ve experienced for so long, undetermined for me, men’s position over women is undisturbed, thus kind of giving them assurance or justification that men must be placed over women or more superior than women by nature. But, when their belief is shaken, that women can be or are the same as men, they started to get anxious, they started to get confused and start to question the real meaning of their existence, and their role in life. Another possibility, men suddenly got surprised that what they have believed all this time is wrong and then tried to deny it, one of which by representing women in forms of monster, trying to justify that women is what they believed to be.
The creation of women as angels and monsters can be said as a product of patriarchal culture. My belief of which came from the fact that Gubar and Gilbert used a lot of examples taken from the work of male writers, not only to show that male writers dominated female writers, but also to show that it is male writers who have been for so long representing women in the way that is, perhaps, not to their liking or untrue.
“Similarly, Milton, despite his undeniable misogyny (which we shall examine later), speaks of having been granted a vision of “my late espoused saint,” who
Came vested in all white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight”
The above quotation taken from Madwoman in the Attic is part of an explanation of Milton’s vision about his late wife and also about angelic woman. In their explanation, Gubar and Gilbert stated “In death, in other words, Milton’s human wife has taken on both the celestial brightness of Mary and (since she has been “washed from spot of childbed taint”) the virginal purity of Beatrice”. In my interpretation the line and the excerpt of Milton’s work show that, mean that by being dead, a woman can attain the seemingly holier form that is angelic, as if death was a way to escape from the less holy state of being human.
“She . . . leads a life of almost pure contemplation. . . .in considerable isolation on a country state. . .a life without external events – a life whose story cannot be told as there is no story. Her existence is not useless. On the contrary . . .she shines like a beacon in a dark world, like a motionless lighthouse by which others, the travelers whose lives do have a story, can set their course. When those involved in feeling and action turn to her in their need, they are never dismissed without advice and consolation. She is an ideal, a model of selflessness and of purity of heart.”
Another example I took from Madwoman in the Attic, which is of Goethe’s, seemingly showing that by becoming such a person described in the excerpt a woman will become a good, an angelic being, but by having “a life of almost pure contemplation”, living “in considerable isolation on a country state. . .a life without external events..” which seems to me a rather passive life, is what women want? By becoming the passive, while men are living more active life.
Besides angels, women also being portrayed as monsters by male writers such as the creation of Errour in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Cecropia, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan, alomh with other example mentioned by Gubar and Gilbert in the writing.
So far, perhaps, what I implied is that representation is a political act, because it concerns with gaining power by trying to lose the power of the “opposition” that is if the political means matters concerned with power. Now, what about the act of exposing representation, is that also a political act? I would say yes. That is because, to me, whether representation or the act of exposing it, is not that quite different, for exposing the representation means to help the oppressed, the made-powerless group to gain their power, and I guess this line from Gilbert and Gubar’s writing is in accordance with my argument: “… women were not only writing, they were conceiving fictional worlds in which patriarchal images and conventions were severely, radically revised.”
I believe there are still mistakes and holes I have to fix so that this writing of mine could become better. If I have the chance to update this writing, I would like to examine: the power of the pen (or the importance of literature on representing or influencing), this matter when related to subjectivity, and perhaps other things to come to be added to this writing.
Work cited:
Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. 1979. “The Madwoman in the Attic” in Literary Theory: An Anthology ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael (2004, 2nd edition; pg. 812-825). United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing.
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