Cousin Phillis Essay

In the novel, Cousin Phillis, Gilbert and Gubar’s claim of how women characters in literature are only portrayed as “angels” or “monsters” due to male authors’ creation of this dichotomy is evident in how the two female characters in the novel respond to an intellectual conversation. In the beginning of the paragraph, Cousin Holman’s depiction as an angel begins when Paul’s father, intent on explaining his design for a turnip-cutting machine, used a burning stick from the fire to draw on a drawer that Cousin Holman had just cleaned. Instead of being invested in the conversation like the other characters (excluding Paul it seems), Cousin Holman can only pretend to care about the conversation while she frantically goes right away to re-clean

Paul uses forceful language when describing Phillis, saying she was listening “greedily” and “sucking in information” (183). This is a noticeably more aggressive way to describe her participation in the discussion, especially compared to her father, who is sitting and listening calmly. This difference can be explained in part by their gender and the way males described female characters who differed from the typical angelic qualities, according to Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: “The monster woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author’s power to allay his anxieties by calling their sources bad names” (28). It is evident throughout the novel that Paul is threatened by Phillis’s intelligence, and thus he describes her passion to learn in a more aggressive, monstrous way than he describes the minister’s or his father’s. In her curiosity for knowledge, she portrays characteristics that are not feminine (especially when juxtaposed against her angelic mother), and therefore, she is portrayed as a “monster” in the context of Gilbert and Gubar’s