The Madwoman In The Attic Analysis

Plus, she rescues many elements of the first wave and she combines them with new ideas such as the mechanization of the female sexuality, women’s choice (maternity or no maternity), and sexual liberation. The metaphors about literary maternity and childbirth were quite numerous in both 18th and 19th centuries, trying to put in a parallel skeleton the process of literary writing and pregnancy. As Elaine Showalter claims, “feminist criticism written in the biological perspective generally stresses the importance of the body as a source of imagery.”(Showalter, 188)

Another important protagonist in these Neo-feminist theories is Betty Friedan with The Feminine Mystique (1963), where she explores the idea of women searching personal realization

In this work, they try to analyze the Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. In many parts of the writing, they tend to give an extreme phallocentric idea. Besides, they criticize the metaphoric biological differences between male and female writers:

In The Madwoman in the Attic, for example, Gilbert and Gubar structure their analysis of women 's writing around metaphors of literary paternity. ‘In patriarchal western culture," they maintain, "... the text 's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis.’ (Showalter, 187)

They support that many female writers have been constantly dealing with depression and anxieties due to these differences, asking queries such as: "If the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts?" (Gilbert and Gubar, 6 7). This tendency compares feminist literary criticism with a biological analysis created disagreements between critics who back up this importance of the body in writing and others who support that this trend is an extreme source of

Plath’s personality was constantly in contrast, she was a girl with ambition but at the same time she was fragile and insecure. It also seems that Sylvia was an obsessive woman in many senses. Firstly, she had a clear fixation with men’s world and, consequently, a fixation with love. Love was a central topic in her daily life showing that she was a person who needed the constant feeling of being desirable: “I need rather desperately to feel physically desirable at all times and mentally desirable (…)” (Letters from home, n.p). Secondly, her prosecution of success was another crucial part in her literary and personal life: “I just can´t stand the idea of being mediocre…” (Letters from home, n.p). Her self-esteem was directly connected with her success; if she could not get achievement with her writings, she turned into a wrecked person. Focusing on her daily life and her academic and literary activity, it can be noticed a high sense of responsibility which it turned into a craze. Sylvia was an important talented writer, but this talent did not provide her a sense of security. As Ana María Moix claims:

(…) Sylvia Plath se nos revela, en estas cartas, como un esplendoroso ejemplo de esas víctimas de lo que Alice Miller llama «el drama del niño dotado» y que consiste en el reconocimiento que esa clase de niños hacen, a muy temprana edad, de las necesidades de sus padres y en el esfuerzo que realizan para adaptarse a ellas y satisfacerlas. (Ana María Moix,