Madwomen in Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein

Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist examination of female-authored literature, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), draws its title from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, in which Rochester locks up his wife, Bertha Mason, in his creepy estate’s attic, which Jane the orphan/virgin does not find out until she is about to walk down the aisle with him. Through the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, Gilbert and Gubar show that female characters’ embodiment of either (1) the “angel” (i.e., Jane) or (2) the “monster” (i.e., Bertha the madwoman) does not accurately represent, or serve, women writers or women as a whole. In this groundbreaking reading, Gilbert and Gubar shed light on what they name the Anxiety of Authorship, which women writers experienced due to there were fewer role-models available to them (i.e, most writer-predecessors were men who kept killing each other off in a Freudian/Oedipal frenzy). To compensate for the limited female role models available to them, coupled with the fact that male writers tended to create a dichotomy/split between angels and whores in their writing, there ensued a “double-voiced text”: a text such as Jane Eyre, which shows the plight of the angel Jane and monster Bertha, each in her own form of subjugation, either as a governess at the mercy of her “master” who tries to marry her whilst already married, or as a wife who is also at the mercy of that same master, in the form of a consummated husband. Later, Bertha kills herself while also emasculating and crippling that master/patriarchy, allowing Jane to live as an “equal” (according to the problematic-for-feminists text/ending that is Jane Eyre). In this response essay, I will examine the implications of Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal Madwoman in the Attic for Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

One might think–on the surface–that the witty, polished prose of Austen’s domestic-sphere reimagination of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho would have little to do with Shelley’s self-described “filthy workshop of creation” that is her cobbled-together-in-the-spirit-of-Frankenstein-and-his-monster “novel” reimagination of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, in the essay “Shut up in Prose” on Jane Austen’s “Juvenilia,” Gilbert and Gubar make connections between the seemingly disparate Northanger Abbey (Austen’s earliest novel, nee Susanna, published posthumously in 1817) and Frankenstein (published one year later, in 1818 and again, revised and revamped, in 1823). They write that:

“Like Mary Shelley’s monster, [Austen’s Gothic heroine Catherine Morland] must finally come to terms with herself as a creature of someone else’s making, a character trapped inside an uncongenial plot. In fact, like Mary Shelley’s monster, Catherine cannot make sense of the signs of her culture, and her frustration is at least partially reflected in her fiction of the starving, suffering Mrs. Tilney. … We shall see that Catherine is motivated by a curiosity that links her not only to Mary Shelley’s monster, but also to such rebellious, dissatisfied inquirers as Catherine Earnshaw [and]  Jane Eyre” (142).

It is of course true that both Catherine Morland and Shelley’s (Frankenstein’s) monster are creatures of someone else’s making. On one level, Catherine is Austen’s creation just as the monster is Shelley’s. On a deeper, in-text level, Catherine is the product (creation, creature) of her upbringing by her parents and multiple siblings, and, later, of her education as she is debuted onto the early nineteenth-century marriage market in fashionable bath; Frankenstein’s unnamed monster, who goes by epithets (not names) such as fiend, creature, devil, is the product of Frankenstein and his debut (thrusting) onto the margins of early nineteenth-century Switzerland and then into the wilderness of the frozen, northern tundra. Whereas Catherine’s upbringing begins in the wilderness that is the countryside in England and is ushered into high society by benevolent (if at times incompetent) neighbors, the Allens, and the Creature begins in the city and migrates to the North Pole due to the violent disavowal of him by his father/creator (if he can be called “father” by virtue of cobbling together disparate pieces of dead bodies and infusing “life” into them). Once Catherine leaves for Bath, she, too, is free from her parents–temporarily–in a way that the Creature, abandoned at “birth,” never has the luxury to wish that he would be. Rather than entering a marriage market filled with balls and social gatherings, equipped with Gothic literature such as Radcliffe’s, the Creature receives his education by reading, most importantly, Milton’s Paradise Lost from the outside/margins of an unknowing family’s window.

Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Frankenstein as a reimagining of Paradise Lost sets readers up for an example of a woman writer, Shelley, whose Anxiety of Influence extends past her literary forebears/inheritance, parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, which they examine in greater detail in Madwoman, even to John Milton and the sexist implications of his Eve. It is an act of psychological reclamation that Shelley undergoes to better understand one of the most important texts of her time, during the romantic period of British literature where his rebellious Satan reigned supreme (see: William Blake et al), and reconcile it with the world that she knew (her literary and female inheritance). “The comments of writers like Bronte, Woolf, and Wollstonecraft show that intelligent women were keenly conscious of the problems Milton posed. But they were dizzied by them, too, for the secret messages of Paradise Lost enclosed the poem’s female readers like a room of distorting mirrors” Gilbert and Gubar write (Gilbert/Gubar 213-214). Thus, “Mary Shelley chooses in Frankenstein: to take the male culture myth of Paradise Lost at its full value–on its own terms, including all the analogies and parallels it implies–and rewrite it so as to clarify its meaning” (Gilbert/Gubar 220). Gilbert and Gubar’s idea of the Anxiety of Influence, applied to Shelley and Austen, illuminates key aspects and themes within their texts. If we look at the characters within Frankenstein, as Gilbert and Gubar do, as conglomerates, reimagining Milton’s Adam, Eve, Satan, etc., then it follows that their method of reading, similar to their reading of Jane Eyre as a dual consciousness of Bertha and Jane from which Madwoman derives its title, could also be done for Northanger Abbey and its reimaginings of Radcliffe’s Gothic villain (Montoni), heroine (Emily), and love interest (Valaincort), etc., in Udolpho (and also, to look at it in terms of her other dominant literary legacy in Northanger, Lennox’s Female Quixote, itself a parody of Don Quixote). In this regard, the literary legacy, the Anxiety of Influence that Shelley and Austen experience according to Gilbert and Gubar, is a rich one indeed, one that has been rife for such explorations/readings since Madwoman was published in 1979.