SOURCE: “Re-creating Eve,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVI, No. 20, December 20, 1979, pp. 6, 8.

In the following essay, Dinnage agrees with Gubar and Gilbert's views regarding the frustrations of nineteenth-century women as authors, but nevertheless asserts that they “insensitively” force “nineteenth-century attitudes into twentieth-century molds.”

Women's situation, Charlotte Brontë wrote, involves “evils—deep-rooted in the foundation of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch: of which we cannot complain; of which it is advisable not too often to think.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's closely argued interpretation of nineteenth-century women's writing is concerned to show that, even in writers such as Brontë who were openly concerned with the “woman question,” pent-up frustration over the evils of which it was best not to think produced images of rage and violence: vicious doubles of submissive heroines, saboteurs of conventional stereotypes, coded messages between innocuous lines. Mad...