SOURCE: “New Questions,” in Yale Review, Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter, 1980, pp. 266–70.

In the following essay, Meyer Spacks appreciates the boldness and importance of Gubar and Gilbert's feminist readings of literature, however she argues that the dogmatism of their ideological commitment causes them to distort the literature they interpret in The Madwoman in the Attic.

New questions generate new answers, new focus refracts new light. Sometimes ideology provides the crucial focus: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, now feminism. Feminist criticism has flourished with increasing vitality in the last decade, demonstrating ever more surely its validity as a mode of inquiry and of assertion. The Madwoman in the Attic, scholarly, authoritative, and imaginative, reinterprets a large body of literature in a fashion that demands and creates serious attention. Nineteenth-century fiction and poetry will never look quite the same again.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar know precisely what questions they wish to ask. “What...