SOURCE: “The Strongly Female Tradition,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,037, August 8, 1980, p. 901.

In the following essay, Ashton argues that the feminist thesis in The Madwoman in the Attic is unconvincing.

“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” ask the authors of this study [The Madwoman in the Attic]. If it is, “with what organ can females generate texts?” Both questions are put rhetorically. Indeed, how could they be answered without exposing the paradox at the basis of the “feminist poetics” the authors wish to construct? On the one hand, they aim to show how women have been cabined, cribbed, confined, kept “mute” in a patriarchal society which requires sewing and submission from its women while men “father” or “author” texts, wielding the exclusive power of the pen/penis. On the other, it is part of their intention to account for female authorship, that contradiction in the terms in which...