SOURCE: “A Prey to Madness,” in New Leader, Vol LXIII, No. 4, February 25, 1980, pp. 16–17.

In the following essay, Pettingell expresses ambivalence towards The Madwoman in the Attic, seeing it as intelligently insightful but marred by “questionable theorizing,” and “simplistic” feminist “jargon.”

What nightmare inspired a quiet teenage mother to create Frankenstein? Was it necessary for the Brontë sisters and Mary Ann Evans to publish under masculine pseudonyms? Why did Emily Dickinson choose to immure herself in her parents’ house all her life and write poems in secret, when she might have exercised her vivacious talents on the world at large? Do the violent images all these writers employ have a common denominator in their experience as women?

These questions are addressed in a radical new study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by feminist critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. As...