SOURCE: A review of The Madwoman in the Attic, in Review of English Studies, Vol. 33, No. 131, August, 1982, pp. 345–47.

In the following excerpt, Boumelha stresses Harold Bloom's methodological influence on The Madwoman in the Attic.

… [In The Madwoman in the Attic,] Gilbert and Gubar take their methodological point of departure from Harold Bloom's parables of the anxiety of influence—a theory which has on occasion been attacked as patriarchal, but which they commend for making central and explicit the male dominance of Western literary history that is naturalized and allowed to remain unspoken in most other accounts. The Madwoman in the Attic attempts to supplement that theoretical work with an account of the traditions of women's writing, traditions established as such writing struggles to make a space for itself within (or beside) Bloom's Oedipal scenario of the strong male poets. The woman writer, they argue, must confront not only...