The madwoman in the attic bertha has become especially famous in literary criticism because her situation supplied the title and central theory of a major 1979 book of feminist criticism sandra gilbert and susan gubar s the madwoman in the attic.
Book of crazy wife locked in attic.
Anonymous asked in arts humanities books authors 1 decade ago what is the name of the novel about an man who had a wife that was crazy and he lokced her in the attic.
Check out selected results from nypl title quest 2019 held august 2 2019 as well as title quest 2018.
The madwoman in the attic.
The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination is a 1979 book by sandra gilbert and susan gubar in which they examine victorian literature from a feminist perspective.
As she lived in a time when women were not encouraged to write charlotte bronte wrote under the pseudonym currer bell to avoid being ostracized by society and to avoid being badly received by the audience because the book was written by a woman.
This is an update of a previous post by sharon rickson.
Jane eyre is a progressive book in many senses far ahead of its time it is even deemed feminist.
The real life attic that was the inspiration for a section of jane eyre where mentally ill character bertha mason is confined before she commits suicide is now open to the public.
Charlotte brontë s jane eyre is well known for the shocking discovery of mr rochester s scandalous hidden wife a deranged woman locked away in an attic.
But astonishingly this may not have all been fiction.
In fact the smarter ones will sometimes have a secret system of peepholes and secret passages so they can move around as they please.
This is when a character with mental problems and often some physical deformity is locked away because they will never fit into society usually either in the attic or in the basement and often by a corrupt hick the more of a big fancy house the better.
The 1966 parallel novel wide sargasso sea by jean rhys serves as a prequel to brontë s novel.
Gilbert and gubar draw their title from charlotte brontë s jane eyre in which rochester s wife née bertha mason is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
Bertha mason rochester s first wife was a beautiful creole woman from jamaica who rochester married years ago before she had a mental breakdown and naturally had to be locked in the attic.