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Female Authorship and the Acceptance or Rejection of Social Norms

     For almost as long as humans have been writing, the dominant voice in the literary world has been a male one. Because of this, it has been hard for women to break into the sphere of authorship, especially considering the societal responsibilities and expectations put upon them. The dichotomy between what it means to be a woman and what it means to be an author is one aspect of what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar analyze in their book The Madwoman in the Attic, specifically in the chapter “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.” While Gilbert and Gubar use a large variety of quotes to back up the arguments they make, one quote that is especially poignant to the relationship between a female author and the society she lives in is from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, who claimed that through the writer’s tone, either “She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’” (36). Gilbert and Gubar use this quote as a summarizing thesis statement to support and enhance their argument that if a woman during the nineteenth century and earlier wanted to be a writer, she must first decide whether or not to accept or reject the social norms of the time.

     To understand how Gilbert and Gubar are using this quote within their own argument, one must first look to the original source in order to understand the context in which it was written. A Room of One’s Own is an essay based on two lectures Woolf gave to two women’s colleges, and the quote Gilbert and Gubar use is from chapter four, which focuses on the circumstances that women wrote in. Typically, this entailed being pulled from their writing by their other duties. Women were not expected or encouraged to be writers, so there was very little support for their efforts. In a reflection of the essay’s title, Woolf stated, “If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room” (32). There was no private room for women to write within for hours, no room they could claim as their own. Instead, they had to write in the family area, where she could be pulled away by her children or tasked with any number of things. Because women, for the most part, lived the majority of their lives inside these sitting and drawing rooms, that is the setting that frequently appeared in their work, along with subject matters such as “the feelings of women” (Woolf 36). In the dominantly patriarchal literary world, this type of work was not given much credit because it did not focus on traditionally male subject matters like sports or war (Woolf 36). Woolf argues that when faced with the criticism that their work was worth less because it was written by a woman and because it focused on more domestic and “trivial” issues, there were two ways that that criticism could manifest within a woman’s work: either “as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis.” She could write as a woman “should,” or she could rebel against those pressures. Either, as Woolf puts it, “She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’”(36).

     As Gilbert and Gubar honed in on in the chapter “Infection in the Sentence,” the tension between being a female writer and the expectations that society placed on them was especially apparent during the nineteenth century, given the prominent women authors and works that were created during this time. Because society already shunned the idea of women writing, if a woman wanted to pursue that passion, she had to be prepared for the consequences she would face in return. The section in “Infection in the Sentence” that this quote is from focuses on how society reacts to female authors and how authors can, and have, reacted in turn. Gilbert and Gubar describe how women, if they did write, were expected to downplay their works and pre-acknowledge it’s inherently low worth because of the female authorship. The only way to write without ruining their standing in society was to go along with how women were expected to act during this time, which included submissive actions that highlighted the intrinsic superiority of men. If they did not do so, as Gilbert and Gubar write, “their literary efforts were defined as mad and monstrous” (63). 

     This choice caused a split between many of the female authors of the nineteenth century, with some writers giving in and making the expected acknowledgment, while others refused to devalue their work. In one paragraph on page sixty-seven of “Infection in the Sentence,” Gilbert and Gubar detail how each path would play out for the woman. Unless they published their work anonymously or under a male pseudonym, the only options available were to preemptively admit their failings or face their inevitable status as a social outcast. The point concludes with Woolf’s quote that the female author “had to choose between admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’” (Gilbert and Gubar 64). This assertion enhances Gilbert and Gubar’s argument by serving as a succinct, one-sentence restatement of their thesis for this section of the chapter that helps to set up a transition into the next section, which covers the anxieties of authorship that follows from being forced into these constrictive choices.

     Though there are a variety of quotes on the subject of female authorship and the difficulties associated with it, when writing “Infection in the Sentence,” Gilbert and Gubar specifically chose to use a quote from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a well-known piece of literature on this topic. In using the discussed quote, Gilbert and Gubar are adding authority to their claims about the choice women writers face when submitting their works to the public by including the voice of a well-known and well-respected figure. Even to readers who are unfamiliar with academic discussions on the nature of women writers, Woolf is likely a recognizable name that will stand out in the chapter. This distinctive name, combined with the short and easily repeatable nature of the quote, gives the reader a memorable summary of this section that not only strengthens the overall argument but also adds further clarity to the two options available to female authors.