Sandra M. Gilbert (1936–2024)

Elliot Gilbert, a sixty-year-old professor of English, checked into a major medical center for routine prostate surgery. Twenty-four hours later, he was pronounced dead in the recovery room. To this day, no one from the hospital has told his family how or why he died. In Wrongful Death his widow has produced a searingly frank account of one family's experience with a kind of medical disaster that occurs surprisingly often but is all-too-rarely discussed in a political arena dominated by concerns about the escalating costs of malpractice insurance. As her story unfolds, Sandra Gilbert describes the numbing shock into which she and her children were plunged by her husband's inexplicable death as well as the stages of grief they endured as they struggled to come to terms with their loss. But her major focus is on the process of discovery through which, with the help of friends and lawyers, they began to learn something about what had happened to Elliot. What are the implications of such a medical tragedy for the deceased and for his survivors? How does it feel to confront the possibility that a loved one has suffered what the law calls a "wrongful death"? As she examines the bewildering complexity of the legal, social, and medical questions surrounding "adverse events" like the one that killed her husband, Gilbert shows how vulnerable we all are to the power of the health-care establishment.… (more)

Yes, it's dated, but for my generation this was so exciting. This made going to grad school feel like punk rock (for grad students, so, y'know, not that punk). We were going to change the academy & then the world & Gilbert & Gubar were showing us how.
Try to read this book as if it's the first or at most second piece of feminist criticism you've ever read. Imagine Austen & the Brontes and Dickinson constantly trivialized and George Eliot lauded for her masculine writing in everything you've seen before. Try to think about Bertha Rochester's life as completely unproblematic. Then read this book and you'll get a sense of what we felt.… (more)

Another university textbook I've been meaning to read cover-to-cover for a long time. Famous enough that everyone ignores the clever title and just calls it "Gilbert & Gubar", over 600 pages long, and with in-depth studies of half a dozen of the biggest names in nineteenth-century literature, it's a daunting prospect. Happily it turns out to be eminently readable, much more so than I remember from when I was writing essays - maybe my standards have changed?

The really important thing about it, of course, is that it's one of the books that made respectable the idea that we need to look at the work of women writers in terms of their role as women in the society of the time, and also bearing in mind that they were writing for a largely female audience. (G&G appeared in 1979, about the same time as Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own.) Where more recent feminist critique tends to mix in other theoretical approaches, G&G look almost exclusively at how women writers deal with and aare influenced by the situation of women in the society of their times, and their own role as women writers in particular. How do you deal with the assertive act of speaking out in print in a society where the ideal of feminine behaviour is supposed to be passive and silent? Despite the famous, aggressively Freudian, opening line, there is little or no recourse to the usual male authority-figures of lit-crit (Marx, Freud, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault...). Virginia Woolf, of course, is quoted heavily, and G&G have quite a bit to say about how 19th century women writers saw each others' work.

One part I found especially interesting was the discussion of how women writers engaged with Milton: maybe an obvious question to pose for Frankenstein and Middlemarch, but not at all self-evident for Wuthering Heights until you've seen their analysis.

With hindsight, one of the surprising things about the book is the way it sticks to the narrowly-defined "canon" of 19th century English writing - there is only the very briefest discussion of Victorian popular novelists who have since fallen out of favour (Mrs Oliphant, Charlotte M. Yonge, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.), and apart from Emily Dickinson there is nothing about women writers who were relatively unknown in their own time. Obviously the reason for this is that they want to concentrate their energy on the writers who have received the lioness's share of critical attention and show how looking at them as women can change our perception of their work and what it is trying to say. Rediscovering writers who were unfairly neglected isn't part of their remit. But it does mean that you shouldn't try to use this book on its own to get a view of women's writing in 19th century England (and New England...). Let alone anywhere else.… (more)