Around and Around and Around We Go in the Attic

      Rereading both Jane Eyre and The Yellow Wallpaper recently have helped to me to ponder deeply on women in literature, and how they are written in stories. I can agree with Gilbert and Gubar's idea that, especially during the nineteenth century and before, female authors typically wrote a type of  "paraphernalia of confinement, like the gate at the head of the stairs, instruments that definitively indicate[d] her imprisonment" (120). Both of these works of literature include symbols and stories of women locked away, driven to madness for reasons half obscured, half obvious. The author made their story intertwine with tragedy and isolation, making a gloomy house or attic a physical symbol of their confinement and restlessness, feelings that cannot be spoken aloud.
      Feminist theory raises good questions about how women are approached in literature - and about who writes them and for what purpose. What's interesting is how feminist theory seemed to solidify for me how much all the theories we've looked at in class can blend together in order to create an interesting approach to a text. How we choose to approach a text is up to us, and so is the question of whether any theory holds the most merit (or, at least, depending on the text we’re using the theory on).

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