Hypochondria In The Madhouse?

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman In The Attic provides us with an interesting study of the use of signifiers and signified concepts in prosecuting their case for woman's liberation in modern culture. Yet if we examine this work from a structuralist perspective, it can be successfully argued that Madwoman is self-defeating in decreasing its redeeming social value as a canonical piece of feminist literature.

It is both the blessing and the curse of the artist, in transcending the human condition, to find both isolation and criticism as byproducts of their endeavor. By being on the outside looking in, the artist necessarily creates a distance from their community and environment in the mimetic process. From this Gilbert and Gubar create an impression of alienation, reinforcing this negativity with a defensive posture taken from their feminine self-awareness. It is not enough that they distance themselves from the common bond of loneliness that artists seem to share. It also causes them to seek greater solitude by redefining themselves as women, building a new and unique identity that sets them apart from all races, religions and creeds for physiological reasons alone. By interpreting the 'anxiety of influence' as having a special and unequal meaning to women artists, Gilbert and Gubar develop an alienation of species that does little to enhance or edify the genre of women's literature.

From the structural view, we connotate psychological significance to the repeated use of the word 'debilitating' and the continued interchanging of the terms 'anxiety of influence' and 'anxiety of authorship'. The signifier 'anxiety', in turn, interacts with 'debilitating' in reinforcing an overall message of psychological duress. The authors freely refer to psychological scholars such as Freud and Bloom in freely drawing from the jargon of the discipline, viz and to wit: "Applying Freudian structures to literary geneaologies, Bloom has postulated that the dynamics of literary history arise from the artist's 'anxiety of influence', his fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings."

Again we find the signifier 'fear' as a recurring theme, yet being shown as a male demonstrative. The authors begin developing a contradictory and ambiguous message for its intended audience, the associatives illustrating that these problems are male-oriented. Yet they go on to interchange the terms 'anxiety of influence' and 'anxiety of authorship', attempting to give them different meanings though, structuralistically, we see their effects as signifiers throughout the work: "Thus the 'anxiety of influence' that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary 'anxiety of authorship' - a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her."

As Ferdinand de Saussure implies, the form of a language supercedes its substance. Once the text is diffused past its intended audience, the semantics become dynamic in determining the meaning of the work. At this point we encounter an atmosphere of hypochondria that is enhanced by an emphasis on signifiers such as 'revolt' and 'rebellion'. Although it is clear that 'fear' and 'anxiety' are common ailments of both genders, the authors go on to imply an unequal 'system of relations' (as proposed in works by Levi-Strauss) that necessitate a schism between artists and audiences according to gender. Here the hypochondria is now reinforced by an air of paranoia that becomes stigmatic throughout the work. "Frequently, moreover, she can begin such a struggle only by actively seeking a female precursor who, far from representing a threatening force to be denied or killed, proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literature is possible."

The linguistics play an essential role in defining the message of the piece. In the works of Roman Jakobson, he emphasizes the dynamics of language and the aesthetics of structure in conveying ideas and meaning in poetry. It is the word 'legitimize' that jumps out at us as we consider the nature of feminist 'rebellion' as defined by the authors. Centuries from now, scholars will ponder what legitimized 'patriarchal literature' and what gave it the authority against which rebellion was required. The word 'comply' further suggests a relationship of weakness implying a need for subjugation of one party to another: "The woman writer - and we shall see women writers doing this over and over again - searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her 'femininity' but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors."

If we refer to the writings of Roland Barthes, we find that the signified (the coherence of a meaning) and the 'play' of the signifier (disruption of meaning) provide us with clear distinctions between the assembly and the final product. The words 'antagonism', 'timidity', 'dread', 'impropriety' and 'inferiorization' continue to sprout like weeds throughout the text. "Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention - all these phenomena of 'inferiorization' mark the woman writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart."

In considering the work of Tzvetan Todorov and categorizing the piece by narrative analysis (syntax, theme, rhetoric) we find the negativity reinforced and reiterated throughout the text. Scholars unfamiliar with the context will note the compulsion for legitimacy and a need for aggressive assertion permeating the work: "As we noted above, for an 'anxiety of influence' the woman writer substitutes what we have called an 'anxiety of authorship', an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex."

Hypochondria becomes a key factor throughout the text as the constant use of the word 'debilitating' connotes a physical trauma that alludes to the female as being a weak and inferior species, or of a gender born of disease and debilitation: "In comparison to the 'male' tradition of strong, father-son combat, however, this female anxiety of authorship is profoundly debilitating."

If, from the structuralist standpoint, meaning occurs through difference, it is not identification of the sign, but by the difference among signs within a system. For instance, the meaning of the word 'woman' is established by its relation in a meaning-field. It refers to a human female, but what constitutes 'angels' and what constitutes 'monsters' are themselves established through difference, not identity with any particular truth. We then find ourselves stymied by the authors' statement: "It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters."

The recurring themes are the critical failures from a structural standpoint. We have co-authors writing to a 70's audience, constantly referring to an archaic Victorian era with its standards and mores, attempting to justify their argument by constant references to Freudian principles and what appear to be Darwinian concepts. For example, we find that "To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily trained to ill health, since the human animal's first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion."

The scholars of the future approaching this from a structural viewpoint may find that the reader is hard-sold into buying into a female 'disease' that is never fully established other than within the allegations of the authors. Structurally, we find a problem in seeing past the boundaries of the text, why it may have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears: "In other words, the 'female diseases' from which Victorian women suffered were not always byproducts of their training in femininity; they were the goals of such training."

Structuralism is reader-oriented in that the reader constructs literature, reading the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Again we find that the authors will have caused considerable misunderstanding by iterating: "Certainly infection breeds in these sentences, and despair; female art, Sexton suggests, has a 'hidden' but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness." We find statements like the following suggesting that being a female writer exposes the artist to psychological illnesses and maladies that the reader will have great difficulty in supporting: "Surrounded as she is by images of disease, traditions of disease, and invitations both to disease and dis-ease, it is no wonder that the woman writer has held many mirrors up to the discomforts of her own nature."

The continued reference to the psychological and the manifestation of the mental in the physical, again, are highly suggestive of the hypochondriac state. It is as if the authors are insisting that the imposition of chauvinist mores are guaranteed to bring the female artist to her knees in a variety of physical maladies: "Finally, aphasia and amnesia - two illnesses which symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellectual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally required of women - appear and reappear in women's writings in frankly stated or disguised forms."

Certain signs connotate larger and generalized cultural meanings, known as 'myths', or second-order signifiers. The American eagle on the globe is a mythic signifier of power and majesty. If scholars are to interpret the myths presented by the authors in statements such as the following, we find ourselves recreating a society of comprehensive alienation of species, making us wonder what kind of male-female relations existed, if at all: "In doing so, we will have to trace the difficulty paths by which nineteenth-century women overcame their 'anxiety of authorship', repudiated debilitating patriarchal prescriptions, and recovered or remembered the lost foremothers who could help them find their distinctive female power."

It is interesting to note the latent homosexuality inferred by the co-authorship of the piece. Only in the field of clinical research do we find co-authorship prevalent, largely due to the exhaustive nature of the research and the lack of popular acclaim for its contributors. Literary authors, on the contrary, will rarely give credit to ghost writers or collaborators. Yet Gilbert and Gubar find it necessary to latch their names together on this work. It reminds one of a hyphenated married name, the desperate clinging of a newlywed to her own identity, struggling to maintain a symbolic emancipation. In this case, Gilbert and Gubar's names are bound forever as their work seeks its place among a canon of feminist literature. Again, however, the message may well be garbled or lost once the frames of reference are removed by future generations.

In summation, from a structuralist perspective, the scholar of the future may perceive the female artist of the 70's to be a weak-willed hypochondriac with no guiding light or sense of tradition, if he is influenced by the work of Gilbert and Gudar. It leaves us questioning the enduring and redeeming social value of the piece as an essential testimony to the character and the capacity of the female artist of 70's America.