The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of two metaphors: the pen as a penis and the notion of literary paternity. According to this discussion, the man who holds the pen, also known as the “aesthetic patriarch,” has the power to generate life that exists on a page, just as men have the potential to procreate children. The metaphor of literary paternity implies that “a ‘man of letters’ is simultaneously, like his divine counterpart, a father, a master or ruler, and an owner” (7).

The discussion of these metaphors suggest that, according to Western patriarchal cultures of the past, male creativity is the only kind of creativity that can exist in the world. Thus, the absence of creativity, as well as the absence of the agency implied by creative pursuits, forms the basis of female identity. The notion of a writer as a kind of father figure echoes the legal language that marks patriarchal culture; fathers and husbands once possessed daughters and wives, just as men who write possess “brain children.” The origin myth of Adam and Eve also supports this metaphor of literary paternity; Eve, after all, would not exist without Adam and his rib.

Women who choose to write violate an established identity based on “the slavish consolations of her ‘femininity’” (9).