Sandra Gilbert
Encyclopedia
Sandra M. Gilbert Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...

, is an influential literary critic and poet who has published widely in the fields of feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...

, feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...

, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is perhaps best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar
Susan Gubar
Dr. Susan D. Gubar is an American academic and Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. She is co-author with Dr. Sandra M. Gilbert of the standard feminist text, The Madwoman in the Attic and a trilogy on women's writing in the twentieth century.Her book...

, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic
The Madwoman in the Attic
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979, examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective...

 (1979), a landmark in 1970s American feminism. Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

.

She lives in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

, and in Paris, France. Her husband, Elliot L. Gilbert, was Chair of the Department of English at University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...

, until his death in 1991. She also had a long-term relationship with David Gale
David Gale
David Gale was a distinguished American mathematician and economist. He was a Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with departments of Mathematics, Economics, and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research...

, renowned mathematician at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, until his death in 2008. She is the mother of three and grandmother of four.

Academia

Gilbert received her B. A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, her M. A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 from New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, and her Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1968. She has taught at California State University, Hayward, Williams College
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this...

, Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

, Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, and Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

. She held the C. Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 from 1985 until 1989. Most recently she was named the inaugural M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University for spring 2007, as well as the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at San Jose State University
San José State University
San Jose State University is a public university located in San Jose, California, United States...

 for spring 2009.

Awards

Gilbert is a former president of the Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...

. She has been a recipient of Guggenheim
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...

, Rockefeller
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...

, NEH, and Soros Foundation
Soros Foundation
A Soros Foundation is one of a network of national foundations, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, which fund volunteer socio-political activity, created by George Soros, international financier and self-proclaimed philanthropist, and coordinated since early 1994 by a management team called the...

 fellowships and has held residencies at Yaddo
Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...

, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco. In 1988 she was awarded a D. Litt. by Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...

. In 1990 she was a co-recipient (with Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.-Biography:...

) of the International Poetry Forum's Charity Randall Award. More recently, she has won a Patterson Prize (for Ghost Volcano), an American Book Award
American Book Award
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...

 (for Kissing the Bread), the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (from the Italian-American Foundation), the Premio Lerici Pea awarded by the Liguri nel Mondo association, and several awards from Poetry magazine. In 2004 she was awarded the degree of Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...

.

Collaboration with Susan Gubar

Gilbert and Gubar met in the early 1970s at Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

. In 1974, they collaborated to co-teach a course on literature in English by women; their lectures led to the manuscript for Madwoman in the Attic. They have continued to co-author and co-edit, and have been jointly awarded several academic distinctions. Notably, they were jointly named Ms. magazine's "Woman of the Year" in 1986 for their work as head editors of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English.

Because of the success of their joint publications, Gilbert and Gubar are often cited together in the fields of Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...

 and Feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...

.

Feminist literary criticism and theory

Gilbert's critical and theoretical works, particularly those co-authored with Susan Gubar, are generally identified as texts within the realm of second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

. As such, they represent part of a concerted effort to move beyond the simple assimilationist theories of first-wave feminism
First-wave feminism
First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the 19th and early twentieth century in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. It focused on de jure inequalities, primarily on gaining women's suffrage .The term first-wave was coined retroactively in the 1970s...

, either by rejecting entirely the given, oppressive, patriarchal, male-dominated order of society, or by seeking to reform that order. Gilbert's texts, in turn, lay themselves open to many of the criticisms levelled by third-wave feminism
Third-wave feminism
Third-wave feminism is a term identified with several diverse strains of feminist activity and study whose exact boundaries in the historiography of feminism are a subject of debate, but often marked as beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present...

, or thinkers who regard patriarchy not as an integrated and foundational system, but a set of repeated practices which may vary over time and space.

Gilbert is often said to have found her theoretical roots in the earlier 1970s works of Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.She is well known and respected in both academic and popular...

, as the basic premise of her thought is that women writers share a set of similar experiences and that male oppression or patriarchy is everywhere essentially the same.

"The Anxiety of Authorship"

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar take the famous and influential Oedipal model developed by literary critic Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 and adapt it to their own purposes as feminist critics. Bloom's well-known theory of the anxiety of influence argues that writers suffer from an Oedipal fear and jealousy for their perceived literary "fore-fathers". As such, the unpublished writer puts himself under a great deal of pressure to break free from his most immediate, direct influences, to form his own voice, even to "kill" the threatening and over-bearing "father" of his particular literary experience and inspirations. Gilbert and Gubar argue that this model is male-oriented, as certainly the associations of Oedipus are, and offer for women a theory of "The Anxiety of Authorship". Here, they question the ability of the anxious woman writer even to contemplate her status as an author. In a culture whose literary tradition is in vast majority a patriarchal one, with a distinct dearth of female writers, and an overabundance of flighty female characters appearing in texts authored by members of both sex, how can a woman arrive at the confident self-conception necessary to write successfully?

Where Bloom wonders how the male author can find a voice that is his own, Gilbert and Gubar wonder how a woman writer can see herself as possessing a literary voice at all. Where Bloom finds aggression and competition between male literary figures in terms of self-consciously feeling influenced and desiring to be influential, the "anxiety of authorship" identifies a "secret sisterhood" of role models within the Western tradition who show that women can write. These models too are "infected" with a lack of confidence and insoluble internal contradiction of ambition curdled by the culturally induced assumption of "the patriarchal authority of art."

Criticisms

Gilbert's theoretical works have come under fire from several later thinkers, particularly those attached to third-wave feminism
Third-wave feminism
Third-wave feminism is a term identified with several diverse strains of feminist activity and study whose exact boundaries in the historiography of feminism are a subject of debate, but often marked as beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present...

 and/or post-feminist theories. Writers such as Barbara Smith
Barbara Smith
Barbara Smith in Cleveland is an American, lesbian feminist who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as an innovative critic, teacher, lecturer, author, independent scholar, and publisher of Black...

, Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

, Mary Daly
Mary Daly
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male...

, Rosemary Radford Ruether
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Rosemary Radford Ruether is an American feminist scholar and theologian.-Biography:Ruether was born in 1936 in Georgetown, Texas, to a Roman Catholic mother and Episcopal father. She has reportedly described her upbringing as free-thinking and humanistic as opposed to oppressive...

, and Ann Oakley
Ann Oakley
Ann Oakley is a distinguished British sociologist, feminist, and writer. She is Professor and Founder-Director of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London and in 2005 partially retired from full-time academic work to concentrate on her writing and...

 have challenged the general assumptions of the type of second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

 that Gilbert represents. Her works have not usually been marked out for criticism because of their specific content, but rather for their cultural associations and the theoretical perspective from which they are borne. Her approach has been called "Anglo-American" and overly "liberal."

Gilbert has also been criticized for seeming to group together all forms of female experience, displaying a failure to consider issues of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and historical period. Her yoking together of Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...

 and Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...

 is a pertinent example. Put simply, Gilbert's most oft-cited error is that of creating universal standards, both for women and for the patriarchal systems which oppress them.

Critical works

  • Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Cornell University Press, 1972)

Co-authored with Susan Gubar

  • A Guide to The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (W.W. Norton, 1985; revised second edition 1996)
  • The War of the Words, Volume I of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press
    Yale University Press
    Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

    , 1988)
  • Sexchanges, Volume II of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1989)
  • Letters from the Front, Volume III of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1994)
  • Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (Rutgers University Press
    Rutgers University Press
    Rutgers University Press is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in Piscataway, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University.-History:...

    , 1995)

Poetry

  • In the Fourth World (University of Alabama Press
    University of Alabama Press
    The University of Alabama Press was founded in 1945 and is the scholarly publishing arm of the University of Alabama.An Editorial Board composed of representatives from all doctoral degree granting public universities within Alabama oversees the publishing program. Projects are selected that...

    , 1979)
  • The Summer Kitchen (Heyeck Press, 1983)
  • Emily's Bread (W. W. Norton, 1984)
  • Blood Pressure (W. W. Norton, 1989)
  • Ghost Volcano (W. W. Norton, 1997)
  • Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (W. W. Norton, 2000)
  • The Italian Collection (Depot Books, 2003)
  • Belongings (W. W. Norton, 2006)
  • Aftermath: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2011)

Non-fiction

  • Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (W. W. Norton, 1995)
  • Death's Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve (W. W. Norton, 2006)
  • Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions (W. W. Norton, 2011)

Other publications

Gilbert has edited a collection of elegies:
  • Inventions of Farewell (W. W. Norton, 2001)


With Susan Gubar, she has edited several collections:
  • Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Indiana University Press
    Indiana University Press
    Indiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is an academic publisher at Indiana University that specializes in the humanities and social sciences. It was founded in 1950. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana....

    , 1981)
  • The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English (W.W. Norton, 1985, 1990, 1996, 2007)
  • Women Poets, Special Double Issue of Women's Studies (1980)
  • The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (Gordon and Breach, 1986)


With Susan Gubar and Diana O'Hehir
Diana O'Hehir
Diana Farnham O'Hehir is a poet and writer of prose from northern California. She was born in Berkeley in 1929. She taught from 1961 to 1992 at Mills College in Oakland where she is Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Professor Emerita of American Literature. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, writer...

, she has edited a collection of poetry:
  • MotherSongs: Poetry by, for, and about Mothers (W.W. Norton, 1995)


With Wendy Barker
Wendy Barker
Wendy Bean Barker is an American poet. She is Poet-in-Residence and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.- Biography :...

, she has edited a collection of essays on the work of Ruth Stone:
  • The House is Made of Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996)


External links

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