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

The authors begin this chapter with a description of George Eliot’s reaction to American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe’s claim that she was visited by “the spectral presence of Charlotte Brontë” (444). Eliot may have found Stowe’s tale of “spirit-communication” amusing, but she went on to write The Lifted Veil, a novella concerning a protagonist with powers of extrasensory perception. This example of contradictory behavior gives Gilbert and Gubar reason to describe Eliot as a woman writer with an “ambivalent sense of herself” (445).

The protagonist of The Lifted Veil, a man named Latimer, can see into the future. His hallucinations make him miserable because he is unable to change anything about his future; the events he foresees are not at all in his control. Some literary critics believe that Latimer shares many qualities with his author, and Gilbert and Gubar compare him to William Crimsworth, the title character of Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor.

According to Gilbert and Gubar, one important link between Latimer and Eliot is their shared belief that “imaginative vision” is a negative condition. In addition, Latimer’s pained and unhappy situation in the world echoes the plight of many women, who are regarded, like him, as “secondary” to others.