Exposing the role of women in The Madwoman in the AtticIn their book The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar address the question of the literary potential of women in a a world shaped by and for men. Specifically, Gilbert and Gubar are interested in the 19th century woman and how her role was based on her association with the symbols of angels, monsters, or sometimes both. Because the role of the angel was ideally passive and that of the monster was naturally evil, both limited a woman's behavior to calm content, with few words to oppose it. Nineteenth-century women, Gilbert and Gubar argue, led quiet, passive lives, embodying the ideals of the vision of the "Eternal Feminine" in Goethe's Faust. Passivity led to the belief that women were more spiritual than men, expected to contemplate rather than act. “It is precisely because women are defined as totally passive, completely devoid of generative power that they become insignificant for male artists,” they write on page 599. It is this celestial quality that separated them from men earthly creatures capable of leading a life of action, and thus, capable of handling the pen. Of course, lives without action were hardly worth recording, and so the passive woman had no story to tell, no book to write. According to our two authors, a woman without her own story became an angel in the house, one who heard the stories of others but never told her own. Women were encouraged to live according to these descriptions, to be the eternal silent feminine, content only to please society rather than themselves. "For in the metaphysical void, their 'purity' means that they are, of course, selfless," Gilbert and Gubar write on page 599. As selfless beings, women found themselves voiceless, destined for a life.... ... middle of paper ...... like Irene and Clare is crucial to discovering our power to transcend the discrimination of the society we live in, by creating literature that helps change culture for best. Only when we recognize the struggle between the angel and the monster can we free ourselves from both. Works Cited Fetterly, Judith. “On the politics of literature. » Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1998. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1998. Larsen, Nella. Passage. New York, NY: Penguin Books: 1997. Said, Edward. "Orientalism." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers Inc.. 1998.