Does "The Madwoman" Belong in the Workshop?

It’s a well-known occupational hazard for creative writing instructors that the workshop today carries a certain risk of unintended consequences, at least regarding how they, deliberately or not, interfere with a student’s writing potential or creative freedom. We know this can be accomplished in any number of ways, with responses to drafts, assigned readings as models and the overall classroom atmosphere being just a few of the more evident. What is less evident are the lessons shared of the creation of a text itself that a student writer may not be aware of and runs counter to his or her creative identity.

After reading Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking feminist study of nineteenth-century literature by women, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and re-familiarizing myself with the construction of patriarchal texts and their effects on writers of both sexes, I immediately asked myself whether the contemporary workshop has addressed any of these issues for women who see themselves as writing-as-woman. It hasn’t escaped my attention, over the last several years, the workshops and introductory creative writing courses I taught have been predominantly attended by women; and of these attendees, it has been frequently (but not always, of course) the women who soldier on through the usual difficulties for a novice writer and voice the loudest concerns about whether or not they are actually accomplishing anything. This is not to say the men in my workshops are inherently lackadaisical about creative writing, but Madwoman has me considering the difficulties—at least for women—of not only writing from a strictly male-centered tradition that our canon still emphasizes to some degree but if I should address this problem—and not out of academic responsibility, either, but for those grander purposes which a creative writing workshop is designed to fulfill.

Do I give my women students Gilbert and Gubar’s first three chapters, with particular emphasis on “Infection in the Sentence,” then, and awaken them to the horrible truth of what they may think are their original, feminine writings? Should this theoretical background come before I teach the conventions of genre, or are instructors obliged to make their women students grasp and expose their limitations before springing the bad news? Personally, for introductory courses, I’m more inclined to have students chip away at the patriarchy with the reading selections I give them and let them create their own consciousness of the problem based on craft issues; this semester I’ve used Sylvia Plath’s Ariel as a primary model for our poetry assignments, as well as Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way, which, for those not familiar with his work, employs a distinct gender-neutral syntax for male and female narrators with a heaping dose of sexual ambiguity. I tend to save the Dead White Males for literature courses when I have no other choice (and if I’m teaching Flash Fiction in the workshop, Hemingway has got to come in there). As for the rest, it may seem a huge trepidation to have women students as novices become the next Plath or Charlotte Perkins Gilman—unless, that is, a specific workshop was set up with that intent and established from day one. Otherwise, even Gilbert and Gubar concede that “there is no real reason why a woman writer cannot tell traditional kinds of stories, even if they are about male heroes and even if they inevitably fit into male-devised generic structures” (68). If there is such harm afoot in a workshop to turn women writers into masculine subordinates, it may not be as great as one thinks, provided an instructor does not deliberately champion the production of a specific male-oriented text through various methods and designs. But perhaps that still doesn’t make things equitable in the long-run for a woman student’s writing life.

The implementation of Madwoman’s introductory chapters is an intriguing proposition for the workshopper to challenge women students, though one that shouldn’t be taken so lightly and executed without thoughtful deliberation of the skill level of that class, including its overall demographic. How this material could have bearing on writing assignments for each particular literary genre and whether it would be of any use to male students who want to write female-centered texts are certainly issues to consider further.