Honoring Women’s Literature Historian, Theorist, and Critic, Sandra Gilbert (1936–2024)
The Kate Chopin International Society acknowledges the loss of women’s literature pioneer, Sandra Gilbert, on November 10, 2024. Readers may access her full obituary.
Today’s students of Kate Chopin might encounter Gilbert by chance, casually stumbling upon her article, “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire,” while seeking insight into the gold imagery gleaming throughout Edna’s dinner party scene in The Awakening. If that is students’ only exposure to her, they might think of Gilbert as a Chopin scholar, one who devoted her entire career to the study of a single author.
Gilbert was far more consequential.
She and coauthor, Susan Gubar, have been called “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking” for their part in the movement to forge a women’s literary tradition from the countless female-authored texts that had been excised from the study of literary history, theory, and criticism. Together, they launched nothing short of a female literary canon.
So successful were the coauthors in making women’s texts available for reading, teaching, and discussing by collecting them in print and developing ways to think about a distinctly female literary trajectory that today’s students might reasonably doubt there was ever a time when we did not study women’s writing. To situate such history, I often share with classes that my own 1980 undergraduate anthology in American literature collected all of three women writers in a period covering nearly 300 years of U.S. history. What I did not know at the time was that Gilbert and Gubar had published their vanguard The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) only one year prior. Preceded by few like-minded tomes—Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976) and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977)—Madwoman was succeeded by the coauthors’ The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985) and the three-volume No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988-94), where “Aphrodite’s Second Coming” is reprinted in Volume 2. An explosion of women’s literary anthologies, critical treatises, and literature courses ensued, so many that today, we can almost forget a time when they did not exist.
Gilbert and Gubar’s trailblazing was not without resistance. Even among feminist scholars, Madwoman was not universally accepted or celebrated without critique. Still, the coauthors’ achievement is hard to overstate. In a twentieth-anniversary retrospective, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote: “The story of feminist literary criticism can be told through [Madwoman’s] . . . fortunes.” Because of Madwoman, all women’s literary studies, including Chopin Studies, flourished.
We should not forget Sandra Gilbert. Her prodigious distinctions in scholarship, teaching, and service are enumerated by a number of media outlets, including the New York Times. She is remembered by the Modern Language Association, for whom she served as president in 1996, as a “giant of feminist literary theory and a beloved professor . . . [who] shaped the minds of countless students and scholars for more than five decades.”
The Kate Chopin International Society pays its respects to and gratitude for the life and work of Sandra Gilbert.
