Gilbert, Sandra M(ortola)

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GILBERT, Sandra M(ortola)

Born 27 December 1936, New York, New York

Daughter of Alexis J. and Angela Caruso Mortola; married Elliot L. Gilbert, 1957 (died 1991); children: Roger, Katherine, Susanna

Sandra M. Gilbert is a widely published and influential feminist literary critic; she is also a poet with four collections of poetry. Her major critical works, beginning in 1979 with Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, have been written in collaboration with Susan Gubar. The collaboration has been a fruitful one. Shakespeare's Sisters marked the beginning of Gilbert's wide-ranging examination of what it has meant to be a woman writing in English in a culture whose literary values have been determined by men, and in which "woman poet" has been considered a "contradiction in terms." The book is a compilation of 19 essays about women poets, from pre-19th-century writers to contemporary. The effort is to recover lost poets, to reassess women's poetry, and to trace the outlines of a distinctively female poetic tradition.

In The Madwoman in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar scrutinized problems of literary heritage, of women writers' alienation from male predecessors who depicted women as either "angels or monsters." They explore the "anxiety of authorship" that confronted women novelists of the 19th century: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and poets Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As critic Walter Kendrick noted, the madwoman image serves "as an emblem of the confinement inflicted on Victorian women who wished to write."

The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by Gilbert and Gubar, was designed to serve as a "core-curriculum" text for courses in literature by women. While the principle of selection of this comprehensive and somewhat unwieldy volume has been challenged by some reviewers, it is a valuable compilation of women's work in every period and genre and provides useful editorial material.

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century continues Gilbert's and Gubar's reassessment of the literary landscape, using "the battle of the sexes" metaphor as a way to approach changes in the modern period. A reviewer described the first volume, The War of the Words (1987), as documenting "a war on women's words waged by male writers who felt their tradition invaded by alien female talents." The second volume, Sexchanges (1989), approaches the post-World War I territory more intensively, comparing texts by men and women, and providing studies of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather and a chapter on Gertrude Stein and lesbian writers of the 1920s. The third volume, Letter From the Front, published in 1994, completed the much-anticipated trilogy.

Gilbert received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1957, an M.A. from New York University (1961), and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1968). Since 1989 she has been professor of English at the University of California at Davis, where she had taught earlier (1975-80). She held a similar position at Princeton University from 1985 to 1989. Previously she was an associate professor at Indiana University (1973-75), where her collaborative work with Susan Gubar began. From 1963 to 1972, she taught at colleges in New York and California. Gilbert has also published more than 50 essays in a wide range of scholarly and literary journals and essay collections.

Gilbert and Gubar joined forces with Diana O'Hehir on Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and About Mothers (1996), a collection of poems spanning various phases of motherhood. The editors have collected poems covering several centuries and have incorporated an interesting mix of poets, including Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Donne. In the words of one critic, "There's no subject more personal yet more universal than the emotional subject of motherhood, and this vital anthology reflects that depth and variation."

Gilbert's recent volume of poetry, Ghost Volcano: Poems (1997), includes poems written while she was working on the memoir of her husband's unexpected death. The poems are arranged in five unrelated sections and appear as a series of diary-type entries describing her "widow's walks," each titled with reference to the location ("Outside Saratoga Springs"). These works are peppered with descriptions she can no longer share with her mate and the grief of a spirit that is, surprisingly enough, able to go on in the face of tragedy.

Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1997) is the aforementioned memoir of her husband Elliot's untimely death in 1991, a few short hours after routine surgery for prostate cancer. Her suspicions were raised when her questions were avoided or responded to with lies. Gilbert describes her feelings and actions during the time following the series of "medical mishaps" (including poor management of a postoperative hemorrhage) that resulted in this senseless and avoidable loss. Although the case was settled out of court with admitted negligence on the part of the medical professionals involved, the emotions of the experience are painfully clear in Gilbert's account.

Gilbert continues to write for magazines and periodicals such as Poetry, Times (London) Literary Supplement, Women's Review of Books, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary D. Litt. from Wesleyan University in 1988, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1982, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1980-81. She received the International Poetry Foundation's Charity Randall Award in 1990 and Poetry's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize in 1980. With Susan Gubar she shared the Woman of the Year Award from Ms. magazine in 1986.

Other Works:

Shakepeare's Twelfth Night (1964). Two Novels by E. M. Forster (1965). D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1965). The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1965). Two Novels by Virginia Woolf (1966). Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1973, 2nd edition, 1990). In the Fourth World (1979). The Summer Kitchen: Poems (1983). The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (edited by Gilbert, 1984). Emily's Bread: Poems (1984). The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986). Feminism and Modernism (1987). Blood Pressure (1988). Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (edited by Gilbert, 1993). Masterpiece Theatre: An Academe Melodarama (1995). The House is Made of Poetry (1996). Want: New and Selected Poems (2000).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CA (1979). CANR (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

American Literature (Mar. 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1995, 1 May 1995). British Medical Journal (19 Oct. 1996). College English (Nov. 1988). Commentary (July 1988). Comparative Literature (Spring 1991). Contemporary Sociology (July 1990). Criticism (Fall 1989). English Language Notes (Sept. 1990). Journal of American Studies (Apr. 1991). Journal ofModern Literature (Fall-Winter 1989). Journal of English and Germanic Philology (July 1989). Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1988, Winter 1989). Nation (2 July 1988). National Review (28 Oct. 1988). NYRB (31 May 1990). NYTBR (7 Feb. 1988, 19 Feb. 1989, 12 Mar. 1989). Poetry (Dec. 1996). PW (27 Mar. 1995). Studies in the Novel (Spring 1989, Winter 1990). Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Fall 1990). TLS (3 June 1988, 2 June 1989). Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (Spring 1989).