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

This chapter begins with an explanation of Milton’s bogey—a phrase that comes from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and refers, the authors suggest, to a “patriarchal specter” that haunts several of the women writers discussed in the book. Milton’s bogey is the “powerful rendering of the culture myth that Woolf, like most other literary women, sensed at the heart of Western literary patriarchy” (191); this culture myth is explored in detail in Paradise Lost.

The misogyny of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, combined with its universal appeal as a rendering of the best-known Bible story, makes it a complex work for women readers, who may internalize Milton’s messages about females. Women writers find it difficult to follow the example of many male writers who model their own literary ambitions on Milton; to do so would feel like a betrayal. According to Gilbert and Gubar, many women writers, like Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, display a complicated relationship with Milton and with Paradise Lost in their own writing.

The misogyny of Paradise Lost is most apparent in the parallels that exist between the character of Eve and the character of Satan.