"The Madwoman in the Attic"

In their book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar write about the artist's "anxiety of influence." They explain it as the artist's "fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writing" (2025 in Norton). Gilbert and Gubar go on to argue that this anxiety functions much like the Oedipal complex, where the artist seeks to prove his worth as an artist by "killing" his predecessors. This, they maintain, is the struggle that male artists endure; the struggle for female artists is quite different. For women, they argue, the struggle is to find a "female precursor who, far from representing a threatening force to be denied or killed, proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible" (Norton 2027).

I understand the argument. Men have to worry about proving their worth as an artist, women have to prove that they can be artists. The distinction makes sense, especially examining the history of patriarchy as Gilbert and Gubar do.

However, in reading yet another work that emphasizes the difference between men and women, between their experiences and between them as artists, I find myself wondering when it will end. When will we look at an artist and not have to distinguish them as male or female, but just as an artist? Why can't we just say "author," why do we have to say "female author"? Can't we just accept what Woolf suggests: that we all are masculine and feminine, just in different proportions? I agree with Woolf that an awareness of our sex causes issues--it is what makes us scramble to label artists male or female. I wish we could erase the need for such qualifiers.