The Woman as Muse and Begetter: Susan Barton’s “anxiety of authorship”

In their 1979 fiddle titled The Madwoman in the bean, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss the difficulties faced by prudish women attempting to write in a patriarchal society. Gilbert and Gubar describe the fretfulness of authorship experienced by fe male generators who thus believe they argon not capable of creating a successful work. J.M. Coetzees 1986 novel Foe, follows its superstar Susan Barton as she experiences such anxiety in early eighteenth light speed England. Bartons anxieties as well as the society in which she lives bequeath her to employ the writer Daniel Foe to write the story of her experience as a castaway. Throughout her encounters with Foe, Barton describes the difficulty of penning and in one instance, asks whether in that respect exists a hypothecate for female writers as well as males. This foreland echoes that asked by Gilbert and Gubar in their examination of the differences between the experience of male and female writers. In Foe, despite t he fact that Barton gives over the responsibility of penning her story, she maintains some authority and control over the way in which it is written. The near concentrated example of this is when Barton claims the role of Foes muse, along with that of vex of her story. In doing so, she reverses gendered terms associated with re take and successfully resides an active musician in the writing of her story despite not writing it herself. unitary question raised by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic is that of the muse in relation to the female poet. Cited is Harold Blooms theme that sexual intercourse between the male poet and the female muse is a metaphor for the poetic process. Through this metaphorical encounter, the male poet and the female muse unite with the res... ...ished to tell, there is a sense that she has resigned herself to this fact and has attempted to remain close with her story through her sexual encounter with Foe and conformation of the muse. Th at she is not the writer of her story seems to imply the failings of society rather than those of her own attempts to write it. Although Barton does not overcome the gendered ideas of who can be a writer and who cannot, her decision to take advantage of other gender roles and influence the production of her story as a muse deeply involves her in the writing process. Works CitedCoetzee, J.M. Foe. London Penguin, 1987. Print. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. From The Madwoman in the Attic The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century literary Imagination. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York W. W. Norton &, 2010. 1926-1938. Print.