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Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the concept of "anxiety of influence" proposed by Harold Bloom does not apply to women writers because they lacked influential female predecessors. Instead, they experience an "anxiety of authorship" due to fears of not being taken seriously or considered good enough in a male-dominated literary field. They also wanted to establish a matrilineal tradition where women writers support each other rather than feeling they must invalidate their predecessors.

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274 views2 pages

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the concept of "anxiety of influence" proposed by Harold Bloom does not apply to women writers because they lacked influential female predecessors. Instead, they experience an "anxiety of authorship" due to fears of not being taken seriously or considered good enough in a male-dominated literary field. They also wanted to establish a matrilineal tradition where women writers support each other rather than feeling they must invalidate their predecessors.

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aresdedios
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SANDRA GILBERT & SUSAN GUBAR

Harold Bloom’s idea of anxiety of influence: the kind of anxiety that an author may
experience when writing a new work. In other words, anxiety of influence is the feeling that
the author may experience because he or she wants to be superior or, at least, equal to his/her
predecessors.

According to Gilbert and Gubar, this kind of anxiety was only experienced by male writers as
women did not have any predecessors to look up to, live up to, or simply to look at. They
then created the concept of “Anxiety of authorship”, which was based on the idea that as
women writers didn’t have the same kind of historical tradition as men did, and they were not
influential in the past so they could not experience this kind of anxiety. Instead, they will
focus on the idea that they may not be taken seriously or they may not be considered good
enough by other writers, mainly male writers. This feeling will be called “anxiety of
authorship”.

According to Harold Bloom, the relationships between literary artists were a kind of father
and son relationship, in which a new artist can only become an artist by somehow
invalidating his predecessor or poetic father.

Gilbert and Gubar wanted to create some kind of matrilineal tradition, in which a new literary
artist can look up to her predecessors and simply create her own work without having to
destroy or invalidate them. In some way, they just wanted to support each other instead of
fighting between them to outdo their predecessors.

In "Infection in the sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship," they focus
on Harold Bloom's description of the term "anxiety of influence," stating that this kind of
anxiety cannot be experienced by women writers because they have no female predecessors
to live up to, or simply to look at. They then create the concept of "anxiety of authorship",
which consists of the idea that women writers experienced this feeling because they were not
taken seriously in the literary field, so they were afraid of not being good enough to be
considered a real writer in a male-dominated literary field.

They also claim that this patriarchal authority defines women in literary works as either
angels or monsters, with angels being those who followed the patriarchal way of life
established in the 19th and 20th centuries, and monsters being those women who deviated
from this pattern and did not follow male rules.

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