Revisiting Feminist Readings of the ‘Attic’

 

Revisiting Feminist Readings of the ‘Attic’

In global academic discourse, particularly in literary criticism, there remains a tendency to generalise ideas rooted in Western frameworks. Even in our post-postcolonial era, where once-rigid concepts are increasingly interrogated and deconstructed, these generalised narratives often persist. 

However, Sri Lankan feminist literature seems to offer astounding departures from these conventions. Through complex characters and culturally nuanced storytelling, local authors challenge monolithic representations of womanhood often seen in Western feminist thought. Their work not only reclaims agency for Sri Lankan women. It also enriches the global feminist canon by spotlighting perspectives shaped by unique historical and socio-political experiences.

A misunderstood room in literature

Readers familiar with iconic texts like Jane Eyre (1847) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) will recognise the symbolic weight of the attic in both narratives. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is confined to the attic at Thornfield Hall which can be seen as an act that strips her of humanity and reduces her to the infamous ‘madwoman in the attic.’ Her descent into madness is framed as both inevitable and monstrous.

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), however, radically reimagines this narrative. Writing from a postcolonial and feminist perspective, Rhys gives birth to a Bertha who is renamed as Antoinette Cosway along with a voice and a history. While Brontë’s novel silences and demonises her, Rhys’s prequel humanises her, portraying her confinement not as a result of innate madness but as a consequence of patriarchal and colonial violence. However, even within this context, the attic becomes a site of instability.

In Western literature, the attic has long been a space charged with symbolic weight, most often representing repression, madness or hidden trauma. Think of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, locked away above Thornfield Hall and branded as the ‘madwoman’. She becomes a figure who embodies everything Victorian patriarchy feared in an untamed woman. Or consider Gilaman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), where the narrator is tucked away in a former nursery upstairs, only to unravel within its peeling walls. 

The attic becomes less of a place and more of a trap. Even in Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic (1979), it is a literal prison. These stories do not just trap women in small, dark rooms but they also embed them in cultural memory as unstable or dangerous when they stray beyond domestic norms. The Western canon has made the attic a metaphor for madness. But what happens when that space is reclaimed?

Reimagining the attic 

In literary tradition, the attic has long loomed as a gothic cage and a dusty purgatory where secrets fester and women debilitate. Think of Bertha Mason locked away in a creaking upper room, symbolising the destructive grip of patriarchy. In feminist criticism, particularly Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), such spaces are synonymous with psychic collapse: “Imprisonment leads to madness,” they argued.

But Sri Lankan author Punyakante Wijenaike was not content to let the attic remain a prison. In her often overlooked novel Amulet (1994), she rewrites the script. Making the attic a sanctuary not of madness but of clarity.

The woman who was locked away, might not be lost but found

Shyamali, the protagonist, climbs into this upper room and emerges not as a ghost of herself, but as someone reborn. It is in this space, among old diaries and family shadows, that she confronts long-buried truths and begins to redraw the contours of her life. “At the age of fifty I am maturing, at long last,” she confesses. “Alone in the attic room I have, at last, the freedom to think, plan, grow…”

The transformation is striking not just to Shyamali. Her husband Senani, long accustomed to wielding control, is stunned. “While she was away the attic room was under a new strong padlock to which she had the key,” he notes. “So it was the attic that had brought a change in her!”

It had. But not in the way patriarchal literature might expect. Rather than unspooling under the weight of solitude, Shyamali reclaims it. The attic becomes a personal retreat, rather “a nunnery, a hermitage or a cell,” as the novel describes it as a sacred, self-chosen exile that grants her agency. It is a quiet act of rebellion, a feminist reimagining of domestic space as not merely something to endure but something to reshape.

While this revelation may be read as revolutionary, it is not the only domestic space that can be reimagined. This finding emphasises the need to read and reimagine narratives through a local gaze that transcends the generalised frameworks established as the norm.

Yudheera Karunaratne for Ceylon Today - https://ceylontoday.lk/2025/07/05/revisiting-feminist-readings-of-the-attic/