A foundational text of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic makes several key arguments in favor of the rights and the equal treatment of women. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the male depictions of women in Victorian literature as either idealized angels or vilified monsters are incomplete and diminishing. The authors also confront the Victorian notion that women artists are unwomanly and unnatural, arguing instead that women are not insane for wanting to create art, but that they become insane when they are silenced and oppressed. Additionally, Gilbert and Gubar point out that the challenges to female writers are much greater than the challenges that face male writers, who have dominated the literary arts for centuries and benefited from privileged access to education; because women must overcome significant barriers to their creativity, their work must be deemed as a uniquely female literary art form.

Through the thorough debunking of stereotypes that exist in highly varied works of women’s literature, Gilbert and Gubar encourage the reader to appreciate an essential femaleness in the works by the women writers they have selected. This act of appreciation can be difficult because many 19th-century women writers had no choice but to emulate the writing of men, thereby demonstrating that they had internalized the stereotypes of women depicted in male writing.