The Woman as Muse and Begetter: Susan Barton’s “anxiety of authorship” in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe

In their 1979 work titled The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss the difficulties faced by Victorian women attempting to write in a patriarchal society. Gilbert and Gubar describe the “anxiety of authorship” experienced by female writers who thus believe they are not capable of creating a successful work. J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe, follows its protagonist Susan Barton as she experiences such anxiety in early eighteenth century England. Barton’s anxieties as well as the society in which she lives lead 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 writing and in one instance, asks whether there exists a muse for female writers as well as males. This question echoes that asked by Gilbert and Gubar in their examination of the differences between the experience of male and female writers. In Foe, despite the fact that Barton gives over the responsibility of writing her story, she maintains some authority and control over the way in which it is written. The most concentrated example of this is when Barton claims the role of Foe’s muse, along with that of “father” of her story. In doing so, she reverses gendered terms associated with reproduction and successfully remains an active participant in the writing of her story despite not writing it herself.

One 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 Bloom’s idea 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...

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...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 embodiment of the muse. That 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 Cited

Coetzee, 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.