The anxiety of authorship among women fantasy writers

This thesis applies Gilbert's and Gubar's feminist theory evident in The Madwoman in the Attic to the male-dominated, gender biased fantasy genre that works to support and embolden evidence of an existing "anxiety of authorship" among modern women fantasy writers. Anxiety faced by women writers in the fantasy genre is multifaceted in that previous fantasy works as well as publishers have created a bias based around women. In this essay, I answer questions that Gilbert and Gubar posit in their original work, such as what ghosts or parasitical presences women writers are confronting when attempting the pen and in what ways the act of attempting to write will isolate or destroy her. As I apply these questions to the fantasy genre, I examine how works by male fantasy authors offer unsatisfactory representations of women, and severe cases of publisher, reader, and reviewer gender bias in fantasy that contribute to loss of confidence and sense of identity among women writers as they struggle for their own self-creation. My creative fantasy piece emerged from the question of how a character might live with themselves if they were at fault for a widespread issue that ruined the lives of many. In my piece, I delve deeply into the inner workings of the main character, who struggles with PTSD after the traumatic loss of her mother, and who also struggles to live with the guilt of her part in an empire-wide tradition that results in the deaths of many. The piece is written by me, as a woman fantasy writer, and centered on a female protagonist and told through a female gaze, which correlates with the critical introduction.