Curriculum  /  ELA  /  10th Grade  /  Unit 10: Sanity & Madness in A Streetcar Named Desire & Ma Rainey's Black Bottom  /  Lesson 3

Sanity & Madness in A Streetcar Named Desire & Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Lesson 3
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ELA

Unit 10

10th Grade

Lesson 3 of 23

Objective

Explain the madwoman in the attic archetype/literary trope.

Apply the madwoman archetype to a close reading and analysis of an excerpt of Jane Eyre.

Readings and Materials

  • Excerpt: Jane Eyre Volume 3, Chapter 1 by Charlotte Brontë  — (from "My brother in the interval was dead" to "and go home to God!")

  • Article: “Literary Theory: "The Madwoman in the Attic" (1979)” by Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert 

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A Note for Teachers

  • In the first half of this lesson, students will experience a lecture, a common mode of learning in college courses and an efficient means of making sure that students have content knowledge necessary to apply in later analysis at a high level. This lesson gives 10th grade students an at-bat with taking notes and making meaning during this style of lesson; to avoid the pitfalls of lectures and scaffold student practice prior to college, teachers should ensure they are continuing to monitor student work and respond.
  • The following list includes examples of the note taking skills that you should expect from students and teach into:
    • Create a heading for your notes that includes the date, the unit of study, and the topic of the lecture
    • Create subheadings for your notes as they are addressed in the lecture
    • Use an outline or bullet points structure to organize notes
    • Define, emphasize, and add key terms as they are defined
    • Include any examples or illustrations of ideas when necessary to aid in your memory development 
  • In this excerpt of Jane Eyre, Rochester shares the tale of his marriage to Bertha Mason in Jamaica. As students read, they should carefully note the terms he uses to describe his marriage as well as Bertha.

Target Task

Writing Prompt

To what extent does Rochester’s description of Bertha align with the archetype of the madwoman?

Sample Response

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Key Thinking

Annotation Focus

What words, lines, and phrases does Rochester use to characterize his first wife?

Scaffolding Questions

How does Rochester characterize his wife? 

How does he describe his luck in marrying Bertha? What impact does this description of his luck have on the audience? In other words, do we feel sympathy for Rochester or Bertha?

Who is responsible for the monstrous person Bertha has become? Herself or Rochester?

Discourse Questions

To what extent does Rochester’s description of Bertha align with the archetype 
of the madwoman? 

Key Points for Lecture

  • An archetype is a recurrent or typical image, figure, setting, story pattern, or character type in literature. Archetypes provide a common thread through the diverse literary experiences of individuals. 
  • In 1979, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a hallmark of second-wave feminist criticism. It presents an analysis of a trope found in 19th-century literature. Gilbert and Gubar proposed that all female characters in male-authored novels can be categorized as either an angel or a monster; women in fiction were either pure and submissive or sensual, rebellious, and uncontrollable, all undesirable qualities in a Victorian woman. 
  • In their book, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the angel/monster trope in novels written by women, covering the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontës. They claim that 19th-century female writers carried a lot of rage and frustration about the male-dominated literary tradition they tried to enter, and that this gender-specific frustration influenced these writers’ creative output. According to Gilbert and Gubar, their rage was often shown through the figure of the mad woman. They conclude by urging female writers to break out of this dichotomy and not to let themselves be limited by its impositions.

Homework

  • Prepare for the Socratic seminar in Lesson 5 by gathering evidence and identifying ideas and arguments per question.

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Standards

  • LO 1.2A — Analyze the development of an argument, evaluating its central claim(s), the soundness of the reasoning, and the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
  • RI.9-10.1 — Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Supporting Standards

LO 5.1A
LO 5.1B
RL.9-10.1
SL.9-10.1

Next

Analyze how the speaker in K.P Page’s poem portrays the landlady as a complex character. 

Lesson 4
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