"It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where woman are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters…Whether she is a passive angel or an active monster, in other words, the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to ‘breed’ like sentences of death in the bloody shoes she inherits from her literary foremothers. "

- - “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination” from Chapter 2 Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship - Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar