ABSTRACT
The alleged tragedy of Jane Welsh Carlyle's life is one built upon ignorance and founded upon falsehood. For over one hundred years, she has been damned and defamed. In spite of her nobility of character and wit, and her talents as a writer and thinker, Jane Carlyle has been consistently condemned because she dared to marry the irascible Thomas Carlyle. Many psychoanalytic critics and feminist scholars feel, in varying degrees, betrayed by her – she has become the symbol of the presumed oppression in Victorian marriage. Perhaps inevitably, post-modern criticism has perpetuated the myth of Jane Carlyle, to the point where the windmill of illusion spins to a blur. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar emerged as the chief spokespersons of psycho-feminist theory, and they comfortably and without hesitation asserted that the Victorian pen and the Victorian penis were indistinguishable, at least metaphorically.
