ABSTRACT
I used as my starting point in this project Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s trenchant response to Bloom in their essay ‘Infection in the sentence: the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship’.2 In that essay, Gilbert and Gubar posed questions along the following lines:
If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s own voice, how do its kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she ‘talk back’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint?
