basis for future gender – inequality. But why do mothers influence the child in a way that perpetrates gender dichotomy? The answer to this goes back perhaps, to the time when the society was initially being formed. Women are physically weak as compared to men; they become restricted during gestation and pregnancy, and during the period of lactation. For all this they require male support and protection therefore, the male who provides for the woman and the children owns them. Since the man had to move out of the house to earn a living he wanted to be assured that the children for whom he fends, are his. To ensure this, women are restricted and chained to the confines of their homes. Therefore, over the centuries the social construction of the society was orchestrated to suppress women and subjugate them.
This is vividly depicted in the literature and art of those times, a woman persona that was frequently found in the novels of the 19th century orthodox conservative female novelist was drawn in the image of the angel-perfect, sacrificing and self-disciplined housewife who is implicitly or explicitly a contrast to the implicit whore-figure. The woman in Hunt's painting, "The Awakening Conscience” is poised between these two possibilities for female subjectivity. Such a situation prevailed upon a lot many female novelists and urged them to question aspects of domestic ideology, a portrayal and exploration of which makes Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gunbar a ground breaking