Behind a successful man there is a strong woman. We have all heard this adage so many times before. Throughout history there has been a plethora of examples: Jacqueline Kennedy to John F. Kennedy, Rachel Robinson to Jackie Robinson, Coretta Scott King to Martin Luther King Jr., Miss Elizabeth to Randy “The Macho Man” Savage. Many people do not recognize the last pair because it is a reference to the World Wrestling Federation, now the WWE. However, Miss Elizabeth was a character that reflects several of the ideas conveyed in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwomen in the Attic.
Elizabeth Anne Hulette, better known to the wrestling world as Miss Elizabeth made her WWF (E) debut in 1985. Her debut was not as a wrestler, a color commentator, but as a wrestling manager. Miss Elizabeth was not a great manager, but she helped Randy Savage become the world heavy weight champion. She was beautiful, graceful and very soft spoken, barely saying a word. She wore elegant clothing to ring and presented herself like a lady. She commonly wore white dresses complemented with white gloves to signify her pleasantness and purity. Her gimmick was that of a quiet, innocent woman. In the eyes of Gilbert and Gubar, Miss Elizabeth was the ideal type of woman they wrote of in their text. Miss Elizabeth was “neither great nor extraordinary… [she had] no story except a sort of antistory of selfless innocence based on the notion that man must be pleased” (814). The act of being selfless and putting a man’s needs first are the “proper acts of a lady” Elizabeth Anne Hulette portrayed as her character.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwomen in the Attic discusses several women writers of the nineteenth century who were forced to categorize their female characters as either the extreme images of angel or monster. Gilbert and Gubar’s work can still be relevant today. Female characters such as Miss Elizabeth would fall under the angel group. She reflected several ideals the authors discussed in their text. The authors stressed the importance of killing these two images of women because neither can accurately define a woman. And Miss Elizabeth did just that as her career went on: being a mixture of face and heel or good and bad character.
Work Cited
Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An
Anthology. Julie Rivkin and Micael Ryan. 812-825.
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