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| Armytage Open Lecture |
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1.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860-1935): a
prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short
stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social
reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women,
and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of
her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is
her semi-autobiographical short story "The
Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum
psychosis.
2. The Yellow Wall Paper: a
6,000-word short
story by the American writer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, first
published in January 1892 in The New
England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of
American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's
physical and mental health.
Presented in the first
person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman
(Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom
of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has
to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a
"temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and
there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control
her access to the rest of the house.
The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental
health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern
and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It
makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like
buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about
that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the
color of the paper! A yellow smell."
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping
around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of
them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing
to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the
ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly
on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so
I cannot lose my way."
3.
Gilman's own words:
In The Yellow
Wallpaper Gilman
portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and
professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression
that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind,
women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time
women’s-rights
advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill
was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to
play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing,
because their writing would ultimately create an identity, and become a form of
defiance for them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman realized that writing became one of
the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few
rights.
4.
Feminist Interpretation:
This story has been interpreted by feminist
critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of
the 19th-century medical profession. Feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the
story. While some may claim that the narrator slipped into insanity, others see
the ending as a woman's assertion of freedom in a marriage in which she felt
trapped. The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered
practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the
narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would
begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found the escape she was looking for.
Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could
not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband
lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over
him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her
sanity.
5. Themes:
The Subordination of Women in Marriage
In "The
Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman uses the conventions of the psychological horror tale
to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially
as practiced by the "respectable" classes of her time. When the story was first
published, most readers took it as a scary tale about a woman in an extreme
state of consciousness—a gripping, disturbing entertainment, but little more.
After its rediscovery in the twentieth century, however, readings of the story
have become more complex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century
middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the "domestic"
functions of the female and the "active" work of the male, ensured that women
remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this gender division had
the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing
their full development. John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and
maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the
name of "helping" her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant
child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal.
The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she
retreats into her obsessive fantasy, the only place she can retain some control
and exercise the power of her mind.
The
Importance of Self-Expression
The mental
constraints placed upon the narrator, even more so than the physical ones, are
what ultimately drive her insane. She is forced to hide her anxieties and fears
in order to preserve the facade of a happy marriage and to make it seem as
though she is winning the fight against her depression. From the beginning, the
most intolerable aspect of her treatment is the compulsory silence and idleness
of the "resting cure." She is forced to become completely passive, forbidden
from exercising her mind in any way. Writing is especially off limits, and John
warns her several times that she must use her self-control to rein in her
imagination, which he fears will run away with her. Of course, the narrator’s
eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not
the expression of it. She is constantly longing for an emotional and
intellectual outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal, which she
describes more than once as a "relief" to her mind. For Gilman, a mind that is
kept in a state of forced inactivity is doomed to self-destruction.
The Evils
of the "Resting Cure"
As someone
who almost was destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s "resting cure" for depression, it
is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this
ineffective and cruel course of treatment. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an
illustration of the way a mind that is already plagued with anxiety can
deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and
kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in the
story, took Gilman’s criticism to heart and abandoned the "resting cure."Beyond
the specific technique described in the story, Gilman means to criticize any
form of medical care that ignores the concerns of the patient, considering her
only as a passive object of treatment. The connection between a woman’s
subordination in the home and her subordination in a doctor/patient relationship
is clear—John is, after all, the narrator’s husband and doctor. Gilman implies
that both forms of authority can be easily abused, even when the husband or
doctor means to help. All too often, the women who are the silent subjects of
this authority are infantilized, or worse.
6.
Irony:
Irony is a
way of using words to convey multiple levels of meaning that contrast with or
complicate one another. In verbal irony, words are frequently used to convey the
exact opposite of their literal meaning, such as when one person responds to
another’s mistake by saying "nice work."(Sarcasm—which this example embodies—is
a form of verbal irony.) In her journal, the narrator uses verbal irony often,
especially in reference to her husband: "John laughs at me, of course, but one
expects that in marriage." Obviously, one expects no such thing, at least not in
a healthy marriage. Later, she says, "I am glad my case is not serious," at a
point when it is clear that she is concerned that her case is very serious
indeed.
Dramatic
irony occurs when there is a contrast between the reader’s knowledge and the
knowledge of the characters in the work. Dramatic irony is used extensively in
"The Yellow Wallpaper." For example, when the narrator first describes the
bedroom John has chosen for them, she attributes the room’s bizarre features—the
"rings and things" in the walls, the nailed-down furniture, the bars on the
windows, and the torn wallpaper—to the fact that it must have once been used as
a nursery. Even this early in the story, the reader sees that there is an
equally plausible explanation for these details: the room had been used to house
an insane person. Another example is when the narrator assumes that Jennie
shares her interest in the wallpaper, while it is clear that Jennie is only now
noticing the source of the yellow stains on their clothing. The effect
intensifies toward the end of the story, as the narrator sinks further into her
fantasy and the reader remains able to see her actions from the "outside." By
the time the narrator fully identifies with the trapped woman she sees in the
wallpaper, the reader can appreciate the narrator’s experience from her point of
view as well as John’s shock at what he sees when he breaks down the door to the
bedroom.
Situational irony refers to moments when a character’s actions have
the opposite of their intended effect. For example, John’s course of treatment
back fires, worsening the depression he was trying to cure and actually driving
his wife insane. Similarly, there is a deep irony in the way the narrator’s fate
develops. She gains a kind of power and insight only by losing what we would
call her self-control and reason.
7.
Wallpaper as a Symbol:
"The
Yellow Wallpaper" is driven by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text
she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly.
Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first
it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an "unclean yellow."The
worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as
she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for
hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in
certain light. Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate
woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the
main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees
this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled
as they tried to escape. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure of
family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped.
Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman skillfully uses this nightmarish,
hideous paper as a symbol of the domestic life that traps so many
women.
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1.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860-1935): a
prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short
stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social
reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women,
and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of
her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is
her semi-autobiographical short story "The
Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum
psychosis.
2. The Yellow Wall Paper: a
6,000-word short
story by the American writer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, first
published in January 1892 in The New
England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of
American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's
physical and mental health.
Presented in the first
person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman
(Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom
of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has
to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a
"temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and
there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control
her access to the rest of the house.
The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental
health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern
and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It
makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like
buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about
that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the
color of the paper! A yellow smell."
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping
around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of
them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing
to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the
ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly
on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so
I cannot lose my way."
3.
Gilman's own words:
In The Yellow
Wallpaper Gilman
portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and
professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression
that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind,
women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time
women’s-rights
advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill
was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to
play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing,
because their writing would ultimately create an identity, and become a form of
defiance for them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman realized that writing became one of
the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few
rights.
4.
Feminist Interpretation:
This story has been interpreted by feminist
critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of
the 19th-century medical profession. Feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the
story. While some may claim that the narrator slipped into insanity, others see
the ending as a woman's assertion of freedom in a marriage in which she felt
trapped. The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered
practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the
narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would
begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found the escape she was looking for.
Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could
not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband
lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over
him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her
sanity.
5. Themes:
The Subordination of Women in Marriage
In "The
Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman uses the conventions of the psychological horror tale
to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially
as practiced by the "respectable" classes of her time. When the story was first
published, most readers took it as a scary tale about a woman in an extreme
state of consciousness—a gripping, disturbing entertainment, but little more.
After its rediscovery in the twentieth century, however, readings of the story
have become more complex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century
middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the "domestic"
functions of the female and the "active" work of the male, ensured that women
remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this gender division had
the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing
their full development. John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and
maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the
name of "helping" her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant
child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal.
The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she
retreats into her obsessive fantasy, the only place she can retain some control
and exercise the power of her mind.
The
Importance of Self-Expression
The mental
constraints placed upon the narrator, even more so than the physical ones, are
what ultimately drive her insane. She is forced to hide her anxieties and fears
in order to preserve the facade of a happy marriage and to make it seem as
though she is winning the fight against her depression. From the beginning, the
most intolerable aspect of her treatment is the compulsory silence and idleness
of the "resting cure." She is forced to become completely passive, forbidden
from exercising her mind in any way. Writing is especially off limits, and John
warns her several times that she must use her self-control to rein in her
imagination, which he fears will run away with her. Of course, the narrator’s
eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not
the expression of it. She is constantly longing for an emotional and
intellectual outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal, which she
describes more than once as a "relief" to her mind. For Gilman, a mind that is
kept in a state of forced inactivity is doomed to self-destruction.
The Evils
of the "Resting Cure"
As someone
who almost was destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s "resting cure" for depression, it
is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this
ineffective and cruel course of treatment. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an
illustration of the way a mind that is already plagued with anxiety can
deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and
kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in the
story, took Gilman’s criticism to heart and abandoned the "resting cure."Beyond
the specific technique described in the story, Gilman means to criticize any
form of medical care that ignores the concerns of the patient, considering her
only as a passive object of treatment. The connection between a woman’s
subordination in the home and her subordination in a doctor/patient relationship
is clear—John is, after all, the narrator’s husband and doctor. Gilman implies
that both forms of authority can be easily abused, even when the husband or
doctor means to help. All too often, the women who are the silent subjects of
this authority are infantilized, or worse.
6.
Irony:
Irony is a
way of using words to convey multiple levels of meaning that contrast with or
complicate one another. In verbal irony, words are frequently used to convey the
exact opposite of their literal meaning, such as when one person responds to
another’s mistake by saying "nice work."(Sarcasm—which this example embodies—is
a form of verbal irony.) In her journal, the narrator uses verbal irony often,
especially in reference to her husband: "John laughs at me, of course, but one
expects that in marriage." Obviously, one expects no such thing, at least not in
a healthy marriage. Later, she says, "I am glad my case is not serious," at a
point when it is clear that she is concerned that her case is very serious
indeed.
Dramatic
irony occurs when there is a contrast between the reader’s knowledge and the
knowledge of the characters in the work. Dramatic irony is used extensively in
"The Yellow Wallpaper." For example, when the narrator first describes the
bedroom John has chosen for them, she attributes the room’s bizarre features—the
"rings and things" in the walls, the nailed-down furniture, the bars on the
windows, and the torn wallpaper—to the fact that it must have once been used as
a nursery. Even this early in the story, the reader sees that there is an
equally plausible explanation for these details: the room had been used to house
an insane person. Another example is when the narrator assumes that Jennie
shares her interest in the wallpaper, while it is clear that Jennie is only now
noticing the source of the yellow stains on their clothing. The effect
intensifies toward the end of the story, as the narrator sinks further into her
fantasy and the reader remains able to see her actions from the "outside." By
the time the narrator fully identifies with the trapped woman she sees in the
wallpaper, the reader can appreciate the narrator’s experience from her point of
view as well as John’s shock at what he sees when he breaks down the door to the
bedroom.
Situational irony refers to moments when a character’s actions have
the opposite of their intended effect. For example, John’s course of treatment
back fires, worsening the depression he was trying to cure and actually driving
his wife insane. Similarly, there is a deep irony in the way the narrator’s fate
develops. She gains a kind of power and insight only by losing what we would
call her self-control and reason.
7.
Wallpaper as a Symbol:
"The
Yellow Wallpaper" is driven by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text
she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly.
Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first
it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an "unclean yellow."The
worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as
she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for
hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in
certain light. Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate
woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the
main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees
this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled
as they tried to escape. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure of
family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped.
Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman skillfully uses this nightmarish,
hideous paper as a symbol of the domestic life that traps so many
women.
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