Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

Abstract This paper will attempt to analyze how similar forms of power play are manifested towards the protagonists in both The Bell Jar and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The aim of the essay is to investigate how power play affects the protagonists’ relations with their caregivers and how it affects their treatments. Thus, the hypothesis is that it is the power play that prevents the protagonists in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Bell Jar from recovering from their mental illness, which is confirmed by my analysis. Therefore, the concept of power play will be used in the essay as an instrument of analysis. The hypothesis will be discussed from five main points: obstacles to recovery, caregivers’ role in recovery, patients’ response to treatment, the role of power play, and the negative impact which power play has on recovery. Keywords: Power play, mental illness, treatment, recovery, patient-caregiver relationship, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Reet Sjögren.

Since 1973, the year in which Elaine Hedges's groundbreaking edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story has been read primarily as one of America's leading feminist texts. With potent symbolism and a fragmented style of narration, it is easy to understand why many feminist scholars fashion the story's narrator into a proactive feminist, a courageous heroine who rebels against patriarchal oppression. While this trend of interpretation compellingly attempts to empower the narrator, it often overlooks her perspective of disability and projects the characteristics of a nondisabled, high-functioning feminist on a mentally ill woman. This paper reads Gilman's short story as a narrative of mental illness and applies the research of feminist disability scholars Anita Silvers, Jenny Morris, and Susan Wendell to a close reading of the story. Approaching the story from this perspective, we can identify the systems of oppression that disable the narrator and read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a way that validates the subjective reality of depression and invites disabled voices into feminism's exploration of womanhood.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald provide unique insight into the patriarchal worlds they lived in through autobiographical accounts of their lives. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the diaries of Gilman and her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, serve as Gilman’s autobiographical texts of the period before, during, and immediately after her breakdown. The correspondence between Fitzgerald and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Scott’s letters to Zelda’s psychiatrists serve as a biographical (and, in the case of her letters to Scott, autobiographical) account of her life during the period of her institutionalizations, from 1930 up to Scott’s death in 1940. These biographies and autobiographies, studied in conjunction with their fictionalized autobiographical accounts, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, illustrate the struggles these women, and by extension, many women of their time, experienced when they were unable to live up to the expectations a patriarchal society placed on them to be perfect wives and mothers. The construction of the feminine by the patriarchy required women to be complacent, meek, dependent, and infantile, and this construction, complicated by the issues of institutionalization and hysteria, is at the heart of the works of Gilman and Fitzgerald. The subtexts present in their fiction demonstrate that Gilman and Fitzgerald not only understood and felt the pressure of the patriarchal construction of femininity, but were acutely aware of how it could exert itself on women, particularly white, economically privileged women. Both authors, victims of the same patriarchal mechanism that dominated society during the turn of the twentieth century, provide insight into their own perspectives through their autobiographies, and then create fictional worlds in which the implications of these perspectives are realized to the detriment of their protagonists. While critics have examined this focus within individual stories by these writers, they have not been examined together in a comprehensive discussion of the patriarchal construction of the feminine and its manifestation in the autobiographical/biographical and fictional works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald.

The term “phantom limb” is used to describe the phenomenal tingling sensation that occurs in the nerve endings of an amputated limb; though the limb is no longer physically attached to the body, the person experiences pain and physical sensation in the space the limb once occupied. Though the body part has been removed, it haunts both the body and the brain. It is through this metaphor that I am interested in investigating the connection between the disembodied and the embodied. The disembodied connects to the embodied through the loss or lack of a bodily form; the embodied, therefore, links the disembodied to movements and mannerisms of the body. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, I define manner as a fluctuating force that operates as a spectrum. Manner links, rather than separates, the internal and the external through the social. In other words, the interplay between the internal and external must be socially interpreted in order to be understood as manner. The first chapter of my thesis will focus on embodied manner and use Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a case study to explain how society impacts the construction of normative manner. Building off Jack Halberstam, I adopt the theory that Mr. Hyde “is both a sexual secret, the secret of Jekyll’s undignified desires, and a visible representation of physical otherness” (82). My argument focuses on the connection between the “deformity hidden within” Mr. Hyde and that “inscribed upon his...skin” that Utterson, Enfield and Lanyon struggle to identify (82). The second chapter of my thesis will focus on how manner operates as both a disciplinary force and cultural haunting. In other words, just as the phantom limb reproduces a distorted version of the lost limb, the social control of manner ultimately reproduces imperfect replicas. In George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, the protagonist, Latimer, begins suffering from visions after he parts ways with his dear friend Charles Meunier. Here, the unconscious operates at the individual level; I argue that these “visions” are the result of an implosion of Latimer’s repressed sexuality. I then turn to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to argue that manner operates as a type of social law that attempts to stave off haunting but instead inadvertently reproduces it. In this section, I argue that the narrator’s secondary status as a female character gives her a different kind of agency from Mr. Hyde and Latimer, and that her husband’s ultimate failure to control her results in a type of queer production that calls into question the dialectical relationship between haunting and manner.

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The present research aims to analyze the process of discursive constitution of the narrator- character subjectivity of the tale The Yellow Wall Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The tale tells the story of a woman cloistered in a colonial mansion by her husband, who is a doctor, because of her supposed propensity for hysteria. In the seclusion, she notices other women stuck to the wallpaper of the room in which she is staying. By this movement, she writes in a diary to deal with her anxieties, yearnings and feelings, while deciphering the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. It is a literary corpus and through it we understand that historical and social practices produce the subjectivity of the narrator-character. We base ourselves on Discourse Analysis as descriptive-interpretative and analytical support, based mainly on the following foucaultian notions: knowledge/power relations, objectivation/ subjectivation and freedom practices, madness, self-care, self-writing, resistance, desubjectivation. The study is structured in three chapters: in the first, we present the story and its author, gather academic research about the story, point out some elements of the fantastic literature observed in it; in the second, we discuss the theoretical-methodological framework, analyze knowledge/power relations in the constitution of the madness in the story; in the third, we explore freedom and self-care practices employed by the narrator-character, evidencing processes of desubjectivation that deprive her identity and place her before new possibilities of existence. Therefore, in this process of Foucault's discursive analysis, we reflect about the subject- positions assumed by the narrator-character, the discursive practices in which it inserts itself and is inserted, the effects of knowledge/power incident on its (dis)constitution as subject and the ruptures of patterns and roles imposed. We understand that the subjects constitute themselves and are constituted in and by the discourses of a given historical and social conjuncture, in addition to breaking with the imposed standards, the subjects transgress social norms, resist knowledge/power relations and, when desubjecting themselves from the standard model imposed upon them, they produce new subjectivities, reinvent themselves into something which is yet to come. This was the movement of resistance built by the narrator-character, the protagonist of the narrative under study.
A presente pesquisa tem como proposta analisar o processo de constituição discursiva da subjetividade da narradora-personagem do conto O papel de parede amarelo, de Charlotte Perkins Gilman. O conto narra a história de uma mulher enclausurada em uma mansão colonial por seu marido, que é médico, em decorrência da suposta propensão dela à histeria. Na reclusão, ela percebe outras mulheres presas ao papel de parede do quarto em que está hospedada. Por esse movimento, escreve em um diário para lidar com suas angústias, anseios e sentimentos, ao passo que decifra o padrão do papel de parede amarelo. Trata-se de um corpus literário e por meio dele entendemos que as práticas históricas e sociais produzem a subjetividade da narradora-personagem. Fundamentamo-nos na Análise do Discurso enquanto suporte descritivo-interpretativo e analítico, pautados, sobretudo, nas seguintes noções foucaultianas: relações de saber-poder, práticas de objetivação/subjetivação e de liberdade, loucura, cuidado de si, escrita de si, resistência, dessubjetivação. O estudo se estrutura em três capítulos: no primeiro, apresentamos o conto e sua autora, reunimos pesquisas acadêmicas sobre o conto, apontamos alguns elementos da literatura fantástica observados nele; no segundo, discutimos o arcabouço teórico-metodógico, analisamos relações de saber-poder na constituição da loucura no conto; no terceiro, exploramos práticas de liberdade e de cuidados de si empregadas pela narradora-personagem, evidenciando processos de dessubjetivação que destituem a identidade dela e a coloca diante de novas possibilidades de existência. Portanto, nesse processo de análise discursiva foucaultiana, refletimos sobre as posições-sujeito assumidas pela narradora-personagem, as práticas discursivas nas quais ela se inscreve e é inscrita, os efeitos do saber-poder incidentes na (des)constituição dela enquanto sujeito e nas rupturas de padrões e papeis impostos. Apreendemos que os sujeitos se constituem e são constituídos nos e pelos discursos de dada conjuntura histórica e social, além de que, ao romper com os padrões impostos, os sujeitos transgridem normas sociais, resistem a relações de saber-poder e, ao dessubjetivar-se do modelo padrão que lhes é imposto, produzem novas subjetividades, reinventam-se em um devir. Foi esse o movimento de resistência construído pela narradora-personagem, a protagonista da narrativa em estudo.

L'étude d'un corpus transgénérique de la fin du XIXe siècle, constitué de The Portrait of a Lady de Henry James, The Yellow Wallpaper de Charlotte Pekins Gilman et d'une sélection de poèmes d'Emily Dickinson révèle l'entrelacs des genres en tant que fondement fictionnel à une rhétorique du sujet. Protéiformes sans toutefois se situer hors catégorie, ils ont recours à une écriture spiroïdale qui est la conjonction parfaite du narratif et du poétique. Leur emploi du féminin et de l'épicène fait apparaître les distinctions de genre linguistique qui avaient été occultées dans les écrits romantiques et réalistes. L'emphase que ces textes mettent sur l'énonciation et leur prise de distance avec les conventions narratives les différencient des textes précédents. Se détournant du cartésianisme, ils proposent une déconstruction du sujet qui n'aboutit pas toutefois à une vision aporétique. Remettant sans cesse en question l'apparente unité de la perception et de la conscience, ils construisent une vision kaléidoscope qui montre le sujet et le réel comme complexes et torturés, rarement absurdes.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a one-act opera (in three scenes) for dramatic soprano and chamber orchestra (eleven instruments). The libretto is a free adaptation by the composer of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The instrumentation required is: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling english horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet and E-flat clarinet), bassoon, horn, soprano, piano (doubling celesta), violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and contrabass. The approximate duration is one hour. The work is dedicated to soprano Aimee Marcoux.

Dissertation

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
英語學系
92
Both heroines in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea have similar encounters and fates. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is based on Gilman’s own experiences; Jean Rhys writes Wide Sargasso Sea to give Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre a voice and a complete life. The two texts both feature the patriarchal oppression and madness of the two leading female characters. The unnamed heroine in “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffers from gradually growing mental breakdown by repressing and being repressed her own sense of self-awareness and self-realization; Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea has been labeled as a mad woman by others, partly because of the impression of her mother and partly because of purposeful intention. By the end of both texts, the two heroines make their own choices─liberating themselves. There are five chapters in this thesis. In Chapter One “Introduction,” I depict the background of the two texts, come up with the topics and main ideas I would like to offer in my thesis, and make a brief summary of them. In addition, I introduce some literature reviews of the two texts. In Chapter Two “Patriarchal Oppression,” I examine the representatives of the patriarchal oppression, or the patriarchal oppressors the two heroines face and suffer from in the two texts. In Chapter Three “Madness,” I discuss the two heroines’ madness, including the way that they look like mad women, the way they are looked upon as mad women, and the way they are treated as mad women. In Chapter Four “Possible Choices,” I treat the ending of the texts and discuss the final possible choices they make under such oppression. In Chapter Five “Conclusion,” I combine the previous three chapters, analyze the relation and causality among them and make my conclusion.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, une femme de lettres du XIXe siècle, a bien failli perdre, complètement et à jamais, sa capacité d'écrire au terme de traitements inappropriés pour sa dépression. Elle rédige un récit autobiographique et dénonciateur qui illustre son combat contre la science et la société de son époque. À la fin du récit, la narratrice, quoique anéantie, refuse de se soumettre et continue désespérément d'aller de l'avant. C'est une fin qui suggère, même au XIXe siècle, qu'elle (la femme, la Nature) avait raison, et que le médecin (l'homme, la Culture) avait tort. Au XXe siècle, Martine Desjardins reprend cette histoire sous forme de fiction. Notre étude comparative des deux oeuvres repose sur l'hypothèse principale selon laquelle Desjardins s'est largement inspirée du récit de Gilman pour rédiger son roman. De fait, les deux oeuvres, La Chambre au papier peint (1892) et Le Cercle de Clara (1997), l'une inspirée d'une histoire réelle et l'autre présentée comme imaginaire mais fort probablement inspirée de la première, racontent sensiblement la même histoire. Pourquoi une femme du XXe siècle a-t-elle choisi de réécrire cette histoire en disant « je » à son tour? En quoi le « je » d'une femme du XIXe siècle peut-il trouver écho chez celui d'une femme moderne? Et, comment, par l'écriture, la femme peut-elle exorciser ses souffrances et reconquérir son identité? Le premier chapitre de ce travail traite de la mise sous silence des femmes au XIXe siècle. Le second dresse le portrait de Charlotte Perkins Gilman et présente son récit autobiographique, puis le troisième porte sur la parole que les femmes ont reconquise au XXe siècle et met de l'avant les ressemblances et les différences entre les textes en mettant l'accent sur la modernité et le féminisme de l'oeuvre de Desjardins. Desjardins a rédigé son roman en hommage aux femmes qui ont donné leur corps et leur âme à la société pour permettre à celles d'aujourd'hui de pouvoir publier. Le « je » individuel de Gilman est donc, aujourd 'hui plus que jamais, collectif. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Féminisme, Écriture, XIXe siècle, Hystérie.