Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper Narrative - Essay Example

The internal assertions voiced through the multiple voices in the use of metaphors, the setting and the foreshadowing comprising the obsessive narration of the narrator and the author attempt to grasp the hysteria of female experience. "The Yellow Wallpaper" only shows the futility writing to pen down female experience. Language is "phallogocentric", and thus Gilman appropriates images, motifs, metaphors, and symbols to show the design of her desires, frustrations and ultimately her freedom in a way that the patriarchal narrative logic is unable to rationalize. This narrative and all the symbols become a pre-Oedipal chaos of her chained mind. Barbara A. Suess sees the symbols as an agent to overcome the lack of Lacanian "Imaginary" language beyond the "Symbolic Order" or what cannot be symbolized. Thus every fragment of her unique sense of the self is a mosaic of reactions to the "Wallpaper" and within the "dead paper" of her journal where she uses masculine utterances to give vent to her silenced self. Hence she can only grapple at visual details that correspond to the vague images of her mind that has only found a corresponding "objective correlative" in the wallpaper. Suess calls this her attempt to "create a new order" (Suess, 84). The wallpaper is the canvas where she objectifies herself. The "patterns" of her condition when projected subjectively with expressionistic detail over the wallpaper only appear "gruesome" to her. Slowly one can observe a change in her as she tires herself out and goes out of her way to "think" out a pattern and etch out a space of her own. Suddenly she sees a crack within the interminable and exhaustive "patterns" as they appear as "bars". And beyond that she finds herself buried underneath that charade of "self-control" and "will". Another startling effect is produced by the symbol of daylight and moonlight. It can have indefinite meanings to a post-Freudian reader, but if taken in the context of the narrative pattern itself, the light and darkness seem to directly refer to her new sense of alienation. She sees herself as a social misfit (like all the other creeping women she sees) only because she understands the futility of this silence and restive calm. It is only a decorated surface that mocks her with "bulbous eyes" and lolling heads. She can tolerate or understand John's laughter but not the laughter of those eyes, because she cannot face her own sham. Her sense of self is almost like that 'paper', which under the ownership of the master and like a palimpsest has lost it's own sense of identity and is of a cowardly shade of yellow that follows her everywhere, the smell of which make her constantly aware of her own imprisonment. She tries to free the wallpaper of all its designs and loose all the tiring "daylight" calm and rest off her. The narrator expresses her desire to be seized by the 'moonlight' madness that starts to attack her sporadically. She escapes the humiliating treatment offered to her mind by humiliating her body. She raises herself to the level of physically "creeping" humiliation and "gnawing" beyond all fixed "duties" and free her mind of any further humiliation. Her body by its symbolic detachment from the mentored and monitored habits becomes the only way of writing her own experiences in her own terms and not become tired of maintaining any monstrous "deceit". Again the bestial action of the narrator is juxtaposed to the manicured gardens of the 'colonial' estate. This "hereditary estate may be read metafictionally as the Gothic tradition" (Davison, 49), with adequate settings to fit the ghastly mood of the place.1 Again the symbolisms also help one to understand the unreliability that the reader must exercise in assimilating the narration of the author. The symbols remain the same all through the narrative. First the room is described to be a nursery. Again the narrator surmises that it may have been a playroom and a gymnasium after that, since the "windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls". One may ask what these things might be. It may be Chains or locks that she describes as "things". Again she says that "It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down" This is uttered at the very beginning of the narrative. But when one reaches the end of the climax where the narrator says that "Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly" one thinks whether she blames all her own actions on the "children", (she too is called a little girl by John) since small boys would not be able to tear off papers that come "about as far as [she] can reach". Again she says that "How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed!" But later as the narrator in an attempt to "astonish" John tries to tear off papers from behind the bed stand and is unable to do so she says "I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner" When she says that the Yellow paper "sticks" to her, like the yellow "metaphorical" odour of it, one can go back to the middle section of the narrative where she talks about Jennie complaining that "she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's" Interestingly the children she is referring to may be the child that John makes of her by calling her in such dehumanized and symbolic names as "little goose". He rebukes her and sternly silences her from exchanging her opinions and the suffering that she undergoes. Thus silence becomes the biggest motif in the whole narrative. Wherever she quotes John, almost always there is an awareness of the silencing agent that tries to adjust her aberrations into the male signifying agents but only increase her paranoia. Thus John is the thousand eyes that chain her to the repressive socializing agents by denying her "imagination", thought and "ideas", which makes this narrative a kind of an intellectual claim of a woman who has no language to revolt against the claustrophobia of this normalizing intrusion. The term nervous depression refuses to impress the narrator because it relies on the objective aspects of her illness and the subjective "mind" of the woman (and her ecriture or "work") becomes a taboo. Her mind and the awareness of it threatens John's authoritative standing which severely destroys any healthy medium of communication between them. She is left bereft of any unique expression that does not emerge out of those disgusting "patterns" and hence she exercises thought through action. And she has no thoughts of her own and is only able to quote John and his logical reasons. In the space of her paper she writes about her genuine need to "think" which lacks all the guidelines and inspiration from John. Most of the time the narrator talks about her mind in terms of the wallpaper. And her mind is revolting to her since she is best confined and captured there. She uses the term "fungus" with the patterns that seem to be threatening her because it is never static there are always new ways of getting bound by them. In her desire to be haunted in the house by ghosts, her own self haunts her. She describes the odor of the wallpaper in an almost magical realist metaphor. The trauma of her consciousness reaches her everywhere as she says "I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell." Here she is facing her fears but in a self-destructive way, because there is no other alternative present to her. There is no transcendence from her "phallogocentric" bars. She contemplates suicide when she understands that no one can climb out of the pattern because it "strangles", by throwing herself out of the window. But then again she does not want her death to be misconstrued like all her actions and says that if she is alive then she has to "I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!" As she grows fonder of her freed self she forgets to identify John and he becomes a "young man" to her. Felton says that "yellow" corresponds to "undesirables" (Felton, 274), which actually becomes a symbolic color of subterranean fantasies that has no place or language within the Symbolic Order of Lacan. Thus yellow just becomes an interminable symbol of multiple languages that has no medical term for categorizing inner struggles of women. Infact, the symbols and descriptions use foreshadowing to create a jarring text, so much so that they were mostly changed and muted in the magazine texts, as per Shawn St. John where he talks about the "irony of Gilman's experience" is that he can relieve the "press" of ideas into writing, "a story exposing patriarchal oppression is itself co-opted and produced by dozens of editor's whose own exploitation of Gilman's misfortunes exists in tension with their promotion" (St John, 412). Thus St. John is talking about authorial intention that are very important to feminist critiques who want to preserve Gilman's original textual intentions and thus the setting and symbols find themselves steeped in a "high degree of subjectivity" (St. John, 413). The setting and symbols show fit the allegory of women's discourse being discouraged by the medical language and treatment of John who represents all "hereditary" ideas and share the "certainty" (Bak,40) of universal discourse where madness does not fit and is put under the exhaustive gaze of the "panopticon" that symbolize "power and observation" (Bak, 40). The surface of the wallpaper becomes the instrument of surveillance that "hardly lets [her] stir without special direction", the "barred windows", the "gate at the head of the stairs", and the "heavy bedstead" all symbolize prison house furniture. The condescending pose of "infallible correctness" (Delashmit , 32) in the Victorian Male is best foreshadowed in the line "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him". The setting, symbols and literary devices suffuse the reader with the horror not of the supernatural but the horror behind the "proper" surface of every women who are shaped in mind and body to fit patriarchal discourse. The narrator says "most women do not creep by daylight" and later she sees "there are so many of those creeping women". The apparent metaphor transcends the immediate sense of horror and articulates the condition and the nature of woman that John has created who has ceased to be "Jane" and now just beyond any illusion or imagination.2 The literary device is thus an extension of the imaginary self that the narrator construes within an insane lack of illusion. Works Cited Bak, John S. "Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (1994): 39-47. Academic Search Premier EBSCO. San Jacinto Coll. Lib., TX. 14 July 2006. . Davison, Carol Margaret. Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in "The Yellow Wallpaper".Women's Studies, Jan/Feb2004, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p47-75, 29p; DOI: 10.1080/00197870190267197; (AN 11794606) Delashmit, M., and C. Longcope. "Gilman's' The Yellow Wallpaper.'" Explicator 50.1 (1991): 32-34. Academic Search Premier EBSCO. San Jacinto Coll. Lib., TX. 15 July 2006. . Felton, Sharon. "Reviews." Studies in Short Fiction 32.2 (1995): 273-275. Academic Search Premier EBSCO. San Jacinto Coll. Lib., TX. 14 July 2006. . Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" Literary Cavalcade, 00244511, May2001, Vol. 53, Issue 8, Database: Academic Search Premier Hochman, Barbara. "The Reading Habit and 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." American Literature, Mar2002, Vol. 74 Issue 1, p89, 22p; (AN 6660179) Notes:This title is held by San Jacinto College Libraries Schumaker, Conrad . "Too Terribly Good to Be Printed": Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" By:. American Literature, Dec85, Vol. 57 Issue 4, p588, 12p; (AN 10069622) Notes:This title is held by San Jacinto College Libraries Read More