Literary Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by C.P. Gilman and Patriotism by Y. Mishima - Term Paper Example

 Literary Analysis The Yellow Wallpaper by C.P. Gilman and Patriotism by Y. Mishima One of the key elements of literature is struggle. Without struggle, internal or external of one kind or another, characters have no motivation to change, and the plot has no potential area for development. Often – and this is particularly true of short stories, due to their intense nature – these struggles can address problems in the author's own life. The two short stories discussed in this essay are partly autobiographical, in that they are the literary manifestations of issues which deeply troubled their writers. The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892 and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, charts a young woman's development into deep depression, enabled by her well-intentioned but misguided husband, who is a doctor. The main character, who remains nameless (but may be called Jane, as a reference at the very end of the story, and she will be referred to as such in this essay at times), struggles against the popular contemporary concept of the 'rest cure,' a 'medical' treatment for the “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Perkins Gilman) which nineteenth-century women were frequently diagnosed with. Her gender- and educational-based fight is against the system, represented by her husband, for a cure which is catered to her own wants and needs rather than a blanket treatment which oppresses her and worsens her condition. Yukio Mishima's 1966 Patriotism also focuses on a woman's struggle, although his is a very different perspective. Written in the third person, unlike The Yellow Wallpaper which is from the main character's point of view, Patriotism records the evening of a happily married couple's suicide pact, in grim and gory detail. Reiko and her husband reduce their world to their small house, decrease the world's population to just themselves, and then struggle wordlessly against their own concepts of a peaceful death, both mentally and physically. Their passive acceptance of a frightening situation, a reflection of Mishima's complicated feelings on contemporary Japanese morality, resists the classification of a 'struggle,' and a critic is forced to admit that the story's struggle is deeper than vocalization. It appears that it is a tract against suicide, but the author's deep-seated, somewhat twisted love for his country, and the fact that he also chose to commit seppuku, is difficult to reconcile with the repellent nature of this amazingly-written story. Mishima was also an ardent supporter of the samurai honor code. Like the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, Reiko's struggle is both gender- and educationally-based, although her experience is more totally a reflection of Mishima's internal problems rather than a struggle of her own. This essay will show how setting, tone and irony in The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism reveal the struggles enacted through their main women characters, and how these stories reflect their author's respective fears. The setting of The Yellow Wallpaper becomes the focus of Jane's struggle against her husband's medical and frankly misogynistic beliefs. It is is the most important motif of the story, in that the narrator believes that the cause of her descent into madness is the wallpaper – its colour, pattern and even its smell. The narrator and her husband have taken “ancestral halls” (Perkins Gilman) as their summer holiday home; the “place has been empty for years” (Perkins Gilman) and as such, presumably, is old and run-down. Jane is enclosed in the large room at the top of the house, even though she fervently expressed a desire to stay in one of the rooms downstairs. The old, “atrocious” (Perkins Gilman) yellow room both entraps her and symbolizes that entrapment: John coerces her to stay alone in the room, on the basis of his educational and emotional authority, against her will. Just as the protagonist cannot overcome him, nor can she fight against the mores of the society which dismisses her illness on the grounds that she is a woman. Furthermore, the banality of the setting brings us closer to the narrator's fate. This story echoes uncomfortably in twenty-first century women suffering from depression, whether post-partum or otherwise, because (at the risk of sounding obvious) wallpaper is everywhere. Jane fixates on it as a distraction – “I wish I could get well faster. But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (Perkins Gilman) – thereby suggesting that any distraction could instead turn into an obsession. Jane's struggle with the wallpaper is so small as to be threateningly universal. Patriotism is a story likewise contained in a small area: the “old three-room rented house backing on to a small garden” (Mishima) in which Reiko and Shinji live – however, the setting does not reveal the couple's struggle, but instead intensifies it by providing a quiet, unchanging backdrop. The physical framework of this story, similarly to The Yellow Wallpaper, reflects the characters' seclusion from the world, although theirs is chosen when Jane's is not. The “noises of the trains and streetcars around Yotsuya station did not penetrate this far”, and the house is so entrenched in its role of cocoon that “it was hard to believe in the tension gripping this whole quarter” (Mishima). The most concrete example of the house as a protective shield against the vulgarities and violence of outside occurs in the short time between Shinji's and Reiko's suicides: should Reiko unlock the front door, allowing neighbours to enter with ease to find their bodies? The answer seems obvious, and during Reiko's deliberation, she articulates no reason to keep the door locked. She is nonetheless reluctant to do so: “for a while she stood immersed in the consideration of [this] simple problem” (Mishima). The decision is made on the basis of practicality – “Reiko did not relish the thought of their two corpses putrefying before discovery” (Mishima) – but it is clear that unlocking the door symbolizes the 'bubble breaking', as it were. Earlier, Shinji “returned the bolt once more to its socket. With what significance, Reiko did not understand” (Mishima). Now she does understand, she is reluctant to undo the act with which he enclosed them in their suicidal marital utopia. The reader is brought back to earth with a bump after the bloody nightmare of Shinji's suicide, enhancing the reality (as opposed to the surreality) of his actions. The setting of The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism reflect their protagonists' different struggles in different ways. Jane's home is alien to her, and her internal (and physical) conflict with the wallpaper represents her greater struggle – and the greater struggle – of women suffering from mental illness in a patriarchal society. Reiko's house is the haven of her loving marriage, and its unchanging serenity underscores the dramatic contrast of her peace in suicide. Perkins Gilman's setting is absolutely key to the story – in the post-July 4th entry, not even halfway into the narrative, over half of the content is about the wallpaper, and the setting's involvement in the plot only increases thereafter – whereas Mishima provides the house as a quiet backdrop for its horrific event, by including short sentences which ground the action after climactic moments. After Reiko and Shinji commit to their pact, “Reiko tended the charcoal brazier in the living room” (Mishima). The everyday banality of the house restores the story to familiarity; the oddly relevant, and unrecognized, history of Jane's yellow room as a potential asylum for the mentally disturbed heightens and even enables her insanity. Mishima and Perkins Gilman both use the setting to familiarize their readers with disturbing struggles and experiences we like to consider alien to us. Perkins Gilman's tone in The Yellow Wallpaper is energetic to begin with, characterized by the narrator's excessive use of exclamation marks. As the story develops, the narrator begins to write one-sentence paragraphs, which reveal an internal struggle of expression: the effect is to make the reader, like the writer, pause lengthily between rushed sentences, as if she cannot quite get the words out, even on to “dead paper” (Perkins Gilman). The last entry in the diary has exactly fifty paragraphs, and just sixty-four sentences, which means that most of the paragraphs only articulate one thought – or even a fraction of a thought. Jane struggles to be heard by her husband and doctor, and his refusal to listen to her impedes their communication and, eventually, impacts Jane's very ability to communicate. Her writing becomes disjointed and fast, losing pace and leaving the reader somewhat breathless as they hurry through to the end of the story. The effect is to draw us into the narrator's mind, where she alternately refers to the woman in the wallpaper as “that woman” and “I” (Perkins Gilman). The reader is just as confused as Jane is herself, as she struggles to make sense of being trapped and infantilized when she is a grown woman and (one would think) capable of making her own decisions, mental illness or no. The tone of Patriotism makes the reader's skin creep. From the very short first chapter, which is a summary of the following events written in a clinical, news-report style, we are taken through the entire ritual of the couple's suicide pact with painstaking and unflinching detail. The first half of the story, the rising action which leads into the young army officer's lengthy suicide, remains calm but with brief flashes of intensity, particularly during the various sex scenes: “Suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness, her cheeks flushed by a dizzying uprush of emotion, Reiko threw her arms about the lieutenant's close cropped head” (Mishima), for example. But from the fourth chapter, in which Shinji slowly and painfully commits seppuku in front of his wife, this diligent tone becomes cold and distanced. At one point the lieutenant is retching, his stomach cut open and his entrails spilling on to the floor; Reiko “had been sitting until now with her face lowered, gazing in fascination at the tide of blood advancing toward her knees” (Mishima). The meta-conflict between the tone and content of this story is disturbing on a very deep level, and representative of the discord between the ancient honor code of the samurai and the modern day. Furthermore, the continuity of the tone underlines the disparity of the content: in chapter 3, the lieutenant reflects that “there was a certain elegance … in the association of death with this radiantly healthy face” but shortly before his drawn-out death, his face is described as “not the face of a living man. The eyes were hollow, the skin parched, the once so lustrous cheeks and lips the color of dried mud” (Mishima). Mishima's attitude towards these markedly different concepts remains the same, allowing the reader to discern the disquieting chasm between the two. The two stories present very different tones to their reader: The Yellow Wallpaper's is frantic, revealing the narrator's fight to communicate; Patriotism's is calm, a manifestation of the protagonists' inner peace at their grisly decision. Perkins Gilman's tone requires the reader to journey into depression with her character, whereas Mishima's equal treatment of sex and death take the reader into a new and disturbing reality. There is no conflict between the content and tone of The Yellow Wallpaper, as the two work together; the juxtaposition of tone and content in Patriotism, however, is complementary, and the two aspects of storytelling do not quite make the full picture by themselves. A gap between what is said and how it is said forces the reader to work for an appreciation of the text. Comparing the struggles revealed in excessive use of new paragraphs and excessive lack of judgment is difficult, and it is remarkable that first-person freneticness and third-person calm can portray a similar situation: both Jane and Reiko experience their own wishes being overwhelmed by their husband's. This proves that tone is reflective, also, of the author's view of women. Jane was written by a nineteenth-century Western woman, and as such she refuses to accept this subsumation of her own will; Reiko is the product of a twentieth-century Eastern male mind, and accordingly she willingly surrenders her life to the whim of her husband. Had Jane been the protagonist of Patriotism, we would be able to read a very different story, in which a husband wants to make a suicide pact but his wilful wife refuses to join him. As it stands, the vast chasm between the tones of these two works highlight how different the struggles of Reiko and Jane are. The Yellow Wallpaper is full of examples of irony – the protagonist describes her husband as having “an intense horror of superstition” (Perkins Gilman), an ironic and darkly comedic juxtaposition of words. One example of Perkins Gilman's excessive use of irony is the situational irony of John's 'cure' sending her further into madness; the verbal irony of “I am glad my case is not serious!” (Perkins Gilman), when of course it is, is another. One of the most effective instances of irony, though, is the dramatic irony reverberating throughout the short story: in the protagonist's description of her bedroom, she naïvely assumes it to have been a nursery. A more plausible explanation occurs to the reader: the “windows are barred, and there are rings and things in the walls” (Perkins Gilman) for the imprisonment of the mentally ill. The prime moment of dramatic irony, however, occurs at the end of the story, when the narrator subsumes her personality into that of the “creeping woman” (Perkins Gilman) in the wallpaper, and John enters the room. The narration of the story does not change perspective, but the effect is one of shock on the audience, who reads the protagonist's description of events and can simultaneously understand the reason why John fainted. This represents – even more ironically – the high point of the narrator's struggle. By sinking into the depths of her illness, she wins her fight against John and all that he represents. She “creeps over [his unconscious body] every time” (Perkins Gilman) she circles the room, in a manner symbolic of her eventual triumph over him, in spite of the fact that this triumph comes at a great cost to her also. Jane 'wins,' because she refuses to allow her spirit to break under John's harsh rule. The irony in Patriotism focuses on the disparity between the first and second halves of the story, which respectively detail Reiko and Shinji's ideal of death, and the reality of their suicides. There is a verbal irony in Shinji's suicide note, which reads “Long Live the Imperial Forces” (Mishima) when he – a member of these forces – considers his suicide to be a morally right and heroic act. Various parallels can be drawn between the couple's plans and the actuality of their death: Shinji's handsome 'death face' turning into a ghostly gray parody of life has already been mentioned above, as one example of this. Before the couple has sex for the last time, he wonders “Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?” (Mishima), and while making the final preparations for suicide, he notices that “the touch of rouge on [Reiko's] lips seemed remarkably seductive” (Mishima). It appears that Shinji cannot truly differentiate between sex and death until he is “soaked [in his own blood] to his knees” (Mishima). That Mishima follows that image with this sentence “It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment” (Mishima) strongly suggests that the third-person omniscient narrator is using verbal irony – the reader unaware of Mishima's politics would consider this to be sarcasm – but apparently it is sincere. It is a real-life case of dramatic irony that Mishima's pro-suicide tract can be given an interpretation so contrary to his own beliefs. Moments before he first cuts open his stomach, Shinji reflects briefly on how lucky he is to die a soldier's death in the presence of his wife. “This must be the very pinnacle of good fortune, he thought” (Mishima). This example of situational irony comes across as almost distasteful to an audience which does not, as Mishima did, believe in the samurai honor code. A gruesome suicide pact is not many people's idea of good fortune – even less so, given that Shinji and Reiko were very happily married, had only been married for six months, and were respectively just thirty-one and twenty-three years old. Irony is possibly the most important literary device in both The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism. Although it is deployed to different effect, the irony in both works deepen their message to make it more applicable and more influential. A version of Patriotism in which Shinji's suicide had happened exactly according to his imagination would tell us nothing about 1960s Japanese society, or samurai honor culture, or the horror of self-disembowelment. The Yellow Wallpaper without irony would just have been the sad tale of a woman's spirit being crushed. In these two short stories, irony is the method by which the reader learns something: Perkins Gilman's dramatic irony throws Jane's insanity into sharp relief against the blurred background of her husband's shock, and Mishima's controlled reporting highlights the shocking contrast between Reiko's and Shinji's preconceptions and experience of death. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Yukio Mishima faced very different challenges in life. Neither their nationality, nor their culture, gender, time period and even age at which they wrote these stories are the same. They both committed suicide, but for very different reasons: Charlotte would otherwise have died a long and slow death from cancer; Mishima killed himself, in the same manner as the lieutenant in Patriotism, during a failed coup attempt. The setting, tone and irony inherent in The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism are drastically contrasted. Yet the basic story is the same: the narratives of two women dragged into unexpected situations by their authoritative husbands are telling of these greater struggles experienced by their authors. Both wrote these short stories to advise the world on an issue which had personally affected them. The Yellow Wallpaper can be read basically as an autobiography with some details changed and others intensified. Perkins Gilman was writing from her own experience with the rest cure, and uses her imagination to play out the consequences of some of the scarier moments of her illness: her husband's diaries at the time record Charlotte's fascination with knives and other instruments of suicide. Nowadays – with partial thanks to testimonies like this – it seems obvious that to deprive a depressed person of enjoyable activities will lead them to dwell on the sadness of their situation, causing their health to decline further, but in the late nineteenth century it was common to disregard mental illness (particularly in women) as something that could be 'cured' through a lack of stimulation. Patriotism is more difficult, as a first reading of the story, with no knowledge of the author's politics, suggests that seppuku is bad, and that such excessive loyalty to one's employer can have truly horrific consequences. This interpretation may focus too much on the physical aspects of death, though, and Mishima's original intentions may be clearer to someone who is more familiar with the Japanese disembowelment tradition, and who believes in life after death. Someone without such a belief cannot help but read this story as the tale of unreasonable, purposeless pain, and the harrowingly naïve belief that it will somehow be worth it. When reading Patriotism with an understanding of Mishima's politics, which include (amongst other things) an anachronistic dedication to the samurai honor code, the struggle becomes the reader's, as we attempt to harmonize the gory imagery with his clear approval of the act. This approval was so strong that Mishima committed it himself, although this is less surprising when we consider just the awe-inspiring and sickening level of detail in his description of Shinji's death. Perkins Gilman's struggle was against prejudices of gender, which, combined with prejudices of education, gave her male doctor a spurious authority over her – so much so that Charlotte was not even considered an authority on her own existence, forbidden from contributing any suggestions towards her own treatment. The post-partum depression from which she suffered, along with the havoc wrought on her mentally from the 'rest cure', changed everything in her life, from setting to tone (to borrow momentarily from literature). Like Jane, Charlotte was transplanted from her home to a “queer” (Perkins Gilman) place in which she was meant to recover but instead worsened, as if caged; she grew suicidal and eventually had to divorce her husband and give up her child in order to restore her sanity. Mishima's struggle, however, was not the fight of the oppressed class for their own bodies and minds, but of a man entrenched in tradition and disenchanted with modern development. It is difficult not to feel that Mishima has appropriated the serious matter of gender-based struggle to reflect his own problems with the governing of his country – after all, Reiko would have benefited from a system in which she was allowed to choose her own death, rather than being subject to her husband's whim. Of course, Shinji would have benefited too, but it is disingenuous of Mishima to describe the couple's 'happy' marriage thus: “Not once did Reiko ever contradict her husband, nor did the lieutenant ever find reason to scold his wife” (Mishima). This is not a state of affairs which, as Mishima suggests, is synonymous with harmony between husband and wife – Reiko, although she does not realize it, is meant to be nothing more than a pair of dutifully observing eyes. Although Mishima's story attempts to subvert contemporary Japanese values, it affirms the dangerous patriarchal and honour-based institutions of traditional Japan, making this a short story with a disagreeable conservative moral. Setting, tone and irony are literary devices which can be effectively employed to enhance the struggles of the protagonists, infiltrating the entire short story with an atmosphere of conflict. The main characters of The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism endure very different struggles, in very different ways, even though the motives of the authors were similar – to express their discontent at failure in their own, individual struggles. Perkins Gilman was unable to overcome her depression with the accepted contemporary treatments, and wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as an encouragement to medical professionals to research different cures – she actually sent a copy of the short story to Weir Mitchell, the doctor who treated her and is even mentioned in the text – and Mishima found himself incapable of accepting the political system of modern Japan, adhering strongly (though with little support) to anachronistic nationalist values. The authors' struggles were medical and political, and expressed through terms of gender, in which the female protagonist is powerless against her husband, a male supporting character. Their skilled employment of setting, tone and irony as literary devices combine to make two short stories which, if objectionable in part, are still undeniably enjoyable and well-written pieces of literature. Works Cited Mishima, Y. (1966). Patriotism. Available from http://www.mutantfrog.com/patriotism-by-yukio-mishima/. Perkins Gilman, C. (1899). The Yellow Wallpaper. Available from http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html. Read More