Women’s Writing

Notes 
Unit -2
Short stories
 Sultana’s Dream
 The Yellow Wallpaper

Drama
 Fefu and Her Friends

The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gillman

 Themes and Motifs

 Histeria and Rest Cure in 19 th century Europe

 The Ending

 The Wallpaper

 Infantilization

 “The Madwoman in the attic”

 TYW and Jane Eyre an intertextual reading

 Criticism (SW)
Paula Treichler: “Almost immediately in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story
"The Yellow Wallpaper," the female narrator tells us she is "sick." Her
husband, "a physician of high standing," has diagnosed her as having a
"temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency." Yet her
journal-in whose words the story unfolds-records her own resistance to this
diagnosis and, tentatively, her suspicion that the medical treatment it
dictates treatment that confines her to a room in an isolated country estate-
will not cure her. She suggests that the diagnosis itself, by undermining her
own conviction that her "condition" is serious and real, may indeed be one
reason why she does not get well. A medical diagnosis is a verbal formula
representing a constellation of physical symptoms and observable behaviors.
Once formulated, it dictates a series of therapeutic actions. In "The Yellow
Wallpaper," the diagnosis of hysteria or depression, conventional "women's
diseases" of the nineteenth century, sets in motion a therapeutic regimen
which involves language in several ways. The narrator is forbidden to engage
in normal social conversation; her physical isolation is in part designed to
remove her from the possibility of over-stimulating intellectual discussion.
She is further encouraged to exercise "self-control" and avoid expressing
negative thoughts and fears about her illness; she is also urged to keep her
fancies and superstitions in check. Above all, she is forbidden to "work"-to
write. Learning to monitor her own speech, she develops an artificial
feminine self who reinforces the terms of her husband's expert diagnosis:
this self-attempts to speak reasonably and in "a very quiet voice," refrains
from crying in his presence, and hides the fact that she is keeping a journal.
This male identified self-disguises the true underground narrative: a
confrontation with language”

The yellow wallpaper comes to occupy the narrator's entire reality. Finally,
she rips it from the walls to reveal its real meaning. Unveiled, the yellow
wallpaper is a metaphor for women's discourse. From a conventional
perspective, it first seems strange, flamboyant, confusing, outrageous: the
very act of women's writing produces discourse which embodies "unheard of
contradictions." Once freed, it expresses what is elsewhere kept hidden and
embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as
grotesque, or fails to perceive at all. Like all good metaphors, the yellow
wallpaper is variously interpreted by readers to represent (among other
things) the "pattern" which underlies sexual inequality, the external
manifestation of neurasthenia, the narrator's unconscious, the narrator's
situation within patriarchy.

But an emphasis on discourse-writing, the act of speaking, language-draws

us to the central issue in this particular story: the narrator's alienation from
work, writing, and intellectual life. Thus the story is inevitably concerned
with the complicated and charged relationship between women and
language: analysis then illuminates particular points of conflict between
patriarchal language and women's discourse.

This conflict in turn raises a number of questions relevant for both literary
and feminist scholarship: In what senses can language be said to be
oppressive to women? How do feminist linguistic innovations seek to escape
this oppression? What is the relationship of innovation to material
conditions? And what does it mean, theoretically, to escape the sentence that
the structure of patriarchal language imposes.

(“The color is repellant […], a sickly sulphur tint in others.”)

In the late nineteenth century, the color yellow “became […] associated with
all that was bizarre and queer in art and life” and also of decadence. The
1890s were also referred to as the “Yellow Nineties,” which was a reference
to French stylistic influences and the “wicked and decadent French novel,
which then further led to the creation of a quarterly publication known as
The Yellow Book, which was then a reference to “the yellow wrappers of the
cheap editions of French novels which had the distinction of the
scandalous.” The color yellow was associated with this publication, which
was also associated with “aestheticism and homosexuality.” Thus, Gilman’s
reference to such a “repellant” color of wallpaper references such queer
associations to the color yellow.

(“I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.”)

According to Elizabeth Cromley, bedrooms were supposed to convey a sense

of “individuality.” This idea stems from Ella Rodman Church’s 1877 home-
decorating advice in the Appleton’s Journal, where she states that visitors
should be able to easily distinguish between a mother’s room from a
brother’s room. Cromley also states how “many writers gave the bedroom
power to express the self,” which makes this particular sentence quite
interesting, as the narrator’s identity becomes enmeshed in the queered
characteristics of the wallpaper that ultimately defines the room she is
staying in.

During the nineteenth century in America, the nation was moving toward a
more consumer-oriented society. With the Industrial Revolution and the end
of the Civil War, society changed, and money became increasingly
important. While what is known as the Gilded Age brought more women
into the workforce, few women actually supported themselves. Young
women who were working were often expected to turn their wages over to
their parents, and wives were expected to turn wages over to their husbands.
Women who were not in the workforce were burdened with domestic duties.
Neither marriage nor work really loosened the boundaries placed on women;
each situation simply offered a different set of rules.

Nineteenth century doctors accepted the idea that a woman's energy was
centered around her reproductive organs. When a woman suffered a medical
problem, doctors often diagnosed the problem as a problem with
channelling energy. Since reproductivity was central to a nineteenth century
wife's life, doctors often concluded that a "sick" woman was out of sync with
her reproductive organs.

In addition, upper class women made ideal patients. Their husband's bank
accounts " . . . seemed almost inexhaustible," and the patients were usually
" . . . submissive and obedient to the doctor's orders."5 Charlotte Perkins
Gilman herself was treated for a similar "nervous condition" as that of the
narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Her physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, was
well known in the United States for his "rest cure," also called the "Weir
Mitchell Treatment." Mitchell believed, as a rule, that no harm was done by
rest. He often required patients to stay in bed for six to eight weeks. Most
female patients were forbidden to sit up, sew, write, or read.6

It appears that no effort to probe the symptoms of mental illness was made.
In the case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and in the case of the narrator of
"The Yellow Wallpaper," the rest cure failed. One analysis of such failure is
that the rest cure simply locked Gilman, her narrator, and all "sick" women
into a extremely submissive, helpless role. As a reader of "The Yellow
Wallpaper" can conclude, the rest cure only ". . . deepened a person's psychic
unrest".

The Female Gothic

Ellen Moers is known for establishing the term "female gothic" as an

element of literary analysis. According to Moers, female gothic refers to
writings where " . . . fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the
commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite
auctorial intent: to scare".12 Gilman's story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has
been called gothic because of its focus on madness and its horrifying
conclusion. Some critics even chose to compare Gilman's story to the stories
of Edgar Allan Poe, because of its remarkable depiction of the deterioration
of the human mind. In addition, Gilman's narrator's madness is focused on
the wallpaper, serving a similar function to Poe's famous black cat or tell-
tale heart.

Almost 100 years before Gilman's story was published, Ann Radcliffe
established a standard for a gothic novel written by a woman writer.
Radcliffe's novel's central figure is a young woman who was a persecuted
victim and courageous heroine. Applying this definition to "The Yellow
Wallpaper," it is clear to see why the story has been called gothic. Further
complicating the analysis of Gilman's story as a gothic tale is Moers'
discussion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. A novel about creation, birth and
its traumatic aftermath, Shelley established fear, guilt, depression, and
anxiety as commonplace reactions to birth. In real life, Gilman's own
nervous condition followed the birth of her daughter, Katherine, and
paralleled the narrator's madness which revolves around the yellow
wallpaper of an old nursery. Unlike many some gothic tales, Gilman's story
is not simply about a haunted environment or an estranged woman. The
story connects both setting and character with a chilling effect.
 Sultana’s Dream

 SW- Comments

In colonial Bengal, dreaming was charged with other histories and

forces. Dreams hold a special role in Islamic history and in The
Qu’ran. The Prophet Muhammed’s revelations included dreams that
were divinely inspired. Dream interpretation was an established
feature of medieval Muslim literature and practice, and a thick history
of dream interpretation exists in Bengal. Dreams can have a prophetic
potential, and offer divinely inspired insights and valued knowledge.
Such dream-visions can happen both when asleep and awake, as
waking visions. Importantly, they are understood to come to the
dreamer as opposed to being produced or authored by her. In the book
Dreams that Matter, about “dreaming in the undreamy time” of recent
Egypt, anthropologist Amira Mittermaier traces the history of Islamic
dream interpretation, warning against the all too frequent temptation
of Western scholarship to want to interpret the “unconscious”
meaning of dreams, and assign dreams to subjects. Mittermaier
instead situates Islamic dream interpretation in a long history of
Islamic philosophical and theological contemplation that ponders the
difficulty of distinguishing between wakefulness and dream, or
between our thinking and reality.

The historian Projit Mukharji, writing about colonial Bengal, draws

out the importance of dreamscapes as potent intangibles within South
Asian traditional medical practices. Dreams, he has argued, were a
well of divine inspiration for innovative new treatments. Dreams had
epistemic authority that conferred divine force onto new remedies or
practices. Thus, dreams are not mere flights of fancy or creations of
the unconscious. They are a source of world-making that are
interacted with and bring potential, insight and innovation into the
world. Dreaming can be the perception of an intangible presence or
potential in a world saturated with intangibilities and held together by
imaginaries. The recognition of the powerful world making capacities
of nonsecular dreaming in Islamic and Bengali dream practice, pushes
back on Benjamin’s analysis of phantasmagoria to underline that
technoscience is as just one of many modalities of wakeful dreaming.

Technoscientific speculation, joins an already rich array of potent

practices that apprehend the immaterial and felt as a historical force.

Read through this history of potent dreaming, “Sultana’s Dream” hails

women and girls as aspirational and generative subjects of
technoscience and as crucial to the constitution of an anticipatory
postcolonial nation. Women become the agents and not just the
objects of speculation. Begum Rokeya described her social reform
work as part of an “awakening” of women. Sultana’s Dream “awakens”
readers to an alternate possibility, even though the narrator herself
concludes by waking back into the complexity of her luxurious
oppression. Feminist technoscience is affirmatively performed in the
dream, and more than this, Sultana’s Dream summons other futures
through the speculative potential of technoscience.

 Themes and Motifs

 Seclusion and Gender based Segregation

 Female education

 Colonial resistance

 Anti-Violence Sentiments

 Science and Gender

 The Absent but Still Present Men

 Use of Satire

 Significance of Ending