Introduction
Literary critical theory is a complicated process - there are many different ways from which one can look at a story. The question remains, however, whether or not these readings are valid. Is the process of literary criticism a means of mental gymnastics, where theorists can force a reading into a text like a child pushing a square peg in a round hole? Looking at the various theorists who make up the most prominently observed members of the literary critical canon, it becomes clear that the act of reading itself is an interactive one, with the reader bringing just as much into the experience of reading as the story does. In that way, reading is a transaction, and critical theory is just one way of bringing our perspectives into it.
In the following paper, the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story "The Yellow Wallpaper" will be examined through three varying critical modes. First, the story will be examined through the perspectives of Plato and Christine de Pisan, whose perspectives relate deeply to the short story's relationship to both nature and the agency of women. Next, the story is viewed as a fairy tale through Vladimir Propp's deconstruction of the Baba Yaga story, with Gilman's work fitting interestingly into those elements. Finally, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is examined through the model of Jacques Lacan's idea of the mirror stage (the time in one's childhood in which one recognizes oneself in a mirror). Through these perspectives, we gain a greater sense of critical theory's applicability to fiction through its ability to inspire new lines of thinking, and open up new angles of analysis for a written work. As a result, critical theory is able to flourish and take on new interpretive shape as a highly malleable and subjective (though no less valid) practice.
Reviewing "The Yellow Wallpaper" through Plato and Christine de Pisan
Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the tale of a young married woman who suffers from what is presumed to be post-partum depression. Her physician husband decides to sequester her for a ‘rest cure’ in their summer home, which turns out to backfire when she starts to slowly go insane. The story takes the form of journal entries denoting her gradual slide into madness, as she hallucinates and forms paranoid thoughts about her husband and the outside world. The audience sees all of this through a first-person perspective that allows us to see inside the mind of the protagonist, sharing her slow mental collapse and allowing them to feel everything that she is going through. This creates a sympathy for the protagonist that would not otherwise have been as present if the story were told from any other perspective. Viewing this short story through the modes of both Plato and Christine de Pisan, we see a work that is concerned chiefly with both the nature of reality and the state of feminism in its time period.
The philosopher Plato was chiefly concerned with the nature of reality and of being, as well as his Theory of Forms - the idealism that there are permanent concepts that shape our material world (Plato, Republic). Plato's distrust of fallible memory and man's ability to delude itself and others is evident in his works: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks" (Phaedrus). Plato warns of the dangers of relying on the opinion of others instead of cultivating one's own wisdom; this is demonstrated in the narrator's noted lack of agency, and her misplaced trust in the fallible and unchallenged doctor-cum-husband.
In essence, this struggle between reality and fantasy is at the heart of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as the narrator begins to lose her grasp of what truly constitutes the Real. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist is excited, even chipper, about the prospect of going to this summer home with John, her husband – however, she is suspicious from the start about why they are going there. “Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?” (Gilman 508).The first person perspective lends to foreshadowing, as the protagonist senses that something is wrong, letting the audience know, but she cannot quite articulate it.
The protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” experiences both tremendous psychotic episodes and incredible feministic tendencies and desires, exploring them both for the sake of finding her own identity apart from her husband and normal society and demonstrating the importance of activity and feminism in the female mind. Christine de Pisan was an incredibly learned woman who was perpetually concerned with growing misogyny in French society; she would see the narrator as a victim of such a patriarchal world, where the husband traps her and makes her insane by exerting his control. As men "can tell endless tales and keep the best parts for themselves" (Christine de Pisan 125), Pisan would see this story as an expression of that persecution, and how it can drive victims of patriarchal society insane.
The sense of isolation that the protagonist feels (due to the gender-specific discrimination she experiences) is not unlike the lack of enlightenment one feels in Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”. In it, he describes the philosopher as someone who is able to free themselves from seeing just the ‘shadows’ of reality, and can now see the true shapes of it. This ties back to his ideal of an aristocracy in society, wherein those same philosophers would go back to the cave in order to share the true Forms of reality and knowledge with those still in the cave (who do not understand that they only see shadows) (Republic). The narrator was placed in aprison or cave-like environment, where she was being observed and noticed, rather than simply hidden away. Over time, much of this surveillance took place merely in the protagonist’s head, through the “two bulbous eyes”(Gilman 511) that she regularly sees in the yellow wallpaper. This merely leads to her madness and paranoia, and does not help her already agitated situation. The primary antagonist of the main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the husband himself, John. He is a doctor, and a 19th century one, at that; at the time, mental illness was not very well known of or talked about, and therefore many of the remedies that were prescribed to those suffering from these maladies were anything but helpful. The concept of a ‘rest cure’ is particularly bizarre, as it implies that the outside world itself is what needs to be stopped, not the protagonist’s potential sadness (which may or may not be postpartum depression). He is Plato's idea of the foolish poet who attempts to act as a doctor though he is actually harming her: “Thepoet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling" (Plato, Republic 33).
As the narrator continues on this path, the madness and despair get worse. She starts to hallucinate that figures in the wallpaper are watching her: "I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least" (Gilman 511). All this is evidence of the hallucinations she is experiencing, as well as her further disconnect from reality as a result of the rest cure and her inattentive husband. Feeling separated from this cruel world by terrible circumstances, the protagonist begins to form her very own narrative about what she is seeing. Part of this narrative involves increasable creative leaps, including seeing a woman in the wallpaper – one who is trapped and in need of help. This reflects the protagonist’s own desire to be saved from her own boredom and restrictions. She even laments this potential problem, only to shoot it down with her husband’s own faulty logic: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (Gilman 508). Here, she is falling into the trap that de Pisan avoids sarcastically when she criticizes patriarchy, which is that she does not dare to find fault in what her husband is doing to her. "yet may my daring to repudiate and find fault with an author so worthy and so subtle not seem presumption in me" (Christine de Pisan, 127).
Despite the protagonist’s protests as to the effectiveness of (or desire for) the resting cure, John persists, stating that he knows what is best for her. “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear, ‘said he’ and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time” (Gilman 509). This is one of his many relatively crackpot and holistic theories as to how the protagonist can get better again. However, all this serves to do is bring her further away from everything that still keeps her sane, like her art and painting. Plato warns against those who are too quick to advance their causes (in this case, modern medicine) at the expense of what is right: “what will anyone be profited if under the influence of honor or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?" (Plato 38). In this case, John neglects the desire to do the right thing with his wife in favor of comforting her with flawed 19th century medicine, as well as possibly to keep her out of the way, so as not to disturb him with her hysteria.
The protagonist’s relationship with the color yellow is a big part of the story, especially as more and more time passes and she becomes increasingly paranoid. When she first enters the room, she has a violently negative reaction to the titular wallpaper – “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (Gilman, 509). Time goes on, and John’s promise to change the wallpaper has not been fulfilled, leaving the otherwise nice room with a nagging flaw that exacerbates her growing insanity – “I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper” (Gilman 510). This quote indicates that everything about the room is acceptable to her, except for the wallpaper itself, which she describes as "horrid." The narrator starts to form her own reality through hallucination; Plato rails against this as well, both narrator and husband living in a world of delusion: "if he does not make a real object he cannot make what is, but only some semblance of existence; and if anyone were to say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth" (Plato 31).
The first person perspective allows the audience to go on the complete emotional journey with the protagonist – nothing is left out, no matter how gruesome or uncomfortable. Suspicion turns to anger and hatred, as the protagonist starts to wonder about the woman she sees behind the yellow wallpaper, even relating to it in her own isolation. “I don’t blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!” (Gilman517). She also has her lucid moments – the punctuation of her continuing insanity with moments of clarity makes the journey even more dangerous, as she recognizes what is happening to her, but seemingly cannot stop it. “I wish I could get well faster,”(Gilman 511) says the protagonist at one point in a fit of pique. However, due to her own depression and madness, we see her slowly believe that there are women in the wallpaper. Plato, reading this, might see this as an expression of art and creativity -something that is irrational and has no place in the perfect state of man: "The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling;and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colors and figures"(Plato33).
In the end, she is extremely excited by her situation regarding the wallpaper – the first-person perspective allows us to see inside her mind and learn her opinions on the situation. “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was” (Gilman 515). If this story were told from a third-person perspective, we would simply see a woman going mad in a room, not knowing her innermost thoughts. In this way, however, Gilman allows the woman’s mind to become the journey itself; the arc of the plot is her own descent into madness, rather than merely becoming cooped up in a summer home. What the narrator hallucinates about and what ends up plaguing her most is the violation of her own rights and privileges as a person and woman. John is domineering and unkind, believing erroneously that he knows exactly what is wrong with her and how to fix it. “John is a physician and PERHAPS.that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman508). Her subordinate status as the woman in the marriage forces her to follow her husband’s lead, especially when he has such a prestigious education and standing in life at the time as a doctor. Things like the rest cure were meant to also demoralize her and make her more docile – her condition merely made it easier to be manipulated. This flies in the face of many feminist ideals, and the story often provides feminism as a solution to the problems the protagonist is experiencing. De Pisan herself notes man's willingness to think terrible, insulting things about women, as she mentioned in her criticism of Roman de la Rose: "InGod's name, what can one find there but sophisticalexhortations filled with ugliness and thingshorrible to recall?" (Christine de Pisan128). Feminism was not entirely present in the 19th century – the domestic picture painted by families in the United States was of women dutifully caring for their home while the men went forth and worked on their own. Women were not allowed to vote, and they were often left powerless by an increasingly patriarchal society. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is meant to be an answer to that, wherein the woman is driven mad by the same thing the man wants her to do, proving that he does not have the ultimate answer for everything. It becomes an expression of the world of the woman, and how it can drive women to desperation and psychological torment. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an extremely feminist text. By showing just how wrong John is in his assessment of the protagonist, and seeing how much his diagnosis hurts her psychologically, we begin to see that it is not a good idea for the woman’s own desires and intentions to be ignored. John would rather be certain of his own superiority, both gender-wise and intellectually, than consider the idea that his wife may know more about her own condition than she does. This is akin to "the wickedness which is there recorded of women"(Christine de Pisan 128). De Pisan talks about in her critiques - John and his ilk think poorly of women, and so take the initiative to control them in these ways; by downplaying her need for real medical and psychological help as "a nervous weakness" which "is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies" is akin to this kind of wickedness de Pisan describes (Gilman 508). The biggest thing getting in the way of this being a feminist text is the relative passivity of the protagonist. For as many people (John included) who make fun of her, there are many more instances where she does not stand up for herself. This is for many reasons – one, it would not have been effective to whine in front of the man who is both one’s husband and one’s health care provider; also, in the 19th century it was important to mask her anxieties and fears in order to keep the illusion of a happy marriage, and to make it seem like she is fighting her own depression and living to tell the tale. De Pisan would have admired her, as she fought against these patriarchal beliefs in her own struggles, saying that it “may it not be imputed to me as folly, arrogance, or presumption, that I, a woman, shoulddare to reproach and call into question"(Christine de Pisan131) the actions of arrogant men who seek to marginalize women due to their low opinion of them.
In the end, it seems as though the protagonist is forced into this situation against her will, entering into it through a misplaced trust of her husband/doctor’s assessment of her health. The very tenets of the resting cure prevent her from thinking or spending time on intellectualism for very long, almost as if to discourage her from really thinking about what she is doing. This leads her to the type of creative and cognitive starvation that makes her mind start to invent hallucinations such as the woman in the wallpaper. De Pisan would see this as the eventual outcome of a patriarchal hostage situation like we see in Gilman's story, as men like John do not know what is like to be a woman and cannot address these 'problems' - "it is precisely because I am a woman that I can speak better in this matter than one who has not had the experience, since he speaks only by conjecture and by chance" (Christine de Pisan130).
Perhaps the most gratifying (yet disturbing) moment for the protagonist in the short story is when she finally succumbs to her madness, falling victim to the patriarchal and homeopathic solution that her husband laid out for her. She writes, “I’ve got out at lastin spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman519). At this point, she fully believes she is the woman in the wallpaper who has freed herself from her own insecurities and manages to survive. However, she can never then regain that humanity, as the prison experience has left her feeling higher than consciousness; she has gone off the deep end, and does not have the appropriate skills or support system (being an isolated woman in the 19th century) to thrive, much less survive.
An unsatisfying, patriarchal marriage, combined with misplaced ideas of what constituted medicine in the 19th century, makes the protagonist of“The Yellow Wallpaper” descend into madness and hysteria. Plato's modes would see the story as an example of the poet's need to create a world that is inferior to the real one; both John with his mistaken ideas of what women need, and the narrator's increasing hallucinations to recreate her own reality, are false. Christine de Pisan would see the story as an example of the increasing distrust of men toward women; John uses his apparent greater knowledge of medicine to keep the narrator disenfranchised and without agency. The woman, on the other hand, does not get a say in how she is treated, because she is presumed to not know any better - the same claims de Pisan refuted when criticizing Roman de la Rose.
Esteemed literary critic Vladimir Propp, in his essay "Fairy Tale Transformations," breaks down the essence of the fairy tale into a series of elements and functions, all linked inexorably to religious practices found in past traditions. According to Propp, fairy tales are an amalgam of the functions and roles of religion and culture in various societies; the tropes of fairy tales are reflections of these customs. These functions all exist in some form or another in the vast majority of fairy tales, allowing Propp to organize and codify the structures and natures of fairy tales. "We observe that the actors in the fairy tale perform essentially the same actions as the tale progresses, no matter how different from one another in shape, size, sex, and occupation, in nomenclature and other static attributes" (Propp 785). While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is far from a fairy tale, it has a relatively fairy tale-like structure, and applying Propp's principles to the short story can reveal a uniquely structured tale that is akin to many of these fairy tales.
Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper follows the story of an unnamed narrator, a married woman who, it is presumed, recently had a child and is experiencing a sort of postpartum psychosis. Her husband, John, a doctor, prescribes her a rest cure at a quiet summer mansion, where she is effectively sequestered in a room, causing her to grow more and more slowly insane. As she starts to experience more and more fantastical sights, and her grip on reality starts to fade away, the plot and characters of "The Yellow Wallpaper" structurally resemble a fairy tale - at least in the manner in which Vladimir Propp establishes these tropes.
Propp is innately concerned with two different perspectives on fairy tales - naturalist and folklorist. In essence, he notes that many elements of nature can also be found in folklore, and vice versa; there is a distinct resemblance of nature to folklore, and this enables the fairy tale to be examined through both of these perspectives. In one perspective, folkloristic texts are organized in the linear elements that comprise the story, and in the other the patterns are found underneath the text itself, often out of order and instead rearranged to fit certain schemes:
Both fields allow two possiblepoints of view: either the internal similarity oftwo externally dissimilar phenomena does notderive from a common genetic root - the theoryof spontaneous generation - or else this morphologicalsimilarity does indeed result from aknown genetic tie - the theory of differentiationowing to subsequent metamorphoses or transformations of varying cause and occurrence. (Propp 785)
Propp tends to follow the latter; fairy tales, according to him, possess certain narrative elements that cannot be reduced any further than they already have - these are found in "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Propp has broken down fairy tales into a series of functions and narrative elements, all of which stem from an initial situation and allow the story to fall into the normal path of a fairy tale. "Fairy tales exhibit thirty-one functions, not all ofwhich may be found in anyone fairy tale; however,the absence of certain functions does notinterfere with the order of appearance of the others" (Propp 786). In essence, these functions are often found in fairy tale, but they are not all contained in every one. Propp also notes that, "in contrast to other types of tales (the anecdote,the novella, the fable, and so on), the fairytale shows a comparatively sparse sprinkling of elements from real life"; this further indicates Propp's philosophy of fairy tales being rooted in narrative structure and religious imagery (Propp 789).
The central facet of a fairy tale is the dispatch or departure on a quest; this is where the primary characters (the hero or heroes) have to embark on a journey or accomplish a task. While this dispatch is always a constant in fairy tales, "The dispatching and departing actors, the motivations behind the dispatch, and so forth, are variables" (Propp 786). In "The Yellow Wallpaper,"the dispatch is of the narrator to the room in the summer mansion, and the journey itself is the rest cure - the narrator's own attempts to understand and escape her situation are this story's example of the fairy tale's hero's journey.
In order to understand "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a Propp-structured fairy tale, its plot must be examined using Propp's primary functions. First, there is the absentation, where the hero must leave his or her place of security or home to embark on the journey - this can be interpreted to be the narrator and John's escape to the country home for the summer, leaving the security of home for these unfamiliar climes. "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer" (Gilman 508). Next is the interdiction, where the hero is warned against taking action; here, John gives the warning, as he rebukes his wife's pleas to not undergo the rest cure - "He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures" (Gilman 508).
John, the husband, is both the interdictor (the friend warning against bad things) and the villain (the person who arrives through the violation of the interdiction); the narrator's insanity could also be said to be the villain, as the arrival of the narrator to the house may also constitute a violation of the interdiction. The madness of the narrator performs reconnaissance to seek information on how to defeat her and make her insane; this madness chooses to do this through slowly driving the narrator insane through hallucination. Trickery follows, in which the narrator's madness shows the narrator women in the wallpaper, as well as increasingly decrepit conditions within the room, to drive her mad: "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind" (Gilman 514). Complicity occurs in the narrator's own willingness to believe the hallucinations. The madness performs villainy on the narrator, providing new torments and horrors; John also performs villainy due to his imprisonment of the narrator against her total will and consent.
The narrator is made known of John's villainy by recognizing just how inconsiderate he is of her, and begins her counter-action by falling further and further into madness. She departs from sanity, and begins identifying more and more with the woman she sees in the wallpaper (acting as the 'donor' figure). The wallpaper itself acts as a talisman, or helpful device or tool the hero can use to further their journey: "Talismans play a significant role in the fairy tale. They are often the only means by which [the protagonist] can attain his goal" (Propp 796). Though it is not actively helpful in helping her physical escape, her obsession with it occupies her attention during her incarceration in the room, and it becomes her sole companion (including the woman she imagines crawling around within the wallpaper). She obsesses over it to an incredible level: "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind" (Gilman 514). In this way, she uses the wallpaper in a unique way to free herself the only way she can - by mentally escaping her rest cure.
Eventually, the narrator falls further and further into madness, until she actually causes John to faint and escapes at the end of the story: "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Gilman 519). Despite the structural nature of the fairy tale as part of the hero's journey, the narrator's escape is purely metaphorical, and it is presented as a negative thing; the narrator has completely lost her mind, remaining in the room whilst thinking she has escaped. At the same time, she feels fulfilled despite her apparent insanity: "Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was" (Gilman 515).
Gilman's narrator's unique troubles, particularly what John inflicts her with (the rest cure), can be categorized under Propp's notion of 'basic harm.' What actually constitutes the real basic harm of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is vague - it could be John's rest cure, to be certain, but it could also be the latent postpartum depression that the narrator already had from the birth of their child. As that is what causes John to implement the rest cure, it stands to reason that it is what is being acted upon. Propp notes that the form of this basic harm can be transformed based on a number of cultural factors; instead of being captured by a dragon, for instance, the narrator of Gilman's story is instead trapped by her own growing psychosis.
In order to fit "The Yellow Wallpaper," like other fairy tales, into the traditional notions of fairy tales and their customs as derived from religion and other sources, Propp posits that various transformations of numerous types can and will occur. In essence, ancient religious practices are the chief source of fairy tales, with these tales either taking basic or derived forms. Propp believes that the former is much more pure than its derived counterpart, and one can examine these fairy tales through these transformations to determine if a form is derived or basic. According to Propp, the fantastic is older than the logical, and the heroic is older than the comedic and so on.
One of these transformations is reduction: "Reduction points to thelack of agreement between the fairy tale and thewhole tenor of the life surrounding it; reductionpoints to the low degree of relevance of the fairytale to a given environment, to a given epoch, orto the reciter of the fairy tale" (Propp 791). In essence, the original element is shortened dramatically to form the new fairy tale. In the case of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the fairy tale is significantly reduced; as it is a fairy tale distinctly unrelated to its environment, there is very little that is fantastic about the story outside of what lies within the narrator's imagination. This occurs to the point where the hero's journey is effectively stripped of most, if not all, other characters besides the protagonist (narrator) and antagonist (John), and the narrator herself is confined for the majority of the story, having little agency and identifying with the woman in the wallpaper: "At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be" (Gilman 514).
