new historicist reading of yellow wall paper by gilman
Producing the Subject: A New Historicist Reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’
As we know, new historicism is the American form of criticism which is mostly applied to Renaissance literature, esp. the works of Shakespeare, and it uses Poststructuralist criticism. What interests new historicists most is the poststructuralist notion of the self, of discourse, and of power; with regard to power, new historicism leans more towards a Foucauldian notion of power and focuses on the discourses that serve as vehicles for power, it also focuses on the construction of identity. New historicism tries to find out how power has worked to suppress or marginalize rival stories and discourses. Stephen Greenblatt, the most prominent new historicist, consigns Foucault to footnotes and gives him a marginal position, yet Foucault is everywhere in his work, as he is concerned with the analysis of discourse, the role of discourse in determining subject positions, the relationship between power, knowledge and subversion, the wide dispersion of texts which confirm the existence of powerful discursive formations, the fascination with ‘marginal’ figures and situations—the insane, the heretic, the criminal, and the colonial native. This paper offers a Foucauldian analysis of Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’; it focuses on a new historicist analysis of the story in which the story is shown to take part in the discourse of madness. To this end, two fundamental questions must be dealt with: first, how does the discourse of madness and illness function in the story? And second, how does the story participate in a ‘general economy’ of treating madness and illness?
How does the narrator’s illness function in Gilman’s story? What does her illness make possible within the story? First and foremost, it highlights a conflict between the narrator and her husband, John. John is the exact opposite of the narrator. She likes to write, and have a lively life, while John
As we know, new historicism is the American form of criticism which is mostly applied to Renaissance literature, esp. the works of Shakespeare, and it uses Poststructuralist criticism. What interests new historicists most is the poststructuralist notion of the self, of discourse, and of power; with regard to power, new historicism leans more towards a Foucauldian notion of power and focuses on the discourses that serve as vehicles for power, it also focuses on the construction of identity. New historicism tries to find out how power has worked to suppress or marginalize rival stories and discourses. Stephen Greenblatt, the most prominent new historicist, consigns Foucault to footnotes and gives him a marginal position, yet Foucault is everywhere in his work, as he is concerned with the analysis of discourse, the role of discourse in determining subject positions, the relationship between power, knowledge and subversion, the wide dispersion of texts which confirm the existence of powerful discursive formations, the fascination with ‘marginal’ figures and situations—the insane, the heretic, the criminal, and the colonial native. This paper offers a Foucauldian analysis of Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’; it focuses on a new historicist analysis of the story in which the story is shown to take part in the discourse of madness. To this end, two fundamental questions must be dealt with: first, how does the discourse of madness and illness function in the story? And second, how does the story participate in a ‘general economy’ of treating madness and illness?
How does the narrator’s illness function in Gilman’s story? What does her illness make possible within the story? First and foremost, it highlights a conflict between the narrator and her husband, John. John is the exact opposite of the narrator. She likes to write, and have a lively life, while John