The Yellow Wallpaper: a Stifling Relationship
Husband-Doctor: A Stifling Relationship In Gilman's "the Yellow Wallpaper"
At the beginning of "The Yellow Wallpaper", the protagonist, Jane, has just given birth to a baby boy. Although for most mothers a newborn infant is a joyous time, for others, like Jane, it becomes a trying emotional period that is now popularly understood to be the common disorder, postpartum depression. For example, Jane describes herself as feeling a "lack of strength" (Colm, 3) and as becoming "dreadfully fretful and querulous" (Jeannette and Morris, 25). In addition, she writes, "I cry at nothing and cry most of the time" (Jeannette and Morris, 23).
However, as the term postpartum depression was not in the vocabulary of this time period, John, Jane's husband and doctor, has diagnosed Jane as suffering from "temporary nervous depression [with] a slight hysterical tendency" (30).(Colm) It may be more accurate to view the symptoms she develops later in the storyvisual hallucinations, delusions, paranoiaas stemming from a psychotic condition that, prior to the birth of her son, was subdued or in control. The birth of her son precipitated a confrontation with John and became a catalyst of her psychosis.
Jane's child may be considered a catalyst because, although he is not named for us by the narrator, he will be the recipient of his father's last name. Walsh points out "the stress laid in the clinic on the father as word and figure, so that what is finally important might be called the perception of paternity or the relation to paternity" (78). When applied to a reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper," this translates into the following: The birth event is one of the times, perhaps the first, that Jane actually confronts her relation to the father of her son, John.
In relation to the above, until the very last few lines of the story, Jane herself, is unnamed.(Hume, 477) This absence correlates with the void she has in the place at which a non-psychotic person would have a relation to
At the beginning of "The Yellow Wallpaper", the protagonist, Jane, has just given birth to a baby boy. Although for most mothers a newborn infant is a joyous time, for others, like Jane, it becomes a trying emotional period that is now popularly understood to be the common disorder, postpartum depression. For example, Jane describes herself as feeling a "lack of strength" (Colm, 3) and as becoming "dreadfully fretful and querulous" (Jeannette and Morris, 25). In addition, she writes, "I cry at nothing and cry most of the time" (Jeannette and Morris, 23).
However, as the term postpartum depression was not in the vocabulary of this time period, John, Jane's husband and doctor, has diagnosed Jane as suffering from "temporary nervous depression [with] a slight hysterical tendency" (30).(Colm) It may be more accurate to view the symptoms she develops later in the storyvisual hallucinations, delusions, paranoiaas stemming from a psychotic condition that, prior to the birth of her son, was subdued or in control. The birth of her son precipitated a confrontation with John and became a catalyst of her psychosis.
Jane's child may be considered a catalyst because, although he is not named for us by the narrator, he will be the recipient of his father's last name. Walsh points out "the stress laid in the clinic on the father as word and figure, so that what is finally important might be called the perception of paternity or the relation to paternity" (78). When applied to a reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper," this translates into the following: The birth event is one of the times, perhaps the first, that Jane actually confronts her relation to the father of her son, John.
In relation to the above, until the very last few lines of the story, Jane herself, is unnamed.(Hume, 477) This absence correlates with the void she has in the place at which a non-psychotic person would have a relation to
Cited: Hogan, Patrick Colm. "Structure and Ambiguity in the Symbolic Order." Criticism & Lacan. Eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.3–30. King, Jeannette and Pam Morris. "On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper. '" Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (Winter 1989): 23–32. Walsh, Michael. "Reading the Real in the Seminar on the Psychoses." Criticism & Lacon. Eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 64–73. Dock, Julie Bates. ‘But No One Expects That ' Charlotte Perkins Oilman 's "The Yellow Wallpaper ' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship." PLMA 111.1 (Jan 1996): 52–65. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP. 2000. Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper. '" Tulsa Studies in Women 's Literature 3. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1984):61–77. Johnson, Greg. "Gilman 's Gothic Allegory: Range and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper. '" Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (Fall 1989): 521–30. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Tripathi, Vanashree. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper ': A Gynograph." Indian Journal of American Studies 27.1 (Winter 1997): 65–69. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1977.