Intentional and Symptomatic Readings on “the Yellow Wallpaper”
Intentional and symptomatic readings on “The Yellow Wallpaper”
On starting my reading on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I found it very amusing to understand the feeling of the narrator, whose name is revealed as Jane at the very end of the story. She is constantly restricted in many ways by her husband John, yet many of her description describes him as “caring” and “loving” even though he disappoints her in most of her wants. The contradiction, I suspected, was due to that the authorial intention is not projected on the spot, and that through interpreting the story with intentional reading and symptomatic reading different ideology may be revealed respectively. I therefore decided to study the distinction between the two ways of interpreting narrative with this text. In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, H. Porter Abbott put much emphasis on the concept of the implied author, the “sensibility (that combination of feeling, intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that ‘accounts for’ the narrative” (84), in discussing interpretations of narratives. As he described intentional readings, he depicted that “the ideas and judgments that we infer from the narrative are understood to be keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects.” (102) And he defined that when doing symptomatic reading “you are explicitly arguing that yours is an interpretation that the implied author would not agree with, but you are also maintaining that this is what is psychologically and culturally significant about the novel.” (104) This is a good point to base the distinction between the two ways of reading, and perhaps the most significant one: whether the interpretation is attributing to the authorial intention or not. Another distinction could be how paratext-dependent the reading is (Abbott, 106), but even though symptomatic readings often require much more paratextual material to support their argument, intentional readings could establish its
On starting my reading on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I found it very amusing to understand the feeling of the narrator, whose name is revealed as Jane at the very end of the story. She is constantly restricted in many ways by her husband John, yet many of her description describes him as “caring” and “loving” even though he disappoints her in most of her wants. The contradiction, I suspected, was due to that the authorial intention is not projected on the spot, and that through interpreting the story with intentional reading and symptomatic reading different ideology may be revealed respectively. I therefore decided to study the distinction between the two ways of interpreting narrative with this text. In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, H. Porter Abbott put much emphasis on the concept of the implied author, the “sensibility (that combination of feeling, intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that ‘accounts for’ the narrative” (84), in discussing interpretations of narratives. As he described intentional readings, he depicted that “the ideas and judgments that we infer from the narrative are understood to be keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects.” (102) And he defined that when doing symptomatic reading “you are explicitly arguing that yours is an interpretation that the implied author would not agree with, but you are also maintaining that this is what is psychologically and culturally significant about the novel.” (104) This is a good point to base the distinction between the two ways of reading, and perhaps the most significant one: whether the interpretation is attributing to the authorial intention or not. Another distinction could be how paratext-dependent the reading is (Abbott, 106), but even though symptomatic readings often require much more paratextual material to support their argument, intentional readings could establish its
Bibliography: Abbott, H. P. The Cambridge Introduction to Narratives, Second edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010[2008]. Print. Gilman, C. P. “The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)” and “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper (1913)”. ENGL1025 Course Anthology. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong, 2012. “Turned”. FullReads. [1911]. Web. 13 Dec 2012. http://fullreads.com/literature/turned/ The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990[1935]. Web, Google Book preview. 12 Dec 2012. Jansen, S. L. “Mad Women in the Attic: Madness and Suicide in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’”. Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011. Print.