The Yellow Wallpaper by C.P. Gilman and the Concepts Developed by Jacques Lacan - Book Report/Review Example

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was an American novelist, lecturer, and public supporter of feminist reforms. Today when we speak of her we primarily recall her well-known short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This short novel is based on the personal experiences of the author when she had a mental distress which was treated in an erroneous and harmful way. However, there is much more in the short story than simply an account of an experience similar to the one that the writer had had. Indeed, the story belongs to the list of perhaps the most outstanding pieces of the feminist literature, and the fact that such a powerful and impressive indignation of the author about the oppressed position of women in the male dominated society of the nineteenth century was voiced in time when many of social changes in the sphere of women`s social equality were even not yet thought of testifies to the great significance of the heritage of Charlotte Perkins Gilman for the modern feminist movements (Golden 1992, pp.319-332). Moreover, Gilman`s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a great piece of literature for the study of concepts of psychoanalysis. It seems to be especially well suited for the comparison with the theories and concepts of the famous French doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (1901–1981). In this regard, let us firstly take a closer look at the plot, themes, and symbols in the Gilman`s story, which depicts the decent of its heroine into madness, and secondly try to establish links between “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the concepts developed by Jacques Lacan. One of the chief themes of “The Yellow Wallpaper” relates to the completely inadequate attitude of the husband to his wife, a woman that apparently has a depressed condition after having given a birth to a child and who is the main protagonist of the short novel. The plot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is told to readers through the eyes, or more exactly through the private diary writings, of the heroine of the story, who after a nervous breakdown that we can associate with the so called postpartum depression, which may happen with new mothers right after the birth of a child, has been in essence isolated from the external world in a roomy and “so long untenanted” (Gilman 1892) mansion by the whim of her husband John. John is a physician who allegedly knows what is needed for his wife to get better as he is saying to her “You know the place is doing you good” (Gilman 1892). Moreover, as the woman observes “he does not believe I am sick!” (Gilman 1892). But from the very opening lines of the story we as readers begin to see that such an attitude of John for the heroine is actually “one reason [she] do not get well faster” (Gilman 1892). What also becomes understandable from the first entry in the diary that the woman has written is that despite her condition she retains signs of a healthy excitement, for instance with the beautiful surroundings, and she initially remains clear-headed in terms of her ability to intuitively feel what is needed for her recovery. And exactly those potentially beneficial things, like “more society and stimulus” (Gilman 1892) John is strictly forbidding her even to think of. On the contrary, he is insisting that she should be avoiding any activity that can be characterized as work, including writing, and in this way he is creating a background for her upcoming descent into madness. Now, a question naturally arises as to whether John can really be completely unaware of the harmfulness of his approach to the treatment of his wife. In this connection we should not forget that the setting of the story takes place in the period when women had definite social roles assigned to them in accordance with what is known as the Cult of True Womanhood, an ideology among other things centered on submission and domesticity as the values imposed upon women (Golden 1992, pp.71-82). Not surprisingly then that such an ideology in both literal and figurative senses was aimed at keeping of women within the confines of their homes, and perhaps John was only subconsciously projecting his expectations of submission and domesticity over his mentally disturbed spouse. It is also quite symbolic that John is the representative of the medical establishment “of high standing” (Gilman 1892), and as such he issues commandments to his wife in a manner that does not tolerate any objections. We may even view him as the personification of the oppressive nature of the medical establishment of the time when the plot of the story is developing that was working to help to maintain the severely limiting Cult of True Womanhood. We may judge the extent to which this is so from the allusions in the story to other doctors (the brother of the heroine and Weir Mitchell) who support the methods of `treatment`, if we may at all call it that way, professed by John. At the same time, even though the woman silently protests against the attitude towards her, it seems that she nevertheless also subconsciously holds the mentioned views regarding the restrained social position of women. For example, when she ponders over her attitude to John, she uses such phrases as “I get unreasonably angry” (Gilman 1892), while it is clear to us that her anger and dissatisfaction with her isolation are completely justified. She further tries to explain away her sensitiveness by asserting that “I think it is due to this nervous condition” (Gilman 1892). So, her relationship with John has become very stressful, as she is trying to control herself before her husband which is a very difficult task for her. In this way, John through his authoritarian stance is essentially controlling not only the physical body of the woman, but her mind as well as he instigates a deep controversy within the woman`s psyche that has to find ways to reconcile the oppressed position and the striving for freedom from her confinement. Not surprisingly then that being unable to find such ways the mental strain of the heroine of the story was poisoning her mind and slowly driving her crazy. Another contribution of John to the psychological downfall of the woman in the story is that he “. . . is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (Gilman 1892). This fact, coupled with John`s impenetrable paternalistic attitude towards his wife essentially makes him impenetrable for her real feelings as well. He is simply unable and unmotivated to even try to understand her, as he tries to postpone discussions of issues that are important for his wife, and ignores both the positive psychological tendencies in her as well as truly alarming signs of her developing madness. For one, when at night John saw the heroine of the story to checking whether her illusions of the movement of the wallpaper were real, he did not even bother to wonder what was the cause of her unrest. And to make things worse, he totally denied all the complaints of his wife about her worsening condition that she thought it was appropriate for to voice at the moment. Such a drastic contrast between seemingly caring tone of John`s expressions in his conversations with the protagonist of the story and his ignorance of her inner mental turmoil may even suggest that the husband is a psychological sadist who aims to torture his spouse. To see that this may be a rightful assumption we may recall the episode from the story when John reacted to the request of his wife to repaper the room in order to get rid of the hideous yellow wallpaper with the response that “. . . after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on” (Gilman 1892). Thus, while proclaiming that his intention was to create the best conditions for his wife`s quick recovery, in practice he was essentially doing almost everything he could to harm her. Aside from direct retelling of the situation of the woman through her diary writings, the author uses a lot of symbolic elements that bolster the narrative, and greatly boost the power of the author`s main messages contained in the story. Of course, the main symbol of the story is the yellow wallpaper, the discussion of which permeates the plot. In fact, the yellow wallpaper as such stands for the sickness that plagues the woman, and as her disturbed condition progresses, the significance that she assigns to the yellow wallpaper grows, as well as the anxiety that it generates in the heroine of the story. In the end, as madness fully overtakes her, we can perceive the whole narrative as the account of the slow process of the helpless immersion of the woman into the frightening unconscious parts of her mind. Now, in his writings Jacques Lacan elaborated several concepts that can be directly applied to the story and in the process confirm and expand its themes and their meaning. One of such concepts is known as the mirror stage, and it relates to what Lacan characterizes as a crucial phase of the formation of a person`s I. From a very general point of view, the mirror stage may be associated with the ability of children to recognize themselves in the mirror, but for Lacan this notion went much further, to the point of being related to the very identification of one`s individual psychology with external entities, the interrelation and dichotomy between which determines the essence of what is for a person to be the separate subject related to what Lacan terms the Other (Feldstein, Fink, and Maire 1995, pp.140,176), which in its turn constitutes another important concept developed by him. Thus, the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” may help demonstrate the workings of this mirror stage through the example of its heroine who as if repeats the childish stage of self-identification with the external world, but in this particular case the woman gets newly transformed into what is viewed as insanity by other people. Interestingly, as Lacan confirmed in his research that perceptual connection to another representative of one`s species is indispensable for the proper process of individual maturing in both humans and animals, the fact that the heroine of the story was essentially left on her own by her husband helps partially explain why her second mirror stage went so terribly wrong. Using to the above-mentioned concept of the Other, we can again see that as Lacan, in opposition to the influential school of ego-psychology, postulated the principal connection between one`s self and the concept of external (Feldstein, Fink, and Maire 1995, pp.39-54), the story heroine`s striving to be allowed to leave her room equally indicated her longing for this connection with the external world, but unfortunately was denied to her by John. Another concept developed by Lacan that has interesting parallels in the story is the concept of the letter, which he broadly defines as a material linguistic incarnation of a certain discourse. Indeed, the diary of the heroine serves as the only source of our knowledge about her inner world, and is a mixture of limiting structures of the language and the emotional striving of the woman to speak out and be heard. Besides, the significance of this diary is enhanced by the fact that Lacan understands the psychological concept of the letter in a different way from the Jungian interpretation of the unconscious and symbols. While for Jung a collective unconscious is manifested through archetypes encoded in symbols, Lacan claims that the workings of the unconscious must be interpreted literally, as if reading the letter (Homer 2004, pp.68-70). This approach may be adopted to increase the importance of the correct interpretation of the woman`s diary, and at the same time help us better appreciate the difficulty of this endeavor. In fact, we as readers cannot fully comprehend what the heroine of the story really experiences, but may only guess what it feels like to be in her sad position. This is especially so in the end of the story, when a powerful dissonance emerges between the shock of the readers related to the extreme manifestation of madness in the woman, and her own sensation of the obtained freedom. Here, we also can refer to the concept of ‘jouissance’ used by postmodernists and Lacan as well, and related to the notion of enjoyment but not in its neat and structured form, but rather in the form when structures of signification that normally allow the subject to know oneself are broken (Lacan 1998, pp.183-185), which may be compatible with the final painful pleasure of the story`s heroine. As we can see, what might seem as a set of vague psychology conceptions is in fact a powerful tool for the insightful analysis of the complex workings of the human psycho. And while some people could wonder whether the thematic similarity between the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and many of the topics in Jacques Lacans research is a coincidence or simply a specially selected match, I think that it is a proper understanding of the universality of the mental phenomena explained by psychoanalysis and other schools of psychological theories that enables an attentive explorer to transcend the superficial judgment and obtain a deeper understanding of human behavior and motivations. Sources Feldstein, Richard, Fink Bruce, and Jaanus Maire. Reading Seminar XI: Lacans Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. State University of New York Press, 1995. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-Paper", 1892. The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Womens Writings, 1999, April 11 2006 Golden, Catherine. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on the Yellow Wallpaper. Feminist Press, 1992. Goring, Paul, Hawthorn, Jeremy, and Mitchell, Domhnall. Studying Literature: The Essential Companion. A Hodder Arnold Publication, 2001. Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. Routledge, 2004. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Read More