INTRODUCTION:

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1892. It is regarded as an important feminist work in American literature as it illustrates the mental and physical health of a women in the 19th century. The story has been narrated in first person by the protagonist, a married woman who is diagnosed with a mental condition. As time lapses in the story, her condition gets worse. Gilman observed similar incident in modern societywhere people refused to report the concern and instead sustained a hostile attitude. Mentally-ill patients have an equal chance of recovery, but the deep-rooted assumptions and beliefs of the society restrict possibility of treatment and recovery. Gilman discusses a propound issue that was and continues to bring fatal outcome.

The Yellow Wallpaper is primarily concerned with mental illness as its theme. It may be analyzed from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective by analyzing its use of language.

Lacan’s Psychoanalytical Theory:

Many authors prefer not to incorporate the theme of mental illness in literature due to its controversies in the society. But in The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman tries to draw our attention to the psychic nature of the text. A series of diary entries noted by the protagonist helps reader to craft the first person narrative experience (Hall 118). The reader embraces his or her personal thinking and creative mind space of the main character. While captivating confessions and thoughts of the writer, the reader witnesses the development of the protagonist’s thoughts and how she plunges into madness. The protagonist suffers from a severe depression after the birth of her son that worsen her condition. She experiences a string of paranoia, obsession, and nervousness (Gilman 265). At this point, the story reﬂects different stages of mental condition.

Her husband, John is a physician who diagnoses her with hysteria and takes responsibility for her treatment and recovery. Their relationship is no more of husband and wife but that of a psychiatrist and his patient. Later when he realizes that there is no improvement in his wife’s condition, John decided to take her to their country house for her better recovery. With regards to her husband’s decision as a part of her diagnosis, the narrator disagrees. She claims, “I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind” (Gilman 1). The word “this” signifies the narrator’s diary notes through which she connects with the reader (Gilman 1). Thus, the epistolary form of The Yellow Wallpaper creates a series of communication between narrator and reader. As a result, the reader becomes a silent character within the story and this forms a relationship between the narrator and the reader.

Jacques Lacan regarded psychiatry as a “verbal science,” since “the psychoanalyst investigates the unconscious mind by using and examining language” (Barry 106). Likewise, the language of The Yellow Wallpaper too becomes vital because written form of language assist the narrator to record her story, but later she is “absolutely forbidden” from doing this act (Gilman 2). It is linguistic structure through which the story is evolved and the characters are slowly revealed.

As stated by Ferdinand de Saussure, “meaning in language is a matter of contrasts between words and other words, not between words and things… it is a network of diﬀerences” (Barry 106). Lacan clarifies a similar concept in his essay “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” proving that the same signiﬁer may have a multitude of signiﬁeds. A chain of signiﬁers is illustrated in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper when the narrator tries to describe her summer residence. She calls it “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate…a haunted house,” which present an unclear image about the residence to the readers. (Gilman 1). She also describes the room, inaccurately stating that the room was “nursery ﬁrst, and then playroom and gymnasium” (Gilman 2). The description of the house and the room makes, both the narrator and the reader, uncertain about its realities.

Therefore, it can be stated that the house would be the cause of the narrator’s mental illness (Martin 737). She felt isolated and misunderstood by her husband which brought contradiction in their married life. Consequently, she felt detached from the reality and often indulged herself in imagination. In her diary entries, the narrator reminisces her childhood and explains the amount of thrill she had from just staring at walls and the ceiling and watching how these inanimate objects came to life (Gilman 653).

In addition, the yellow wallpaper is the main symbol in the entire short story that fascinates and enchants the narrator to spend time idly sitting alone in the bedroom. It only gave a window to manifest her mental illness. The narrator began to complain about the yellow wallpaper and how she hated the patterns and its smell. However, examining through a Lacanian lens, the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator’s alter ego, and the narrator’s unconscious. At the beginning of the story, it is informed that the narrator suﬀers from “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 2).

Probably, the narrator’s illness was identified as post-partum depression. In the 19th century, a popular diagnosis of post-partum depressionwas ‘rest cure’. Thus, she is advised ‘rest cure’ which keeps her isolated and lethargic. But the narrator had been wrongfully diagnosed by her husband John because he did not have a detailed knowledge of her mental illness and called it to be a result of postpartum. However, from a tender age, the narrator suffers from mental illness. Her parents overlooked her illness and chose to look the other way because in the 19th century, mental illness was perceived as taboo. At that time, parents would lock their children in the cellars or basement of their houses to hide them from the world (Hall 124). So from her childhood confessions, it can be judged that the narrator suffers from symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that reveals itself later on in the adolescence stage. Her mental condition stays hidden until it was noticed later on in her life (Gilman 265).

In the room, the yellow wallpaper turn out to be her sole companion, and in it she views something unfamiliar. Soon, the narrator spots the figure of a woman within the wallpaper, saying, “it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Gilman 6). Hence, the narrator recognizes the ﬁgure of the woman as her “mirror” image. According to Barry, this recognition reﬂects Lacan’s “mirror stage,” when the person sees his/ her ‘reﬂection’ in a mirror and begins to see himself or herself as a “uniﬁed being, separate from the rest of the world” (Barry 109).

Through his work in psychoanalysis, Lacan formulated a three-step model of mental development: The Real Order, The Imaginary Order, and the Symbolic Order. The Real signifies a period in an infant’s life in which all needs are met. As the child matures, he or she moves into the Imagery, where there is no difference between self and other. Then, the child sees their reﬂection in the mirror and begins to diﬀerentiate themselves from others. Lacan calls this stage, a “mirror stage.” When thechild attains self-recognition sense, he enters the Symbolic stage where he learns language that allows him to refer to the people and the objects (Barry 109).

In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator presents these Lacanian stages of development. As the story progresses, the narrator behaves like an infant and not an adult, demonstrating the reverse form of Lacanian development. For instance, her husband, John, takes care of her as a child and calls her “little girl” and “a blessed little goose” (Gilman 6). However, the narrator identiﬁes herself in the company of this “other” woman within the yellow wallpaper and becomes one like her. The identiﬁcation may be interpreted along with the unity between the narrator, “the self,” and the woman within the wallpaper, “the other”. As her obsession and correlation with the woman intensifies, the narrator’s consciousness becomes preoccupied with this “other” (Barry 109). Later, the narrator’s ﬁnal degradation and insanity is evident from her “creeping” around the room in the ﬁnal scene. She states “here I can creep smoothly on the ﬂoor, and my shoulder just ﬁts in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way” (Gilman, 10). The idea of “creeping” causes the narrator to crawl as an infant under the guidance of the wall. However, her ﬁnal portrayal as a child-like soul emphasizes her descent into madness. Here, her return to the Real Order indicates her escape from the mental and physical conﬁnement.

Therefore, her imagination and hallucinations creates an image behind the wallpaper. Her idleness began her mental breakdown excluding her rationality and attachment to reality. The yellow wallpaper helps the psychoanalyst to follow the patterns formed within unconscious mind of the narrator. This unconscious’s eﬀect on the conscious mind is shown in the text as the narrator personiﬁes the wallpaper, stating that it “knew what a vicious inﬂuence it had!” (Gilman 4). Hence, Lacan’s opinion about “the centrality of the unconscious” is mirrored by the yellow wallpaper (Barry 110).

In addition, the images found within the yellow wallpaper are portrayed more or less similar images found within a dream. The narrator asserts that a “recurrent spot” in the wallpaper has a signiﬁcant eﬀect on her creating a recurring dream (Gilman 4). Sigmund Freud, a pioneer in the ﬁeld of psychiatry, observed dreams as an escape route for the unconscious mind. Through signiﬁcance of dreams, Lacan borrowed linguist Roman Jakobson’s concepts of metaphor and metonym to prove how the unconscious and the conscious minds communicate (Barry 107). In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator depicts the figure of a woman in the wallpaper as a “broken neck” with “two bulbous eyes” (Gilman 4). This metonymic depiction of the ﬁgure shows that narrator seems to be self-trapped. Hence, the yellow wallpaper reveals the narrator’s unconscious mind. The narrator’s description of the mysterious woman behind the wallpaper reflects the mirror image of her actions creeping into the room and occasionally peering out through the window at the garden. At this point, it is apparent to think that the mysterious woman behind the yellow wallpaper was the narrator herself. This reﬂects the conscious and the unconscious model of the mind. We observe a similarity between the narrator’s unconscious mind and the ﬁgure of the woman who shakes the wallpaper trying to escape through. She feels confined and limited and has a strong urge to be free so she looked at the garden (Gilman 265). Here, the garden represents a free existence where her creativity would be appreciated. Her “forbidden” desire is to “work,” to participate in social life, and to experience “excitement and change” (Gilman 2). The narrator understands her mental condition better than John by writing entirety in her diary. Hence, in the end, when the narrator accepted her condition, she frees the woman trapped behindthe wallpaper bytearingit up,and thus, she feels liberating herself both mentally and physically.

CONCLUSION:

Therefore, it is evident that Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper can be analyzed withLacanian psychoanalytic theory. Due to its subject matter of women’s madness, the story is well suited to the psychoanalytical reading with Lacan’s traditional stages of development and the narrator seems to exhibit a reverse form of Lacanian development. The most signiﬁcant symbol, the yellow wallpaper, symbolizes the inner most desires of the narrator and her interactions with the wallpaper throughout the story. It allows the reader to understand more about the psyche of a woman in the house and how she decent into madness. Mental illness have been wrongly perceived and the narrator suffers from isolation and detachmentas a part of her treatment. But her internal recognition of herself that madness is the only physical and psychological freedom. Thus, the society’sacceptance and attitude towards mental illness can make its treatment and recovery more effectual.

REFERENCES:

1. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Print.

2. Gilman, Charlotte P. “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. 17.4 (2011): 265-269. Print.

3. Gilman, C. P. “Yellow Wall-Paper.”The New England Magazine. 1892: 647-656. Print.

4. Hall, Donald E. “The Queerness of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”.”Queer Theories. 2003: 115-129. Print.

5. Lacan, Jacques. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” Trans. Array Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. David Lodge. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Education, 2000. 62-87. Print.

6. Martin, Diana. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wallpaper”.American Journal of Psychiatry. 164.5(2007): 726-756. Print.

7. “Mental Illness In “Yellow Wallpaper” By Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” GradesFixer. 15 Jan. 2020. Web. 27Feb. 2020. https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/mental-illness-in-yellow-wallpaper-by-charlotte-perkins-gilman/

8. Nada, Farah. The Other “Madwoman in the Attic: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic and a Feminist Reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.” Asrar Journal. Web. 27 Feb. 2020. https://www.asrarjornal.com/about1-c112e

Received on 22.12.2019 Modified on 19.02.2020

Int. J. Ad. Social Sciences. 2020; 8(1): 01-04.

DOI: 10.5958/2454-2679.2020.00001.8