earticle

영어

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” primarily focuses on exposing how patriarchy can lead to women’s mental illness. Women in the 19th century were trapped by the myth of ‘The Angel in the House’, which caused ‘hysteria’ for many Victorian women. This paper examines the madness of women in the 19th century with reference to Michel Foucault’s Panopticon. The narrator-wife was destroyed by the experience of being confined in a bedroom. This room, surrounded by a yellow wallpaper, functions as a symbol of constant surveillance like the tower in the Panopticon. However, the bedroom in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a hidden place where the wife writes her journal. Writing is a way of looking, knowing and establishing one’s identity. So the power relationship between the visible subject(wife) and the invisible observer(husband) can be reversed in this bedroom. The narrator’s insanity was a result of her repressed anger and enforced passivity. In a male-dominated Victorian society, women had no rights, identity or existence. Women’s hysterias were psychological enactments of insignificant roles they were allowed to play in a patriarchal society. Therefore, in Lacanian terms, she shifts from the Symbolic realm to the Imaginary realm. Through this shift she can deconstruct the false text of contentment she has created in her journal. Upon entering the Imaginary realm, the narrator believes that the woman behind the wallpaper is her double and alter-ego. Madness became not only a form of rebellion but an intelligible response to conflicting social demands. The narrator’s madness is presented as a form of epiphany toward independence and liberation. She awakens from a male-defined world to a world defined by her own feeling and judgement.