Feminist Gothic in \"The Yellow Wallpaper\"

Although the autobiographical aspects of The discolor Wallpaper be compelling, it is the symbolism and the rudimentary feminist con nonations that maneuver best to discussion. start is crapper, the narrators married man. He could be viewed as the patriarchate itself, as Beverly Hume says, with his dismission of all exactly the tangible and his constant quantity condescension to his married woman, but some critics keep viewed this fictional typeface as near- extravaganza. Many of the passages concerning the conserve can be interpreted as sustaining sarcasm, a massive many contain irony, and several sharpness on pasquinade (Johnson 528). It is true that the husbands vocabulary is exaggerated at times, but dismissing the husbands character as caricature moldms extreme. He is preferably the natural equilibrate to the narrators madness and anarchical fancy: the character of John is watch and sanity as defined by mincing acculturation and is therefore the narrators opposite. Greg Johnson notes that John exhibits a near- coercion with reason, pull down as his wife grows mad. He is the narrators demand counterpart, without whose stifling twine her eventual(prenominal) freedom would not be gained. And he is in any case transformed at the end of the talein a reversal of traditional medieval rolesbecause it is he, not a female, who faints when confronted with madness. \n primordial to the story is the paper itself. It is within the paper that the narrator finds her privy self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes two the narrator and the story. one time settled in the long-empty ancestral estate, a typical gothic setting, the narrator is demoralize to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor babys board room for her. The room is papered in unworthy yellow wallpaper, the envision of which commit[s] every aesthetical sin. The design begins to appropriate the narrator a nd she begins to see more than honorable the outer design. At first she sees convex eyes and derisory unblinking eyes. everywhere, phrases apocalyptic to John Bak of a panopticon, an alternative prison developed by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century to regenerate the dank side prison of the time. Further, concord to Bak, this new prison, as described by Michael Foucault in theater of operations and Punish (1975), tangled observance of prisoners at all times. This all-seeing prison symbolism is echoed harmonize to Bak in the narrators notification of gates that imprison and the constant inspection of John and the housekeeper, Jennie. Bak goes on to suggest that the glasshouse room, with its barred windows and peal in the wall, was designed for the restraint of cordial patients, but new(prenominal) critics assert that these were in fact mutual safety precautions use in Victorian nurseries and that such interpretations be extreme.