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The difference between mad people and sane people, Brave Orchid explained to the children, is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over. -Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, p. 184
In 17, a new publishing house with the brave name of The Feminist Press reprinted in a slim volume Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 18 and out of print for half a century. It is the story of an unnamed woman confined by her doctor-husband to an attic nursery with barred windows and a bolted-down bed. Forbidden to write, the narrator-protagonist becomes obsessed with the rooms wallpaper, which she finds first repellent and then riveting; on its chaotic surface she eventually deciphers an imprisoned woman whom she attempts to liberate by peeling the paper off the wall. This brilliant tale of a white, middle-class wife driven mad by a patriarchy con- trolling herfor her own goodhas become an American feminist classic; in 187, the Feminist Press edition numbered among the ten best-selling works of fiction published by a university press.
The canonization of The Yellow Wallpaper is an obvious sign of the degree to which contemporary feminism has transformed the study of literature. But Gilmans story is not simply one to which feminists have applied ourselves; it is one of the texts through which white, American academic feminist criticism has constituted its terms. My purpose here is to take stock of this criticism through the legacy of The Yellow Wallpaper in order to honor the work each has fostered and to call into question the status of Gilmans story-and the story of academic feminist criticism-as sacred texts. In this process I am working from the inside, challenging my own reading of The Yellow Wallpaper, which had deepened but not changed direction since 17.
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My inquiry will make explicit use of six well-known studies of The Yellow Wallpaper, but I consider these six to articulate an interpretation shared by a much larger feminist community. The pieces I have in mind are written by Elaine Hedges, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny, Jean Kennard, Paula Treichler, and Judith Fetterley, respectively, and their publication dates span from 17 to 186. Reading these essays as a body, I am struck by a coherence that testifies to a profound unity in white, American feminist criticism across apparent diversity.5 That is, although Hedges is concerned primarily with biography, Gilbert and Gubar with female authorship, Treichler with textual form, and Fetterley, Kolodny, and Kennard with interpretation, and although each discussion illuminates the text in certain unique ways, the six readings are almost wholly compatible, with one point of difference which is never identified as such and to which I will return. I will also return later to the significance of this redundancy and to the curiously unchallenged, routine elision from nearly all the discussion of one of the storys key tropes. The theoretical positions that The Yellow Wallpaper helped to shape and perhaps reify may be clearer if we recall some of the critical claims with which U.S. academic feminist criticism began. In the late sixties and early seventies, some academic women, most of them trained in Anglo-American methods and texts, began to take a new look at those works by men and a few white women that comprised the standard curriculum. The earliest scholarship-Kathryn Rogers The Troublesome Helpmate {166), Mary Ellmanns Thinking About Women {168), Kate Milletts Sexual Politics (170), Elaine Showalters Women Writers and the Double Standard (in Women in Sexist Society, 171)-was asserting against prevailing New Critical neutralities that literature is deeply political, indeed steeped in (patriarchal) ideology. Ideology , feminists argued, makes what is cultural seem natural and inevitable, and what had come to seem natural and inevitable to literary studies was that its own methods and great books transcended ideology.6 This conception of literature as a privileged medium for universal truths was defended by the counterclaim that those who found a works content disturbing or offensive were letting their biases distract them from the aesthetic of literature.7 Feminist criticism was bound to challenge this marginalization of social content and to argue that literary works both reflect and constitute structures of gender and power. In making this challenge, feminist criticism was implying that canonical literature was not simply mimesis, a mirror of the way things are or the way men and women are, but semiosis-a complex system of conventional (androcentric) tropes. And by questioning the premises of the discipline, feminists were of course arguing that criticism, too, is political, that no methodology is neutral, and that literary practice is shaped by cultural imperatives to serve particular ends.8 Although the word deconstruction was not yet in currency, these feminist premises inaugurated the first major opposition to both (old) scholarly and (New) critical practices, generating what has become the most widespread de- constructive imperative in the American academy. Yet the feminist project involved, as Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn have put it, not onlydeconstructing dominant male patterns of thought and social practice but also reconstructing female experience previously hidden or overlooked.
In the early 170s, the rediscovery of lost works like The Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopins The Awakening, and Susan GlaspellsA Jury of Her Peers offered not only welcome respite from unladylike assaults on patriarchal practices and from discouraging expositions of androcentric I/images of women in literature but also an exhilarating basis for reconstructing literary theory and literary history .The fact that these works which feminists now found so exciting and powerful had been denounced, ignored, or suppressed seemed virtual proof of the claim that literature, criticism, and history were political. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly had rejected The Yellow Wallpaper because I could not for- give myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!10 Even when William Dean Howells reprinted Gilmans story in 10 he wrote that it was terrible and too wholly dire, too terribly good to be printed.Feminists could argue convincingly that Gilmans contemporaries, schooled on the I/terrible and I/wholly dire tales of Poe, were surely balking at something more particular the I/graphic representation of raving lunacy in a middle-class mother and wife that revealed the rage of the woman on a pedestal.
As a tale openly preoccupied with questions of authorship, interpretation, and textuality, The Yellow Wallpaper quickly assumed a place of privilege among rediscovered feminist works, raising basic questions about writing and reading as gendered practices. The narrators double-voiced discourse-the ironic understatements, asides, hedges, and negations through which she asserts herself against the power of Johns voice-came for some critics to represent womens language or the language of the powerless. With its discontinuities and staccato paragraphs, Gilmans narrative raised the controversial question of a female aesthetic; and the lame uncertain curves, outrageous angles, and unheard of contradictions of the wallpaper came for many critics to symbolize both Gilmans text and, by extension, the particularity of female form. The story also challenged theories of genius that denied the material conditions-social, economic, psychological and literary-that make writing (im)possible, helping feminists to turn questions like I/Where is your Shakespeare? back upon the questioners. Gilbert and Gubar, for example, saw in the narrators struggles against censorship the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their speechless woe. 1/15The Yellow Wallpaper has been evoked most frequently, however, to the- ~~ orize about reading through the lens of a female consciousness. Gilmans story ~ has been a particularly congenial medium for such a revision not only because ~ the narrator herself engages in a form of feminist interpretation when she tries to r read the paper on her wall but also because turn-of-the-century readers seem to J have ignored or avoided the connection between the narrators condition and patriarchal politics, instead praising the story for its keenly accurate case study of a presumably inherited insanity. In the contemporary feminist reading, on the other hand, sexual oppression is evident from the start the phrase John says 1 heads a litany of benevolent prescriptions that keep the narrator infantilized, immobilized, and bored literally out of her mind. Reading or writing her self upon the wallpaper allows the narrator, as Paula Treichler puts it, to escape her husbands sentence/ and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which, virtually all these critics have agreed, constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the in- sanity of male dominance.
This reading not only recuperated The Yellow Wallpaper as a feminist text but also reconstituted the terms of interpretation itself. Annette Kolodny theorized that emerging feminist consciousness made possible a new, female-centered interpretive paradigm that did not exist for male critics at the turn of the century. Defining that paradigm more specifically, Jean Kennard maintained that the circulation of feminist conventions associated with four particular concepts- patriarchy, madness, space, quest - virtually ensured the reading that took place in the 170s. Furthermore, the premise that we engage not texts but paradigms, as Kolodny puts it in another essay, explodes the belief that we are reading what is there. Reading becomes the product of those conventions or strategies we have learned through an interpretive community - Stanley Fishs term to which Kolodny and Kennard give political force; to read is to reproduce a text according to this learned system or code.
These gender-based and openly ideological theories presented a radical challenge to an academic community in which close reading has remained the predominant critical act. A theory of meaning grounded in the politics of reading destabilizes assumptions of interpretive validity and shifts the emphasis to the contexts in which meanings are produced. A text like The Yellow Wallpaper showed that to the extent that we remain unaware of our interpretive conventions, it is difficult to distinguish what we read from how we have learned to read it." We experience meaning as given in the text itself." When alternative paradigms inform our reading, we are able to read texts differently or, to put it more strongly, to read different texts. This means that traditional works may be transformed through different interpretive strategies into new literature just as patriarchys terrible and repellent Yellow Wallpaper was dramatically transformed into feminisms endlessly fascinating tale.
It is, I believe, this powerful theoretical achievement occasioned by The Yellow Wallpaper that has led so much critical writing on the story to a triumphant conclusion despite the narrators own unhappy fate. I have found it striking that discussions of the text so frequently end by distinguishing the doomed and mad narrator, who could not write her way out of the patriarchal prison-house, from the sane survivor Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who could. The crucial shift from narrator to author, from story to text, may also serve to wrest readers from an unacknowledged over-identification with the narrator-protagonist. For just as the narrators initial horror at the wallpaper is mirrored in the earlier critics horror at Gilmans text, so now-traditional feminist re-readings may be reproducing the narrators next move her relentless pursuit of a single meaning on the wall. I want to go further still and suggest that feminist criticisms own persistent return to the Wallpaper-indeed, to specific aspects of the Wallpaper-signifies a somewhat uncomfortable need to isolate and validate a particular female experience, a particular relationship between reader and writer, and a particular notion of subjectivity as bases for the writing and reading of (womens) texts. Fully acknowledging the necessity of the feminist reading of The Yellow Wallpaper which I too have produced and perpetuated for many years, I now wonder whether many of us have repeated the gesture of the narrator who will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion (p. 1)-who will read until she finds what she is looking for-no less and no more. Although-or because-we have read The Yellow Wallpaper over and over, we may have stopped short, and our readings, like the narrators, may have reduced the texts complexity to what we need most our own image reflected back to us.
Let me return to the narrators reading of the paper in order to clarify this claim. The narrator is faced with an unreadable text, a text for which none of her interpretive strategies is adequate. At first she is confounded by its contradictory style it is flamboyant and pronounced, yet also lame, uncertain, and dull (p. 1). Then she notices different constructions in different places. In one recurrent spot the pattern lolls, in another place two breadths didnt match, and elsewhere the pattern is tom off (p. 16). She tries to organize the paper geo- metrically but cannot grasp its laws it is marked vertically by bloated curves and flourishes, diagonally by slanting waves of optic horror like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase, and horizontally by an order she cannot even figure out. There is even a centrifugal pattern in which the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction (p. 0). Still later, she notices that the paper changes and moves ac- cording to different kinds of light (p. 5). And it has a color and smell that she is never able to account for. But from all this indecipherability , from this immensely complicated text, the narrator-by night, no less-finally discerns a single image, a woman behind bars, which she then expands to represent the whole. This is hardly a matter of correct reading, then, but of fixing and reducing possibilities, finding a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection will enable her to move from John says to I want. The very excess of description of the wallpaper, and the fact that it continues after the narrator has first identified the woman behind the bars, actually foregrounds the seductiveness of her interpretive act. And if the narrator, having liberated the paper woman, can only imagine tying her up again, is it possible that our reading too has freed us momentarily only to bind us once more?
Most feminist analyses of The Yellow Wallpaper have in fact recognized this bind without pursuing it. Gilbert and Gubar see the paper as otherwise incomprehensible hieroglyphics onto which the narrator projects her own passion for escape.1 Treichler notes that the wallpaper remains indeterminate, complex, unresolved, disturbing.0 Even Fetterley, who seems least to question the narrators enterprise, speaks of the narrators need to impose order on the impertinence of row after row of unmatched breadths.1 Kolodny implicates all critical practice when she says that the narrator obsessively and jealously emphasiz[es] one section of the pattern while repressing others, reorganiz[es] and , regroup[s] past impressions into newer, more fully realized configurations--as one might with any complex formal text. And Kennard states openly that much , more goes on in both the wallpaper and the story than is present in the standard account and that the feminist reading of The Yellow Wallpaper is far from the final and correct one that replaces the patriarchal misreading once and for all. Still, Kennards position in 181 was that despite all these objections ...it is the feminist reading I teach my students and which I believe is the most fruitful; although suggesting that a new interpretive community might read this and other stories differently, she declined to pursue the possibility on grounds of insufficient space-a term that evokes the narrators own confinement. In light of these more-or-less conscious recognitions that the wallpaper remains incompletely read, the redundancy of feminist readings of Gilmans story might well constitute the return of the repressed.
I want to suggest that this repressed possibility of another reading reveals larger contradictions in white, academic feminist theories and practices. Earlier I named as the two basic gestures of U .S. feminist criticismdeconstructing dominant male patterns of thought and social practice and reconstructing female experience previously hidden or overlooked. This formulation posits as oppositional an essentially false and problematic male system beneath which essentially true and unproblematic female essences can be recovered-just as the figure of the woman can presumably be recovered from beneath the patriarchal pattern on Gilmans narrators wall (a presumption to which I will return). In designating gender as the foundation for two very different critical activities, feminist criticism has embraced contradictory theories of literature, proceeding as if mens writings were ideological sign systems and womens writings were representations of truth, reading mens or masculinist texts with resistance and womens or feminist texts with empathy. If, however, we acknowledge the participation of women writers and readers indominant. ..patterns of thought and social practice, then perhaps our own patterns must also be deconstructed if we are to recover meanings still hidden or overlooked. We would then have to apply even to feminist texts and theories the premises I described earlier that literature and criticism are collusive with ideology , that texts are sign systems rather than simple mirrors, that authors cannot guarantee their meanings, that interpretation is dependent on a critical community , and that our own literary histories are also fictional. The consequent rereading of texts like The Yellow Wall- paper might, in turn, alter our critical premises.
It is understandably difficult to imagine deconstructing something one has experienced as a radically reconstructive enterprise. This may be one reason- though other reasons suggest more disturbing complicities-why many of us have often accepted in principle but ignored in practice the deconstructive challenges that have emerged from within feminism itself. Some of the most radical of these challenges have come from women of color, poor women, and lesbians, frequently with primary allegiances outside the university , who have exposed in what has passed for feminist criticism blindnesses as serious as those to which feminism was objecting. In 177, for example, Barbara Smith identified racism in some of the writings on which feminist criticism had been founded; in 180, Alice Walker told the National Womens Studies Association of her inability to convince the author of The Female Imagination to consider the imaginations of women who are Black; in 178, Judy Grahn noted the scathing letters the Womens Press Collective received when it published Sharon Isabells Yesterdays Lessons without standardizing the English for a middle-class readership; at the 176 Modern Language Association meetings and later in Signs, Adrienne Rich pointed to the erasure of lesbian identity from feminist classrooms even when the writers being taught were in fact lesbians; in the early 180s, collections like This Bridge Called My Back Writings by Radical Women of Color and Nice Jewish Girls A Lesbian An- thology insisted that not all American writers are Black or white; they are also Latina, Asian, Arab, Jewish, Indian.4
The suppression of difference has affected the critical canon as well. In 180, for example, Feminist Studies published Annette Kolodnys groundbreaking Dancing Through the Minefield Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism to which my own elucidation of feminist premises owes a considerable and respectful debt. In Fall 18, Feminist Stud- ies published three responses to Kolodny, criticizing the essay not only for classism, racism, and homophobia in the selection and use of womens texts but also for perpetuating patriarchal academic values and methodologies. One respondent, Elly Bulkin, identified as a crucial problem the very social and ethical is- sue of which women get published by whom and why-of what even gets recog- nized as feminist literary criticism.5 Bulkin might have been speaking prophetically, because none of the three responses was included when Dancing Through the Minefieldwas anthologized.6
All these challenges occurred during the same years in which the standard feminist reading of The Yellow Wallpaper was produced and reproduced. Yet none of us seems to have noticed that virtually all feminist discourse on The Yellow Wallpaper has come from white academics and that it has failed to question the storys status as a universal womans text. A feminist criticism willing to deconstruct its own practices would re-examine our exclusive reading of The Yellow Wallpaper, rethink the implications of its canonization, and acknowledge both the texts position in ideology and our own. That a hard look at feminisms Yellow Wallpaper is now possible is already evident by the publication in 186 of separate essays by Janice Haney-Peritz and Mary Jacobus which use psycho- analytic theory to expose the limits of both the narrators and feminist criticisms interpretive acts.7 I believe we have also entered a moment not only of historical possibility but of historical urgency to stop reading a privileged, white, New England womans text as simply-a womans text. If our traditional gesture has been to repeat the narrators own act of underreading, of seeing too little, I want now to risk overreading, seeing perhaps too much. My reading will make use of textual details that traditional feminist interpretations have tended to ignore, but I do not propose it as a coherent or final reading; I believe no such reading is either possible or desirable and that one important message of The Yellow Wa1l- paper is precisely that. At the same time, I concur with Chris Weedon when she insists that meanings, however provisional, have real effects.8
One way back to The Yellow Wallpaper is through the yellow wallpaper itself through what I mentioned earlier as the point of difference and the point of silence in the feminist interpretations I have been discussing here. I begin with the difference that occurs within and among otherwise consistent readings when critics try to identify just whose text or what kind of text the wallpaper represents. For Hedges and for Gilbert and Gubar, the wallpaper signifies the oppressive situation in which the woman finds herself; for Kolodny the paper is the narrators own psyche writ large; for Treichler it is a paradigm of womens writing; and for Fetterley it is the husbands patriarchal text which, however, becomes increasingly feminine in form. Haney-Peritz alone confronts the contradiction, seeing the wallpaper as both Johns and his wifes discourse, because the narrator relies on the very binary oppositions that structure Johns text. It seems, then, that just as it is impossible for the narrator to get that top pat- tern ...off from the under one (p. 1), so it is impossible to separate the text of a culture from the text of an individual, to free female subjectivity from the patriarchal text. Far from being antitheses, the patriarchal text and the womans text are in some sense one. And if the narrators text is also the text of her culture, then it is no wonder that the wallpaper exceeds her ability to decipher it. If, in- stead of grasping as she does for the single familiar and self-confirming figure in the text, we understand the wallpaper as a pastiche of disturbed and conflicting discourses, then perhaps the wallpapers chaos represents what the narrator (and we ourselves) must refuse in order to construct the singular figure of the woman behind bars the foreign and alien images that threaten to knock [her] down, and trample upon [her] (p. 5), images that as a white, middle-class woman of limited consciousness she may neither want nor know how to read. In avoiding certain meanings while liberating others from the text, in struggling for the illusion of a fully conscious knowing, unified, rational subject,0 is the narrator going mad not only from confinement, or from the effort to interpret, but also from the effort to repress? In this case, are those of us who reproduce the narrators reading also attempting to constitute an essential female subject by shutting aside textual meanings that expose feminisms own precarious and conflicted identity? If the narrator is reading in the paper the text of her own unconscious, an unconscious chaotic with unspeakable fears and desires, is not the unconscious, by the very nature of ideology, political? If we accept the culturally contingent and incomplete nature of readings guaranteed only by the narrators consciousness, then perhaps we can find in the yellow wallpaper, to literalize a metaphor of Adrienne Rich, a whole new psychic geography to be explored.1 For in privileging the questions of reading and writing as essential woman questions, feminist criticism has been led to the paper t while suppressing the politically charged adjective that colors it. If we locate Gilmans story within the psychic geography of Anglo-America at the turn of the century, we locate it in a culture obsessively preoccupied with race as the r foundation of character, a culture desperate to maintain Aryan superiority in theface of massive immigrations from Southern and Eastern Europe, a culture openly anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, anti-Catholic, and Jim Crow. In New England, where E Gilman was born and raised, agricultural decline, native emigration, and soaring c immigrant birth rates had generated a distrust of the immigrant [that] reached ~ the proportions of a movement in the 1880s and 180s. In California, where Gilman lived while writing The Yellow Wallpaper, mass anxiety about the Yellow Peril had already yielded such legislation as the Chinese Exclusion Act of c 188. Across the United States, newly formed groups were calling for selective t breeding, restricted entry, andAmerican Protection of various kinds. White, Christian, American-born intellectuals-novelists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, crusaders for social reform-not only shared this racial anxiety but, j as John Higham puts it, blazed the way for ordinary nativists by giving popular racism an intellectual respectability.4 These intellectual writings often justified the rejection and exclusion of immigrants in terms graphically physical. The immigrants were human garbage hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality, oxlike men who belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice age, ready to pollute America with non-Aryan elements. Owen Wisters popular Westerns were built on the premise that the eastern United States was being ruined by the debased and mongrel immigrants, encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce, who degrade our commonwealth from a nation into something half pawn-shop, half brokers office. In the clean cattle country, on the other hand, one did not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews, because pioneering required particular Anglo- Saxon abilities. Jack London describes a Jewish character as yellow as a sick persimmon and laments Americas invasion by the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods. Frank Norris ridicules the halfbreed as an amorphous, formless mist and contrasts the kindness and delicacy of Anglo- Saxons with the hot, degenerated blood of the Spanish, Mexican, and Portuguese.5
Implicit or explicit in these descriptions is a new racial ideology through which newcomers from Europe could seem a fundamentally different order from what l were then called native Americans. The common nineteenth-century belief in three races-black, white, yellow--each linked to a specific continent, was reconstituted so that white came to mean only Nordic or Northern European, , while yellow applied not only to the Chinese, Japanese, and light-skinned , African-Americans but also to Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and even the Irish. Crusaders warned of yellow inundation. The California chapter of the Protestant white supremacist Junior Order of United American Mechanics teamed up with the Asiatic Exclusion League to proclaim that Southern Europeans were semi-Mongolian and should be excluded from immigration and citizenship on the same basis as the Chinese; Madison Grant declared Jews to be a Mongrel ad- mixture. ..of Slavs and of Asiatic invaders of Russia; and a member of Congress announced that the color of thousands of the new immigrants differs ) materially from that of the AngloSaxon. The greatest dangers were almost always traced back to Asia; in a dazzling conflation of enemies, for example, Grant warned that in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners, [Asia] is organizing an assault upon Western Europe. Lothrop Stoddard predicted that colored migration was yielding the very immediate danger that the white stocks may be swamped by Asiatic blood. Again and again, nativists announced that democracy simply will not work among Asiatics, that non-Aryans, especially Slavs, Italians, and Jews, were impossible to Americanize. The threat of Yellow Peril thus had racial implications much broader than anxiety about a takeover of Chinese or Japanese in every section, the Negro, the Oriental, and the Southern European appeared more and more in a common light.6 In such a cultural moment, yellow readily connoted inferiority, strangeness, cowardice, ugliness, and backwardness. Yellow-belly and yellow dog were common slurs, the former applied to groups as diverse as the Irish and the Mexicans. Associations of yellow with disease, cowardice, worthlessness, uncleanliness, and decay may also have become implicit associations of race and class.7
If The Yellow Wallpaper is read within this discourse of racial anxiety , certain of its tropes take on an obvious political charge. The very first sentence constructs the narrator in class terms, imagining an America in which, through democratic self-advancement, common (British) Americans can enjoy upper-class (British) privileges. Although the narrator and John are mere ordinary people and not the rightful heirs and coheirs, they have secureda colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, in whose queerness she takes pride (p. ); this house with its private wharf (p. 15) stands quite alone. ..well back from the road, quite three miles from the village like English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people (p. 11). I am reminded by this description of another neglected gentlemans manor house that people read about-Thornfield-in which another merely ordinary woman little accustomed to grandeur comes to make her home. Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre is given a room with gay blue chintz window curtains that resemble the pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings (p. 1) in the room Gilmans narrator wanted for herself; Jane is not banished to Thornfields third floor, where wide and heavy beds are surrounded by outlandish wall-hangings that portrayeffigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings,-all of which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight-and where, if Thornfield had ghosts, Jane tells us, these ghosts would haunt. Like Gilmans narrator, Jane longs for both the freedom to roam and the pleasures of human society, and her sole relief in those moments is to walk around the attic and look out at the vista of road and trees and rolling hills so much like the view the narrator describes from her nursery in the writing that is her own sole relief (pp. 10,1). It is from her attic perch that Jane feels so keenly that women, like men, need exercise for their faculties and suffer from too rigid a restraint,8 as in her attic Gilmans narrator lies on the great immovable bed (p. 1) and longs for company and exercise. But the permanent, imprisoned inhabitant of Thornfields attic is not Jane; she is a dark Creole woman who might well have been called yellow in Gilmans America. Is Gilmans narrator, who thought seriously of burning the house (p. ) imagining Bertha Masons fiery revenge? Does the figure in the paper with its foul, bad yellow color (p. 8), its strange, provoking, formless sort of figure (p. 18), its broken neck and bulbous eyes (p. 16), resemble Bertha with her bloated features and her discoloured face? Surely the narrators crawling about her room may recall Berthas running backwards and forwards. ..on all fours. And like Brontes mad lady, who would let herself out of her chamber at night and go roaming about the house to ambush Jane, the smouldering yellow menace in Gilmans story gets out at night and skulk[s] in the parlor, [hides] in the hall, and [lies] in wait for me (pp. 1,8-). When the narrator tells John that the key to her room is beneath a plantain leaf, is she evoking not only the North American species of that name but also the tropical plant ; of Berthas West Indies? When she imagines tying up the freed woman, is she repeating the fate of Bertha, brought in chains to foreign shores? Finally, does the 1 circulation of Brontes novel in Gilmans text explain the cryptic sentence at the ! end of the story-possibly a slip of Gilmans pen-in which the narrator cries to her husband that Ive got out at last. ..in spite of you and Jane (p. 6)? ~ Is the wallpaper, then, the political unconscious of a culture in which an Aryan womans madness, desire, and anger, repressed by the imperatives of reason, duty (p. 14), and proper self-control (p. 11), are projected onto the yellow woman who is, however, also the feared alien? When the narrator tries to liberate the woman from the wall, is she trying to purge her of her color, to peel her from the yellow paper, so that she can accept this woman as herself? If, as I suggested earlier, the wallpaper is at once the text of patriarchy and the womans text, then perhaps the narrator is both resisting and embracing the woman of color who is self and not-self, a woman who might need to be rescued from the text of patriarchy but cannot yet be allowed to go free. Might we explain the narrators pervasive horror of a yellow color and smell that threaten to take over the ancestral halls, stain[ing] everything it touched, as the British-American fear of a takeover byaliens? In a cultural moment when immigrant peoples and African Americans were being widely caricatured in the popular press through distorted facial and bodily images, might the interminable grotesques (p. 0) of The Yellow Wallpaper-with their lolling necks and bulbous eyes staring every- where, with their peculiar odor and yellow smell (p. ), their colors repellent, almost revolting, smouldering and unclean (p. 1), sickly and particularly irritating (p. 18), their new shades of yellow (p. 8) erupting constantly-figure the Asians and Jews, the Italians and Poles, the long list of aliens whom the narrator (and perhaps Gilman herself) might want at once to rescue and to flee?
For if anxieties about race, class, and ethnicity have inscribed themselves as a political unconscious upon the yellow wallpaper, they were conscious and in- deed obsessive problems for Gilman herself, as I discovered when, disturbed by my own reading of The Yellow Wallpaper, I turned to Gilmans later work.40 Despite her socialist values, her active participation in movements for reform, her strong theoretical commitment to racial harmony, her unconventional support of interracial marriages, and her frequent condemnation of Americas racist history ,41 Gilman upheld white Protestant supremacy; belonged for a time to eugenics and nationalist organizations; opposed open immigration; and inscribed racism, nationalism, and classism into her proposals for social change. In Concerning Chil- dren (100), she maintains that a sturdy English baby would be worth more than an equally vigorous young Fuegian. With the same training and care, you could develop higher faculties in the English specimen than in the Fuegian specimen, because it was better bred.4 In the same book, she argues that American children made better citizens than the more submissive races and in particular that the Chinese and the Hindu, where parents are fairly worshipped and blindly obeyed, were not races of free and progressive thought and healthy activity. Gilman advocated virtually compulsory enlistment of Blacks in a militaristic industrial corps, even as she opposed such regimentation for whites. In The Fore- runner, the journal she produced single-handedly for seven years, yellow groups are singled out frequently and gratuitously Gilman chides the lazy old Orientals who consider work a curse, singles out Chinatown forcriminal conditions, and uses China as an example of various unhealthy social practices. And she all but justifies anti-Semitism by arguing, both in her own voice and more boldly through her Herlandian mouthpiece Ellador, that Jews have not yetpassed the tribal stage of human development, that they practice an unethical and morally degrading religion of race egotism and concentrated pride, which has unfortunately found its way through the Bible into Western literature, and that in refusing to intermarry they artifically maintain characteristics which the whole world dislikes, and then complain of race prejudice. 4
Like many other nativist intellectuals, Gilman was especially disturbed by the influx of poor immigrants to American cities and argued on both race and class grounds that these undesirables would destroy America. Although she once theorized that immigrants could be healthier grafts upon our body politic, she wrote later that whateverspecial gifts each race had, when that race was transplanted, their gift is lost.44 While proclaiming support for the admission of certain peoples ofassimilable stock, she declared that even the best of Hindus ...would make another problem like the existing problem of African Americans, and that an inflow of Chinas oppressed would make it impossible to preserve the American national character . Thischaracter, it is clear, requires thatAmericans be primarily people of native born parentage, who should have a majority vote in their own country.45 Surprisingly perhaps for a socialist, but less surprisingly for a woman whose autobiography opens with a claim of kinship with Queen Victoria,46 Gilman seems to equate class status with readiness for democracy .Repeatedly she claims to favor immigration so long as the immigrants are of better stock. In her futurist utopia, Moving the Mountain, for instance, a character remembers the old days when we got all the worst and lowest people; in the imaginary new America, immigrants may not enter the country until they come up to a certain standard by passing a microscopicphysical exam and completing an education in American ways. It is surely no accident that the list of receiving gates Gilman imagines for her Immigrant groups stops with Western Europe Theres the German Gate, and the Spanish Gate, the English Gate, and the Italian Gate-and so on. 47
Classism, racism, and nationalism converge with particular virulence when Ellador, having established her antiracist credentials by championing the rights of Black Americans, observes thatthe poor and oppressed were not necessarily good stuff for a democracyand declares, in an extraordinary reversal of victim and victimizer to which even her American partner Van protests, that it is the poor and oppressed who make monarchy and despotism. Ellador's triumph is sealed with the graphic insistence that you cannotput a little of every- thing into a meltingpot and produce a good metal,not if you are mixing, gold, silver, copper and iron, lead, radium, pipe, clay, coal dust, and plain dirt.Making clear the racial boundaries of the melting pot, Ellador challenges Van,, And how about the yellow? Do they melt? Do you want them to melt? Isnt your exclusion of them an admission that you think some kinds of people unassimilable? That democracy must pick and choose a little ?Elladors rationale--and Gilmans-is that the human race is in different stages of development, and only some of the races-or some individuals in a given race--have reached the democratic stage.Yet she begs the question and changes the subject when Van asks,But how could we discriminate? 4
The aesthetic and sensory quality of this horror .1t a polluted America creates a compelling resemblance between the narrators graphic descriptions of the yellow wallpaper and Gilmans graphic descriptions of the cities and their swarms of jostling aliens. She fears that America has become bloated and verminous, a dump for Europes social refuse, a ceaseless offense to eye and ear and nose,51 creating multiforeign cities that are abnormally enlarged and swollen, foul, ugly and dangerous, their conditions offensive to every sense assailing the eye with ugliness, the ear with noise, the nose with foul smells.5 And when she complains that America has stuffed itself with uncongenial material with an overwhelming flood of unassimilable characteristics with such a stream of non-assimilable stuff as shall dilute and drown out the current of our life, indeed with the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that was ever held together by artificial meansGilman might be describing the patterns and pieces of the wallpaper as well. Her poem The City of Death (11) depicts a diseased prison piped with poison, room by room,
Whose weltering rush of swarming human forms, Forced hurtling through foul subterranean tubes Kills more than bodies, coarsens mind and soul.
And steadily degrades our humanness…54
Such a city is not so different from the claustrophobic nursery which finally degrades the humanness of The Yellow Wallpapers protagonist. The text of Gilmans imagining, then, is the text of an America made as uninhabitable as the narrators chamber, and her declaration that children ought to grow up in the country , all of them, recalls the narrators relief that her baby does not have to live in the unhappy prison at the top of the house. Clearly Gilman was recognizing serious social problems in her concern over the ghettos and tenements of New York and Chicago-she herself worked for a time at Hull House, although she detested Chicagos noisome neighborhoods. But her conflation of the city with its immigrant peoples repeats her own racism even as her nostalgia about the country harks back to a New England in the hands of the New English themselves.s6 Theselittle old New England townsand their new counterparts, the fresh young western ones, says Ellador, have more of America in them than is possible-could ever be possible--in such a political menagerie as New York, whose people really belong in Berlin, in Dublin, in Jerusalem. It is no accident that some of the most extreme of Gilmans anti-immigrant statements come from the radical feminist Ellador, for race and gender are not separate issues in Gilmans cosmology, and it is in their intersection that a fuller immigrant invasion thus becomes a direct threat to Gilmans program for feminist reform. II As a particular historical product, then, The Yellow Wallpaper is no more ! the story that all literary women would tell than the entirely white canon of The ! Madwoman in the Attic is the story of all womens writing or the only story those (white) texts can tell. The Yellow Wallpaper has been able to pass for a universal text only insofar as white, Western literatures and perspectives continue to dominate academic American feminist practices even when the most urgent literary and political events are happening in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and I. among the new and old cultures of Color in the United States. We might expand r our theories of censorship, for example, if we read The Yellow Wallpaper in 1 the context of womens prison writings from around the world-writings like r Ding Links memoirs and Alicia Partnoys The Little School Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina and some of the stories of Bessie Head. We might havesomething to learn about interpretation if we examined the moment in Partnoys narrative when her husband is tortured because he gives the wrong reading of m his wifes poems.64 We might better understand contemporary feminist racial politics if we studied the complex but historically distanced discourses of feminists a century ago. Perhaps, like the narrator of Gilmans story, white, American academic feminist criticism has sought in literature the mirror of its own identity , ii erasing the literary equivalent of strange sights and smells and colors so that we ti can have the comfort of reproducing, on a bare stage, that triumphant moment ; when a woman recognizes her self. Perhaps white, American feminist practice too readily resembles that of Gilman, who deplores that historically we have cheated the Indian, oppressed the African, robbed the Mexican,66 and whose utopian impulses continue to insist that there is only one race, the human race,67 but for whom particular, present conditions of race and class continue to be blindnesses justified on other-aesthetic, political pragmatic-grounds.
The Yellow Wallpaper also calls upon us to recognize that the white, female, intellectual-class subjectivity which Gilmans narrator attempts to construct and to which many feminists have also been committed perhaps unwittingly, is a subjectivity whose illusory unity, like the unity imposed on the paper, is built on the repression of difference. This also means that the conscious biographical experience which Gilman claims as the authenticating source of the story is but one contributing element.68 And if we are going to read this text in relation to its author, we may have to realize that there are dangers as well as pleasures in a ; feminist reading based on a merging of consciousnesses.6 Once we recognize Gilman as a subject constituted in and by the contradictions of ideology , we might also remember that she acknowledges having been subjected to the narrators circumstances but denies any relationship to the wallpaper itself-that is, to what I am reading as the site of a political unconscious in which questions of race permeate questions of sex. A recent essay by Ellen Messer-Davidow in New Literary History argues that literary criticism and feminist criticism should be recognized as fundamentally different activities, that feminist criticism is part of a larger interdisciplinary project whose main focus is the exploration of ideas about sex ! and gender, that disciplinary variations are fairly insignificant differences of medium, and therefore that feminist literary critics need to change their subject from literature to ideas about sex and gender as these happen to be expressed in literature. I suggest that one of the messages of The Yellow Wallpaper is that textuality, like culture, is more complex, shifting, and polyvalent than any of the ideas we can abstract from it, that the narrators reductive gesture is precisely to isolate and essentialize one idea about sex and gender from a more complex textual field.
Deconstructing our own reading of the wallpaper, then, means acknowledging that Adrienne Rich still speaks to feminist critics when she calls on us to [enter] an old text from a new critical direction, to take the work first of all as a clue to how we live. ..how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us. ..and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh,1I so that we do not simply pass on a tradition but. ..break its hold over us. Feminist critical theory offers the Reconstructive principles for this continuing revision, so long as we require ourselves, as we have required our non-feminist colleagues, to look anew at what have become old texts and old critical premises. Still, the revision I am proposing here would have been impossible without the first revision of The Yellow Wallpaper that liberated the imprisoned woman from the text. Adrienne Rich has addressed the poem Heroines to nineteenth-century white feminists who reflected racism and class privilege in their crusades for change. It is both to Gilman herself and to all of us whose readings of The Yellow Wallpaper have been both transformative and limiting, that, in closing, I address the final lines of Richs poem
How can I fail to love
your clarity and fury how can I give you all your due
take courage from your courage honor your exact legacy as it is recognizing
as well that it is not enough?
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