Psychoanalytic Approach - The Yellow Wallpaper

 

  SYCHOANALYTIC READING OF THE

YELLOW WALLPAPER BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

  RESENTED BY: VISHAKHA KHAJURIA

 

  What is Psychoanalytic Criticism? Psychological criticism (or psychoanalytic criticism) deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the state of mind and the structure of  personality of the individual author author..

(Source: M.H. Abrams)

 

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

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The premises and procedures of the psychoanalytic criticism were established  by work of Austrian Neurologist Sigmund Freud Freud (1856-1939). Freud's brief comment on the workings of the artist's imagination at the end of the twenty-third lecture of his Introducti his Introduction on to Psychoanalysis (1920), supplemented by relevant passages in the other lectures in that book, set forth the theoretical framework of what is sometimes called "classical"  psychoanalytic criticism. criticism. Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires d esires and anxieties of the author author,, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses.

 

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE o

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According to this concept, the human psyche has three parts: Id, parts: Id, Ego, Ego, and Superego.. Superego  Id : This is the primitive and instinctive part of the psyche. This part of the  psyche constitutes the unconscious unconscious where the repressed emotions are stored.  Ego: This part of the psyche operates according to the reality principle and reason. The desires of Id  of Id  are  are modified by the forces of the outer world. Those modified desires or actions constitute the Ego the Ego..

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Superego: This part of the psyche incorporates the values and morals of the society.. Superego works according to the morality principles. society

 

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The process by which certain desires get pushed into the unconscious is called  Repression.  Repre ssion. These repressed desires do not always remain hidden. Sometimes they come forward in the form of images, dreams or art. They are called Parapraxis called Parapraxis or  Freudian  Fre udian Slips. Slips. A Psychoanalyst’ Psychoanalyst’ss job is to uncover those desires, images or themes that have  been expressed through art forms. The concept of Structure of the Psyche is the basis of the analysis of the work “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

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Charlotte Perkins was born on 3 rd July 1860.

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She was an American feminist, lecturer, writer and publisher.

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She has been included in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The Yellow Wallpaper is one of her best known work and is is semi-autobiographical semi-auto biographical in nature.

Gilman was diagnosed with cancer in 1932. She died by committing suicide on 17 th August 1935.

 

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER - SUMMARY 

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The Yellow Wallpape allpaperr is a first person account of a nameless female narrator who is going through postpartum depression.

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For her to get better she and her husband John move to a new colonial mansion with their baby. baby. They are accompanied by John’s sister Jennie. o

The narrator is imposed with ‘rest cure’ by her oppressive physician husband. She is confined to the nursery of the new house house with a yellow yellow wallpaper that she despises. The only escape she has is her journal that she secretly writes in.

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The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room  – its "sickly" color, color, its "yellow" smell, its bizarre and disturbing pattern like "an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions," its missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it.

 

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER - SUMMARY  o

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This short story describes the narrator’ narrator ’s rapid descent into madness. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and also sees an image of a woman stuck behind the wallpaper pattern. Her plan is to be alone in the room and let the woman stuck behind the wallpaper free. On the final day in the house, ho use, the narrator locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. In the final lines we come to know that the narrators name is Jane. She has a mental  breakdown and is crawling crawling on all fours. This site causes causes her husband to faint. faint.

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The story closes with Jane creeping over the body of her fainted husband and going around the room stripping off the wallpaper.

 

A Psychoanalytic Reading

 

THE BEGINNING

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Since the very beginning of the story we see the narrator being expected to act like an obedient child. She is asked to rest and get fresh air as the treatment for her ‘temporary depression’. Her husband doesn’t take into account the seriousness of her illness which is clear to the readers when the narrator says that, “… he does not believe I am  sick! And what can can one do?”

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The hasto nostay control her life. She is not allowed choose roomnarrator she wants in orover if she should write or even talk to about her what  problems. o

She is shunned and imprisoned to a nursery with a yellow wallpaper and bars on the window.

 

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The ‘husband’ acts acts as the force from the outer o uter world that represses the ‘real desires’ of the narrator and forms her  Ego. Her journaling can be considered a store of all the ‘repressed feelings’ that humans store in their  Id   Id , that never comes to the forefront.

 

THE REPRESSION o

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As the story moves forward we see that the narrator’ narrator ’s  Ego  Ego takes the wheel. She lives in the ‘atrocious nursery’ as her husband wants her to. She has to live the way her physician husband sees fit and has no control on her life. She justifies everything her husband does to herself by saying things like, “… He loves me dearly, dearly, and hates h ates to have me sick.” The narrator even hides the fact that t hat she is writing which is the only o nly escape for her. She is also not allowed to meet people p eople as her husband feels that she is not fit to meet  people. There are multiple incidents in the story where she is seen trying to express her feelings but is stopped mid sentence by the Ego side of the psyche.

 

THE PATRIARCHY  o

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The Superego is at work in the form of age old patriarchal traditions that force her to comply with the oppression faced by her. her. Women had no say in the household and had no life outside of it. This societal oppression fuels the Superego that makes the narrator be okay with everything. She blames herself for everything she is going go ing through.

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The narrator is diagnosed by the men of her house - her husband and her  brother who are both physicians. The way mental illness illness is handled is also also questioned through the text. The narrator has no say in the way she feels.

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Her constant need to balance her anger towards her husband and justifying his actions is the Ego mediating between Superego and Id  part  part of the mind.

 

THE DESCENT INTO MADNESS o

Her rapid descent intobehind madness thethe nursery where she feels that there is a woman creeping the begins patternsinof wallpaper. o

Her obsession with the wallpaper is an escape, a fantasy that she has control over unlike her own life. This obsession can also be seen as her  Id  slowly  slowly creeping into the forefront.

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The desire to let the woman behind the wallpaper free can be a direct indication of narrator’ narrator ’s own desire to break free from f rom the restraints put on her by her husband.  Id have taken over her mind By the end of the story the repressed desires of  Id completely and she wanders around the nursery on all fours while peeling off the wallpaper saying that, “… I have pulled off most of the paper. so you can’t

 put me back!”

 

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WALLPAPER o

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In a way the woman that the narrator observes behind the wallpaper in her own image stuck on the other side. The constant struggle to break free from the bars of wallpaper patterns is the narrator trying to break free from the patriarchal repression.

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The imprisonment imposed on her gets her to be more fixated on the image of the women stuck behind wallpaper. That women is the narrator’s Id which is hidden and trapped behind the oppression. In the final scene the narrator merges herself completely completely with the woman behind the wallpaper and exclaims that, “ I’ve got out at last….” last….”

 

 Psychoanalytic criticism uncovers the ‘subject’ of the author as revealed through the images, the language and the codes of her/his work.  It asks questions of the author's attempts to conceal her/his desires and drives, and the cultural codes that force her/him to do so.  

(Source: (So urce: P.K. Naya Nayar) r)

 

AUTHOR’S HIDDEN DESIRES: o

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As mentioned in the previous slide, psychoanalytic criticism specifies that the expression of the ideas in any work of art is an expression of the repressed desires of the author or curator. curator. The same is the case with The Yellow Wallpaper   as well. The author’s hidden desires have found ways in the short story through her  personal life, personal beliefs and real life life events. Charlotte Perkins Gilman also suffered from post-partum depression after the  birth of her daughter Katherine Katherine just like the narrator narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper. A ‘rest cure’ was also imposed on her by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell while she was under his treatment. This work was a way to show him the error of his ways.

 

AUTHOR’S HIDDEN DESIRES: o

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Mitchell had instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. This short story was an expression of author’s own struggles with depression that brought her very close to a complete breakdown. It was later that a female doctor, Mary Putnam Jacobi, helped Gilman in overcoming her depression. It is also said that Gilman had sent a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper to her former doctor Mitchell but never got a reply reply..

 

AUTHOR’S HIDDEN DESIRES o

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Through the story we also get g et a peak into the nature of Gilman’ Gilman’ss own marriage, as she later divorced her husband which was rare in the 19 th century. Gilman was also a fierce advocate of women’s rights and this ideology has indeed crept in to the short story unconsciously unconsciously..

 

REFRENCES o

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Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms Terms.. 10th ed., Cengage Learning, 2012.  Nayar, P.K.  Nayar, P.K. Contemporary Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory: Form Structuralism to Ecocriticism. Pearson, 2009.  2009. 

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. The New England Magazine, Jan. 1892.