More Thoughts on "The Yellow Wallpaper": Aesthetic-Epistemological Desires and Text as Vaccine

(I’m also citing the extended version from the following site: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html)

I certainly agree with Dalia’s point that the narrator does not necessarily have to be read as a victim of sexist science (or at least, doesn’t have to only be read that way)—that is, other readings are both possible and potentially illuminating. My response—as I mentioned in class, and which I’ll try to flesh out more here—is to think about how Gilman’s narrator is not only the subject of a scientist, but how she also has the subjectivity of a scientist; in a sense, that the wife even “outdoctors” or “outsciences” her husband. Thus, rather than posit the two as dwelling in distinctly separate intellectual spheres, we can see how they’re both exercising similar (what I’m calling “scientific”) drives to classify and diagnose, be it woman or wall. What’s troubling, however, is how such epistemological desires—the narrator’s determination to exclusively access the secrets of the wall (“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will!”)—become inextricably intertwined with impulses to beautify, or at least to remove the unbeautiful (dismantling the offensive paper). In this sense, Gilman’s text, like Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” presents epistemological desire as born from, or with, aesthetic desire: a coupling with consequences.

The narrator’s first impulse, note, is not to enter physician mode; she doesn’t yet diagnose the wall (which she eventually does in denoting its shade as “sickly sulphur,” referring to its “lame uncertain curves,” tendency to “commit suicide,” and sufferance from a “broken neck”) but rather she laments that she has been forced to reside in an atmosphere of overwhelming ugliness. She makes an aesthetic judgment of worth (and saying that the wallpaper commits “every artistic sin” links a moral discourse with aesthetic evaluation as well); what is transgressive about the paper isn’t, at first, that it is sick, but that it is ugly. Ugliness then transfigures into, or is labeled as, sickness. In the beginning, the narrator only states, “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!” Her initial desire is for the beautiful, or more specifically, for the “pretty,” which may in fact be different in connotation: “Do let us go downstairs…there are such pretty rooms there.” Here Gilman’s narrator resembles the scientist of Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” who desires perfect beauty in his wife; meanwhile, this quest for beauty (within a particularly classical sensibility pertaining to ideals of symmetry, harmony and balance), whether to find it or create it, is what actually motivates the move to science. This very relation calls into question why scientists choose the subjects that they do. For Gilman and Hawthorne, study isn’t only study, but is wrapped up with notions of alteration and correction. After all, it is specifically those things which, as the narrator says, “irritate,” that most “provoke study.”

The narrator begins her study with the hope of finding artistic “law” that she hopes is already, somewhere, present, like the naturalist who seeks to understand the operations of natural law. However, both Gilman’s narrator and Aylmer ultimately project their own classical notions of the perfect and the beautiful onto the objects of their study. On the other hand, we have Darwin who warns scientists not to assess perfection on reductive human aesthetic terms: as he says, a naturalist may see “a Crinoid [that] sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines,” but he should “not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts alike…he justly considers the differentiation and specialization of organs as the test of perfection” (Descent of Man, 114). Yet both Hawthorne’s scientist and Gilman’s narrator ignore Darwin’s warning and do, in fact, value symmetry above considerations of how their subjects are suited finely to their own functions; their perception of aesthetic lawlessness (a lop-sided, off-color birthmark, or a wallpaper that “was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry”) dominates their understanding of other organisms as they are. Granted, Gilman’s wallpaper isn’t an organism in the same sense as a human being or a crinoid is, but for her narrator, it becomes an organism once she begins to study it in an attentive light, and she describes it variously as “a fungus,” a thing with “bulbous eyes,” or a “string of toadstools,” an entity capable of moving and shifting in different lights.

While the paper—like Aylmer’s wife Georgiana—stubbornly deviates from classical ideals of beauty, the dangerous scientific response is to attempt to bring these two kinds of “design”—natural and artistic—into alignment. The response to perceived lawlessness, for both Hawthorne’s scientist-husband, and let’s say, Gilman’s scientist-wife, is to attempt to impose law upon the lawless thing. The narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” ‘dissects,’ or even conducts surgery upon, the wallpaper, by tearing the deviant design-less thing apart, while Aylmer less violently mixes up a medicine for his wife to remove her own asymmetrical flaw; in either case, attempting to bring artistic order to the natural Other, whether female body or embodied-wall (which also contains, for Gilman’s narrator, a female body) actually heralds chaos, arguably for doctor as much as patient.

A final note on Gilman’s “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (which can be found at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html, the page I passed around the other day in class).We didn’t get to talk much about the powerful and complex affect of the story, but in this piece, Gilman cites one physician who wrote to her noting that “it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Gilman disagrees with this reader, stating that the story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked,” noting that it has, “to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.” I don’t think, though, that the physician reader has it entirely wrong, even by Gilman’s own logic, since the act of “saving” is given by her as a direct result of “terrifying”—that is, making the reader feel just enough of the narrator’s mental state in order to steer clear of the rest cure. We can’t, then, simply disown the maddening affects of the story’s language, or proclaim its restorative possibilities. The reading experience, if we pull Gilman’s own explanation apart, renders her text as vaccine. It imbues only a certain amount of affective “disease” to the reader in order to awaken and inoculate them against the possibilities of full attack.