Some of our more recent readings—Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” and Holmes’ Elsie Venner for example—have centered around the relationship between the figure of the “doctor” or scientist and the (human) scientific subject, and we’ve thought about these sorts of issues all semester. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in contrast to these kinds of texts, gives us a narrative from the perspective of the subject, and I’m interested both in the way that Gilman figures the scientific subject and the ways that gothic “logics” of space influence representations of scientific/medical interactions.
Like most of you guys, I’ve studied this text a number of times, and within various methodological lenses. It seems to me that one thing that most critics agree on (explicitly or otherwise) is that our narrator is victim of sexist science, and that her husband, in “diagnosing” her as a hysterical woman, takes on the role of the patriarchal, oppressive male role (and again, many critics simply assume this as the story’s “plot,” and not something that even needs to be argued).
I don’t disagree with those readings; gendered power is unquestionably at play. However, this formulation of our narrator as victimized by science seems to me more complicated than some make it out to be. Yes, our narrator is forced into a room and isolates from the world because of her “nervousness”; however, the narrator complains very early in the story that “[John] does not think I’m sick!” (439). John’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the narrator’s “illness” (whatever she imagines it to be) is part of her frustration. Our narrator, here, WANTS to be the patient; she WANTS her husband to diagnose her with a “real” disease. Reading the story in this way runs counter to understandings of the narrator as a victim of sexist science.
People have read the Gilman as rejecting Freudian treatments of the hysteric female subject. More broadly, the clinic (including nineteenth-century clinics where women were routinely put on display and poked and prodded) has been cited as a patriarchal space where women become scientific objects subjected to the oppressive male “gaze” (I’m thinking of thinkers like Foucault, here). However, being seen and “read” seems to be what the narrator desires! Her room is a cage, but more importantly, she’s in a cage where no one can see her. Her husband hasn’t put her up as scientific display; he’s hidden her away from the world, and also refuses to look at her himself—as both a scientist and a husband. John becomes a scientist-hoarder (and Hawthorne comes to mind, here): he takes the scientific subject—his wife!—and hides it. Hawthorne does something similar with his doctor, I think: instead of studying the oddity (his wife’s bizarre birthmark), Aylmer wants to remove it.
These isolated spaces make me think about the relationship between the gothic and science. It’s hard not to notice that a lot of the texts we’ve read—including hardcore scientific texts—possess some elements of the gothic. Nineteenth-century gothic works, with their notable variety of diseased characters, characters that spontaneously explode, mesmerized subjects, mind-readers, and other “freaks” of nature, are very often (if not always) marked by a particular sense of isolated spaces, whether it’s the castle, the wilderness, the cave, and here, the doctors lab and ancestral grounds. I don’t have a solid interpretation of how scientific thinking and gothic writing as a genre work together, but it seems to me that the “space” of scientific work is directly related the a three-part relationship between the patient (in some cases, nature), the doctor, and the “world.”
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