Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar

psychological • 1979

English Literature academics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar bring research on the interface of women and literature into the discourse on the interior and link it to gender politics. They use literary techniques to discuss the interior through the topography of one's innermost self, questioning the conflation between women, house and inner being. In this excerpt, their feminist reading of a literary work in which a woman writer narrates her experiences of textual/architectural confinement, is far from felicitous. Their essay demonstrates that women's writing is necessarily different from men's, and the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings under discussion.

While some male authors also use such imagery for implicitly or explicitly confessional projects, women seem forced to live more intimately with the metaphors they have created to solve the 'problem' of their fall. At least one critic does deal not only with such images but with their psychological meaning as they accrue around houses. Noting in The Poetics of Space that 'the house image would appear to have become the topography of our inmost being,' Gaston Bachelard shows the ways in which houses, nests, shells, and wardrobes are in us as much as we are in them.¹ What is significant from our point of view, however, is the extraordinary discrepancy between the almost consistently 'felicitous space' he discusses and the negative space we have found. Clearly, for Bachelard the protective asylum of the house is closely associated with its maternal features, and to this extent he is following the work done on dream symbolism by Freud and on female inner space by Erikson. It seems clear too, however, that such symbolism must inevitably have very different implications for male critics and for female authors.

Women themselves have often, of course, been described or imagined as houses. Most recently Erik Erikson advanced his controversial theory of female 'inner space' in an effort to account for little girls' interest in domestic enclosures. But in medieval times, as if to anticipate Erikson, statues of the Madonna were made to open up and reveal the holy family hidden in the Virgin's inner space. The female womb has certainly, always and everywhere, been a child's first and most satisfying house, a source of food and dark

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late 19th century space

security, and therefore a mythic paradise imaged over and over again in sacred caves, secret shrines, consecrated huts. Yet for many a woman writer these ancient associations of house and self seem mainly to have strengthened the anxiety about enclosure which she projected into her art. Disturbed by the real physiological prospect of enclosing an unknown part of herself that is somehow also not herself, the female artist may, like Mary Shelley, conflate anxieties about maternity with anxieties about literary creativity. Alternatively, troubled by the anatomical 'emptiness' of spinsterhood, she may, like Emily Dickinson, fear the inhabitations of nothingness and death, the transformation of womb into tomb. Moreover, conditioned to believe that as a house she is herself owned (and ought to be inhabited) by a man, she may once again but for yet another reason see herself as inescapably an object. In other words, even if she does not experience her womb as a kind of tomb or perceive her child's occupation of her house/body as depersonalizing, she may recognize that in an essential way she has been defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species.

To become literally a house, after all, is to be denied the hope of that spiritual transcendence of the body which, as Simone de Beauvoir has argued, is what makes humanity distinctively human. Thus, to be confined in childbirth (and significantly 'confinement' was the key nineteenth-century term for what we would now, just as significantly call 'delivery') is in a way just as problematical as to be confined in a house or prison. Indeed, it might well seem to the literary woman that, just as ontogeny may be said to recapitulate phylogeny, the confinement of pregnancy replicates the confinement of society. For even if she is only metaphorically denied transcendence, the woman writer who perceives the implications of the house/body equation must unconsciously realize that such a trope does not just 'place' her in a glass coffin, it transforms her into a version of the glass coffin herself. There is a sense, therefore, in which, confined in such a network of metaphors, what Adrienne Rich has called a 'thinking woman' might inevitably feel that now she has been imprisoned within her own alien and loathsome body.² Once again, in other words, she has become not only a prisoner but a monster.

As if to comment on the unity of all these points – on, that is, the anxiety-inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies – Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought them all together in 1890 in a striking story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their 'speechless woe.' The Yellow Wallpaper, which Gilman herself called 'a description of a case of nervous breakdown,' recounts in the first person the experiences of a woman who is evidently suffering from a severe postpartum psychosis.³ Her husband, a censorious and paternalistic physician, is treating her according to methods by which S. Weir Mitchell, a famous 'nerve specialist,' treated Gilman herself for a similar problem. He has confined her to a large garret room in an 'ancestral hall' he

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has rented, and he has forbidden her to touch pen to paper until she is well again, for he feels, says the narrator, 'that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency'.(pp 15-16)

The cure, of course, is worse than the disease, for the sick woman's mental condition deteriorates rapidly. 'I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me,' she remarks, but literally confined in a room she thinks is a one-time nursery because it has 'rings and things' in the walls, she is literally locked away from creativity. The 'rings and things,' although reminiscent of children's gymnastic equipment, are really the paraphernalia of confinement, like the gate at the head of the stairs, instruments that definitively indicate her imprisonment. Even more tormenting, however, is the room's wallpaper: a sulphurous yellow paper, torn off in spots, and patterned with 'lame uncertain curves' that 'plunge off at outrageous angles' and 'destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.' Ancient, smoldering, 'unclean' as the oppressive structures of the society in which she finds herself, this paper surrounds the narrator like an inexplicable text, censorious and overwhelming as her physician husband, haunting as the 'hereditary estate' in which she is trying to survive. Inevitably she studies its suicidal implications - and inevitably, because of her 'imaginative power and habit of story-making,' she revises it, projecting her own passion for escape into its otherwise incomprehensible hieroglyphics. 'This wall-paper,' she decides, at a key point in her story,

has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. (p 18)

As time passes, this figure concealed behind what corresponds (in terms of what we have been discussing) to the facade of the patriarchal text becomes clearer and clearer. By moonlight the pattern of the wallpaper 'becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.' And eventually, as the narrator sinks more deeply into what the world calls madness, the terrifying implications of both the paper and the figure imprisoned behind the paper begin to permeate - that is, to haunt - the rented ancestral mansion in which she and her husband are immured. The 'yellow smell' of the paper 'creeps all over the house,' drenching every room in its subtle aroma of decay. And the woman creeps too - through the house, in the house, and out of the house, in the garden and 'on that long road under the trees.' Sometimes, indeed, the narrator confesses, 'I think there are a great many women' both behind the paper and creeping in the garden,

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and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes [the paper] all over … And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. (p 30)

Eventually it becomes obvious to both reader and narrator that the figure creeping through and behind the wallpaper is both the narrator and the narrator's double. By the end of the story, moreover, the narrator has enabled this double to escape from her textual/architectural confinement: 'I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.' Is the message of the tale's conclusion mere madness? Certainly the righteous Doctor John – whose name links him to the anti-hero of Charlotte Brontë's Villette – has been temporarily defeated, or at least momentarily stunned. 'Now why should that man have fainted?' the narrator ironically asks as she creeps around her attic. But John's unmasculine swoon of surprise is the least of the triumphs Gilman imagines for her madwoman. More significant are the madwoman's own imaginings and creations, mirages of health and freedom with which her author endows her like a fairy godmother showering gold on a sleeping heroine. The woman from behind the wallpaper creeps away, for instance, creeps fast and far on the long road, in broad daylight. 'I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country,' says the narrator, 'creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.'

Indistinct and yet rapid, barely perceptible but inexorable, the progress of that cloud shadow is not unlike the progress of nineteenth-century literary women out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority. That such an escape from the numb world behind the patterned walls of the text was a flight from disease into health was quite clear to Gilman herself. When The Yellow Wallpaper was published she sent it to Weir Mitchell, whose strictures had kept her from attempting the pen during her own breakdown, thereby aggravating her illness, and she was delighted to learn, years later, that 'he had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading' her story. 'If that is a fact,' she declared, 'I have not lived in vain.'⁴ Because she was a rebellious feminist besides being a medical iconoclast, we can be sure that Gilman did not think of this triumph of hers in narrowly therapeutic terms. Because she knew, with Emily Dickinson, that 'Infection in the sentence breeds,' she knew that the cure for female despair must be spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as social. What The Yellow Wallpaper shows she knew, too, is that even when a supposedly 'mad' woman has been sentenced to imprisonment in the 'infected' house of her own body, she may discover that, as Sylvia Plath was to put it seventy years later, she has 'a self to recover, a queen.'⁵ (… p 92)

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Notes

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans Maria Jolas, Beacon (Boston), 1970, p xxxii.

2 Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (eds), Adrienne Rich's Poetry, Norton (New York), 1975, p 12: 'A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes' ('Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law', #3).

3 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Feminist Press (Old Westbury), 1973. All references in the text will be to page numbers in this edition.

4 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, Harper and Row (New York), 1975, p 121.

5 Sylvia Plath, 'Stings', Ariel, Harper and Row (New York), 1966, p 62.

Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press (New Haven and London), 1984.

(Excerpt pp 87–92)

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