Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence

Author: Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original from The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979 — excerpt pp. 87–92 of the 1984 Yale edition; © 1979 Yale University, © 1984 Gilbert & Gubar) Source type: chapter (selection reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, John Wiley & Sons, 2006, pp. 121–126, keyworded "psychological • 1979" / "late 19th century space")

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Summary

Gilbert and Gubar's chapter — the classic statement of second-wave feminist literary criticism, selected by the Intimus editors to bring "research on the interface of women and literature into the discourse on the interior" — argues that the house/body equation is the deepest form of women's confinement: women have been "described or imagined as houses" (Erik Erikson's theory of female "inner space"; the Madonna statues that open to reveal the Holy Family; the womb as "a child's first and most satisfying house"), and for the woman writer this trope is not felicitous but lethal — it "does not just 'place' her in a glass coffin, it transforms her into a version of the glass coffin herself." The chapter's critical engine is a gendered counter-reading of Bachelard: against "the almost consistently 'felicitous space'" of The Poetics of Space, women writers record "the negative space" — enclosure anxiety — because "such symbolism must inevitably have very different implications for male critics and for female authors." The reading culminates in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1890) as the "paradigmatic tale" that unites women's parallel confinements "in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies": the husband-physician's rest cure, the garret room, the forbidden pen, the wallpaper as "inexplicable text," the woman behind the pattern as the narrator's double, and the escape — peeling off yards of the paper, creeping "as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind" — as the figure of nineteenth-century literary women's progress "out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority."

Key Claims

Bachelard's poetics is gendered without knowing it: noting that "the house image would appear to have become the topography of our inmost being," Bachelard shows houses, nests, shells and wardrobes "in us as much as we are in them" — but what matters is "the extraordinary discrepancy between the almost consistently 'felicitous space' he discusses and the negative space we have found" (p. 121). The protective asylum is closely associated with the house's maternal features (via Freud's dream symbolism and Erikson's female inner space), yet "such symbolism must inevitably have very different implications for male critics and for female authors" (p. 121).
Women have been imagined as houses: "Women themselves have often, of course, been described or imagined as houses" — Erikson's theory of female "inner space" accounting for little girls' interest in domestic enclosures; the medieval Madonna statues that open to reveal the Holy Family in the Virgin's inner space; the womb as "always and everywhere… a child's first and most satisfying house, a source of food and dark security," imaged in "sacred caves, secret shrines, consecrated huts" (pp. 121–122).
The house/body equation produces enclosure anxiety, not refuge: for many a woman writer the ancient associations "seem mainly to have strengthened the anxiety about enclosure which she projected into her art" — the female artist may conflate maternity anxieties with literary-creativity anxieties (Mary Shelley), or, troubled by the "anatomical 'emptiness' of spinsterhood," fear "the inhabitations of nothingness and death, the transformation of womb into tomb" (Emily Dickinson) (p. 122).
As a house, the woman is owned: "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… she has been defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species" (p. 122).
To become a house is to be denied transcendence: "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" — and "the confinement of pregnancy replicates the confinement of society" ("'confinement' was the key nineteenth-century term for what we would now, just as significantly call 'delivery'") (p. 122).
The trope turns the woman into its own instrument: the house/body equation "does not just 'place' her in a glass coffin, it transforms her into a version of the glass coffin herself" — imprisoned "within her own alien and loathsome body" (Adrienne Rich's "thinking woman"), "not only a prisoner but a monster" (p. 122).
The Yellow Wallpaper unites the parallel confinements: Gilman's 1890 story "brought them all together… the anxiety-inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies" — "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'" (p. 122).
The rest cure is a spatial imprisonment: the physician-husband confines the narrator to "a large garret room in an 'ancestral hall'" and forbids her to write — "with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies" (Gilman, pp. 15–16) — the cure worse than the disease; the room's "rings and things" (nursery gymnastic rings that are really "the paraphernalia of confinement") and the gate at the head of the stairs are "instruments that definitively indicate her imprisonment" (p. 123). Gilman herself was treated by S. Weir Mitchell.
The wallpaper is an oppressive text: the sulphurous yellow paper, torn, patterned with "lame uncertain curves" that "plunge off at outrageous angles" and "destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions," 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"; because of her "imaginative power and habit of story-making" she revises it, "projecting her own passion for escape into its otherwise incomprehensible hieroglyphics" (p. 123).
The pattern is patriarchal structure: the sub-pattern's "strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (Gilman, p. 18) corresponds "to the facade of the patriarchal text"; 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'" (p. 123).
The house is drenched by the paper's decay: "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, in, and out of the house, in the garden and on the road; "I think there are a great many women" behind the paper and creeping in the garden; "nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads" (pp. 123–124).
Escape is achieved with the double: "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" — the narrator enables the double's 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" (Gilman, p. 30) (p. 124).
Madness's triumph is imaginative freedom: John's unmasculine swoon is "the least of the triumphs"; "More significant are the madwoman's own imaginings and creations" — the double creeping away "as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind," indistinct yet inexorable, "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" (p. 124).
The cure must be aesthetic as well as social: Gilman sent the story to Weir Mitchell, whose strictures had aggravated her own breakdown, and learned he "had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading" it — "If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain"; because she knew, with Emily Dickinson, that "Infection in the sentence breeds," she knew "the cure for female despair must be spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as social" — the "mad" woman sentenced to imprisonment "in the 'infected' house of her own body" may discover, as Sylvia Plath put it, she has "a self to recover, a queen" (p. 124).

Connections

Concepts: House-Body Equation · Felicitous Space · The Madwoman · Patriarchal Poetics · Gender and the Interior · Separate Spheres · Domestic Interior · Interiority · Enclosure · The Double · Uncanny · Mutedness · Corporeal Inscription · The Dialectics of Outside and Inside · Gendered Space Authors: Gilbert & Gubar · Gaston Bachelard (the feminist counter-reading's target) · Taylor & Preston (editors and framing headnote) · Elsie de Wolfe (companion: the professionalization of the women/interior identification this chapter diagnoses) Debates: Power and Space — the rest-cure interior as a spatial apparatus of confinement (Position P) · Phenomenology vs. Psychoanalysis — felicitous (phenomenological) space vs. the psychoanalytically infected negative space Related source notes: Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (the felicitous space this chapter counter-reads) · Taylor & Preston — Proximities (the editors' gender-and-the-interior program this selection instantiates) · Ardener — The Partition of Space (women's spatial experience; enclosure as ordering) · Burns — A House for Josephine Baker (the parallel denial-of-interiority case, raced vs. gendered) · Colley — Bodies and Mirrors (the anthology's other literary-critical interior reading) · Fuss & Sanders — Berggasse 19 (the room as analytic instrument; the double) · Gordon — Woman's Domestic Body (the equation's material-culture twin: the industrial-age conflation dated, caused and evidenced — "a simile… transformed into a synonym")

Direct Quotes

"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." — editors' headnote (p. 121)

"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." — editors' headnote (p. 121)

"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." (p. 121)

"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." (p. 121)

"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." (p. 121)

"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." (p. 121)

"The female womb has certainly, always and everywhere, been a child's first and most satisfying house, a source of food and dark security, and therefore a mythic paradise imaged over and over again in sacred caves, secret shrines, consecrated huts." (pp. 121–122)

"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." (p. 122)

"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." (p. 122)

"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." (p. 122)

"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." (p. 122)

"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." (p. 122)

"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." (p. 122)

"Once again, in other words, she has become not only a prisoner but a monster." (p. 122)

"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.'" (p. 122)

"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" — Gilman's narrator, quoting the physician-husband, pp. 15–16 (p. 123)

"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." (p. 123)

"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." (p. 123)

"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." — Gilman, p. 18 (p. 123)

"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." (p. 123)

"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." (p. 123)

"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.'" (p. 123)

"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." — Gilman, p. 30 (p. 124)

"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." (p. 124)

"'I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.'" — Gilman, quoted (p. 124)

"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." (p. 124)

"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." (p. 124)

"'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.'" (p. 124)

"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." (p. 124)

"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.'" (p. 124)

Open Questions

Is Bachelard's "felicitous space" necessarily a male critic's space — and can the poetics of intimate space be repaired (as Treadwell's oceanic interiority and Preston's Performing Matter attempt) or only counter-read? What would a feminist poetics of the house that is neither felicitous nor negative look like?
The chapter's house/body equation rests on Erikson's contested theory of female "inner space" — a psychoanalytic claim Gilbert and Gubar cite as the symbolism's provenance rather than its truth. Does the argument require the equation to be true of bodies, or only of the discourse that "describes or imagines" women as houses?
The Yellow Wallpaper's escape is ambiguous ("Is the message of the tale's conclusion mere madness?"): the double creeps free in imagination ("mirages of health and freedom") while the narrator remains in the attic room. Is imaginative escape a real architectural/political achievement (Gilman's changed treatment of Weir Mitchell) or a deferral — the same problem Burns raises about Baker's "eternally deferred" interiority?
The wallpaper as "inexplicable text" — the decorative surface that imprisons — reads the interior's ornament as patriarchy's script. Does this give the ornament debate (Ornament vs. Purity) a case it lacks: the pattern that "strangles" and has "so many heads" as the ornamental apparatus of confinement, against which the woman "peels off yards"?
The editors read the essay's endpoint as inscription: "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings." How far does the "by implication" carry — is the gendering of interiors done by such texts (criticism, advice literature, poetics), and does this make literary criticism itself an interior-design force?