The Yellow Wallpaper: A Stifling Relationship -- essays research paper

Husband-Doctor A Stifling Relationship In Gilmans the xanthous WallpaperAt the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist, Jane, has just given line to a baby boy. Although for most m new(prenominal)s a newborn infant is a joyous time, for others, like Jane, it becomes a exhausting emotional period that is now popularly understood to be the common disorder, postpartum economic crisis. For example, Jane describes herself as feeling a lack of strength (Colm, 3) and as sightly dreadfully fretful and querulous (Jeannette and Morris, 25). In addition, she writes, I cry at nothing and cry most of the time (Jeannette and Morris, 23).However, as the term postpartum depression was not in the vocabulary of this time period, John, Janes husband and doctor, has diagnosed Jane as suffering from temporary nervous depression with a slight hysterical temperament (30).(Colm) It may be more accurate to view the symptoms she develops later in the storyvisual hallucinations, delusions, pa ranoiaas stemming from a psychotic condition that, prior to the birth of her son, was subdued or in control. The birth of her son precipitated a confrontation with John and became a accelerator of her psychosis.Janes child may be considered a catalyst because, although he is not named for us by the narrator, he will be the recipient of his brings last name. Walsh points out the stress laid in the clinic on the father as word and figure, so that what is finally important might be called the perception of paternity or the relation to paternity (78). When applied to a recitation of The Yellow Wallpaper, this translates into the following The birth event is one of the times, perhaps the first, that Jane actually confronts her relation to the father of her son, John. In relation to the above, until the very last few lines of the story, Jane herself, is unnamed.(Hume, 477) This absence seizure correlates with the void she has in the place at which a non-psychotic person would have a re lation to the Husband/Father. Furthermore, even though her name eventually is revealed, it is, in essence, a no name Jane, as in Jane Doe, as in anonymous, without a history or connections of any sort.Aside from Janes anonymity, there are other indications that Jane does not fit into the wife/mother relationship. From the opening lines, Gilman makes it clear that the world of the story is feminist. For example... ... Psychoses. Criticism & Lacon. Eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Athens U of Georgia P, 1990. 6473.Dock, Julie Bates. But No One Expects That Charlotte Perkins Oilmans The Yellow Wallpaper and the Shifting Light of Scholarship. PLMA 111.1 (Jan 1996) 5265.Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. invigorated Haven Yale UP. 2000.Treichler, Paula A. Escaping the Sentence diagnosis and Discourse in The Yellow Wallpaper. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 3. 12 (Spring-Fa ll 1984)6177.Johnson, Greg. Gilmans Gothic Allegory Range and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (Fall 1989) 52130.Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York Columbia UP, 1982.Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York Columbia UP, 1980.Tripathi, Vanashree. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper A Gynograph. Indian Journal of American Studies 27.1 (Winter 1997) 6569.Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York W.W. Norton &Co., 1977.