WRITING BEYOND THE ENDING, NARRATIVES OF TRANSCENDENCE

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WRITING BEYOND THE ENDING, NARRATIVES OF
TRANSCENDENCE CONSTRAINT contd

• Introduction to Literature by Women
• 31 March 2005

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The Yellow Wallpaper

• BACKGROUND
• The Woman Question obsesses 19th c. By the
  centurys end
  
• Women were not franchised, though
  African-American and ethnic men were
  
• Home less less defines the limit of female
  activity, women were joining the men in the
  outside world, however marginally
  
• Many Americans believed that the need to draw a
  clear line between appropriately male and female
  activities
  
• Evolutionary connections were cited to prove that
  the sexual division of labor was rooted in the
  ways cave dwellers lived in the prehistoric past

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• For educated people, most of whom had left the
  authority of The Church behind them, SCIENCE was
  the ultimate authority
  
• Earliest article in The Popular Science Monthly
  (founded 1872) on the Woman Question appeared in
  1873 (though the Woman Question had raged for
  more than a century -- remember Wollstonecraft,
  Mary Shelley, Abigail Adams)

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• In The Popular Science Monthly
• If it were possible to collect all the results of
  the muscular activity of men, from the beginning
  of civilization to the present, and likewise all
  the results of muscular activity of women for the
  same period, we should reason instantaneously,
  from these phenomena, to the superior quality of
  masculine muscle. (Miss Hardaker, 1873)

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• Again, from The Popular Science Monthly
• When we thus look the matter honestly in the
  face, it would seem plain that women are marked
  out by Nature for very different offices in life
  from those of men, and that the healthy
  performance of her special functions renders it
  improbable she will succeed, and unwise for her
  to persevere, in running over the same course at
  the same pace with him. For such a race she is
  certainly weighted unfairly. . . .Women cannot
  rebel successfully against the tyranny of their
  organization. . . .This is not the expression of
  prejudice nor of false sentiment it is the plain
  statement of a physiological fact.

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• The Popular Science Monthly was the Darwinian
  Journal, featuring the work of Darwins most
  ardent American disciple, Herbert Spencer, who
  published The Psychology of the Sexes in 1873
• Science, common sense, and social custom
  interacted seamlessly in the late nineteenth
  century to make his assertions appear to be
  unchallengeable

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• Social Darwinism invoked by social conservatives,
  who opposed any change in social conventions
  
• Mental and physical traits had evolved in
  response to the activities and functions of each
  sex
  
• For Darwin, the realities of sexual and natural
  selection had resulted in men becoming superior
  to women

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• Darwins disciple, Spencer, argued
• absolute or relative infertility is generally
  produced in women by mental labor carried to
  excess
  
• Thus the deficiency of reproductive power among
  upper-class girls could be reasonably attributed
  to the overtaxing of their brains--an overtaxing
  which produces a serious reaction on the
  physique. This diminution of reproductive power
  is not shown only by the greater frequency of
  absolute sterility nor is it shown only in the
  earlier cessation of child-bearing

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The Yellow Wallpaper, BACKGROUND contd

• Spencer contd but it is also shown in the
  very frequent inability of such women to suckle
  their infants. In its full sense, the
  reproductive power means the power to bear a
  well-developed infant, and to supply that infant
  with the natural food for the natural period.
  Most of the flat-chested girls who survive their
  high-pressure education, are incompetent to do
  this. Were their fertility measured by the
  number of children they could rear without
  artificial aid, they would prove relatively
  infertile. (Principles of Biology 485-486)

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• Male consensus re diagnosis of female narrator
  (265)
  
• Thinking is bad for women worst thing I can do
  is think about my condition, and I must confess
  it always makes me feel badly (265) imagines
  that writing would relieve the pressure of ideas
  and rest me (267)

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• John nothing preternatural in his world
• scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be
  felt and seen and put down in figures (265)
  
• Narrator is under his thumb
• hardly lets me stir without special direction I
  have a schedule prescription for each hour in the
  day (265)

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• Infantilized, lives in the nursery (266)
• Woman as Pet (blessed little goose) Danger of
  imaginative power (266-267)
  
• Narrator craving intellectual companionship,
  imaginative habits
  
• Other women (Johns sister) colluding with
  brothers diagnosis

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• Male consensus -- almost conspiratorial
• What about that wallpaper
• Moves, but without goal or direction
• dull yet lurid. . .sickly sulphur
• Narrator rationalizes her husbands mistreatment
• Woman in paper what she SEES is what she IS

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• Narrator/woman in paper locked into herself
  disruptive woman is buried ni paper
  
• Doctor knows best
• Family First
• Pattern defiant of LAW
• Life better as narrator becomes more infant-like

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The Yellow Wallpaper contd

• SYNESTHETIC all power externalized, attributed
  by narrator to force of others
  
• CREEPING, CREEPING, a horrific reinscription of
  an infants crawl
  
• Self split from Self
• I wonder if they all came out of that paper as I
  did
  
• Patriarch unsettled Now why should that man
  have fainted?

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