Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Abstract

When S. Weir Mitchell diagnosed Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson) as suffering from variation of nervous prostration, or neurasthenia, as outlined in his Fat and Blood (1877), he prescribed what many nineteenth-century physicians (including Freud) believed to be necessary recuperative regimen - rest. Included in Mitchell's Rest Cure treatment were locking Gilman away in his Philadelphia sanitarium for month, enforcing strict isolation, limiting intellectual stimulation to two hours day, and forbidding her to touch pen, pencil, or paintbrush ever again.(1) Mitchell believed, Catherine Golden tells us, that both companionship and work proved detriment to his patient's recovery, further taxing her nerves already frazzled from an admixture of hysteria and postpartum depression (Golden, |Overwriting' ... 146). Gilman dramatized her experience with Dr. Mitchell in Yellow Wallpaper (1892), journalistic/clinical account of woman's gradual descent into madness (or is she mad at beginning and is pathologically reliving descent that already taken place?) at hands of her husband John, doctor who subscribes to Mitchell treatment. Gilman's narrator is isolated three miles from village (11) in an upstairs nursery of colonial mansion (9), its windows barred and its walls covered in faded yellow wallpaper whose sprawling flamboyant patterns commit every artistic sin (13) imaginable. It is room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about room. For this reason, feminist critic Elaine Hedges wrote in 1973 that paper symbolizes her situation as seen by men who control her and hence her situation as seen by (Afterword 51), view echoed by later critics. Yellow Wallpaper, then, became feminist text that indicted men who were responsible for narrator's physical confinement and subsequent mental demise. But this is also room not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon. Originally designed to replace dark and dank houses of security so common throughout England with bright and salubrious house of certainty (Foucault 202), Panopticon developed into an unscrupulous method of inquisition that perpetuated fear and bred paranoia. Like room that confines Gilman's narrator, Panopticon proved to be not utopia for prisoners, mental patients, and schoolboys, but a cruel, ingenious cage (Foucault 205) that misjudged human reaction to unabated surveillance. Yet what Gilman critics for most part have until recently) tended to neglect, and what this interpretation will stress, is that narrator, despite her doctor's ill-advice and her husband's dehumanizing imprisonment, is successful in freeing herself from her male-imposed shackles, her Panopticon. Such view supports feminist label already attached to Yellow Wallpaper but counters premise upon which arguments of Hedges and others are based: that she never does get free and, in fact, has been defeated in end - in short, destroyed (Afterword 52-53, 55).(2) The benefits of Panopticon over prisons, factories, and psychiatric wards of his time, Bentham argued, were several. Its primary goal, though, was to generate symbiotic relationship between observer and observed. In reversing the principle of dungeon, Panopticon, an instrument of power and observation, would provide interned with clean, well-lighted, and relatively pleasant environment, and warden with most efficient means of control through minimal effort (Foucault 200). Wheel-like in structure with central tower at its hub and connecting cells, like spokes, protruding from its middle, the panoptic mechanism, Foucault writes, arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately (200). …