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Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
ART 1: A Prologue to Rebellion: "The Awakening" and the Habit of Self-Expression Author(s):
Joseph R
...
” Kathleen M
...
 

ART 11:  The Nullification of Edna Pontellier Author(s): Katherine Kearns

ART 12:  THE PLACE OF FEMALE WRITERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE CASE OF
KATE CHOPIN Author(s): Gabrielle Baldwin

ART 13:  To Die Laughing and to Laugh at Dying: Revisiting "The Awakening” Author(s): Anca
Parvulescu

ART 14:  Unbearable Realism: Freedom, Ethics and Identity in "The Awakening" Author(s): Peter
Ramos

ART 15:  In Search of a Redeemed Vision: The American Women's Novel, 1880s-1980s Author(s):
E
...
Kennard

ART 19:  Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper” Author(s):
Loralee MacPike

ART 20:  Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper” Author(s):
Paula A
...
Lanser

ART 22:  Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night Author(s):
Michelle A
...
DELAMOTTE

ART 25:  Marking Her Territory: Feline Behavior in "The Yellow Wall-Paper" Author(s): Catherine J
...
Treichler

ART 28:  Hurner, Sheryl
...
" Western Journal Of Communication 70
...

Communication & Mass Media Complete
...
27 Oct
...


ART 29:  The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 Author(s): Barbara Welter 


Rebellion:

ART 1:  “That Edna is rebellious is fairly agreed upon—but against what does she rebel, and is her
rebellion “realistic”?” p22
“I would suggest that what Edna achieves in The Awakening is not so much a rebellion but a
prologue to rebellion
...
That is to say, she learns how to speak out; or, simply put, she learns
to say No
...
As
such, Chopin's emblematic tale of Edna's proto-feminist awakening can also be understood as the
story of Edna's achievement of speech
...
” p23


ART 5:  “One reader places Edna Pontellier alongside Hester Prynne, Huck Finn, and Ishmael
as characters in ”the classic tradition of American novels in which the hero or heroine
...
” p159


ART 10:  “It is important to pay close attention to some lines from the novel: Edna tells her
husband “I thought I should have perished out there [sea] alone” (Chopin, 1899, p
...
Thinking of
the sea, Edna “recalled the terror” (p
...
157)
...
” p38


ART 14:  “Each [reading] inherently suggests that the patriarchal-social pressures forced upon
such a woman were either inescapably deterministic or, somehow, entirely avoidable through a
kind of mythical rebirth achieved through the act of suicide… According to the logic of these
enduring critical readings,women like Chopin or Gilman appear to be accidental survivors who
inexplicably avoided an otherwise inexorable fate, or—worse—women who lacked the courage to
make the ultimate stand of killing themselves or going mad to elude the patriarchal society they
faced
...
” p78

ART 16:  “…and moving in a circle that sketches the futility of her liberation through madness
...
What she has discovered, which
she does not state, is that she and the woman behind the paper are the same
...
"If that woman does get
out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!" and "But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden
rope" (34-35)
...
Locked in the room, she
addresses her husband in a dramatically different way: "It is no use, young man, you can't open
it!”” p73


Language/Speech & Narrative voice

ART 1:  “Edna, in the first chapters of The Awakening, does not initiate speech, she only
responds
...
it becomes unreliable," and
suggests an ironic stance exists behind the narrator's admiration (149)” p407

“Edna, for the most part, uses silence to communicate with Leonce
...
Following this line of
reasoning, then, Adele actions of "taking the words out of [her husband's] mouth," can be positively
interpreted as Adele's ability to usurp and claim patriarchal language as her own
...
These covert female voices attempt to force patriarchal
discourse into a subversive dialogue, a dialogue which shows patriarchal categories to be nonabsolute
...
These later works therefore reject a resisting
voice that operates outside of patriarchal discourse, finding instead a voice that disrupts and
mimics patriarchy from within its own discursive parameters
...
These covert strategies of resistance were Chopin’s most effective weapon,
because they allowed her to slip subversive messages past the censoring dictates of her own

society
...
” p18


ART 6:  Although Fryer's comment may separate Chopin's narrative technique from those of her
male contemporaries, it is somewhat misleading in that Chopin does not begin her story from
inside Edna's psyche
...
2 In Chopin's own words, the audience follows Edna from the "outward existence
which conforms" to "the inward life which questions
...
Yet in the last
narrative moments, when Edna's nude body in the gleaming water presents the most sensual
image in the entire narrative and seems to demand "external" scrutiny, Chopin shifts her rhetorical
emphasis from visual to auditory
...
She does not know what to say,
or how to say
...
410)
...
By her ultimate suicidal choice, Edna determines to find a voice and be
seen but is totally perished instead to prove that the subaltern cannot speak
...
Far from immobile, Adele is raging with restlessness, in labor
...
” p71




ART 14:  “third, though far less popular, reading of Edna's final actions insists they are
inconsistent with her character and, as such, flaw the novella as a whole
...
Spangler
claims that The Awakening's conclusion "undercuts the otherwise superb characterization of the
protagonist and thus prevents a very good novel from being the masterpiece its discoverers claim
that it is" (1970, 250)
...
Biographer Emily Toth has
suggested that Chopin had Edna commit suicide in order to accommodate the moral demands
publishers and readers would place on a woman who committed such transgressions
...
”p146


ART 15:  “These women writers have created a new language as a means to freedom in other
to liberate the female identity from the preconceived male vision
...
As she describes it, the wallpaper
does seem to resemble all-too-familiar assessments of women's language—first, it "sins" against
established forms; it is dull, confusing, irritating, yet nevertheless provoking
...
The most crucial element of her description, however, is the "unheard of
contradictions
...
"The
Yellow Wallpaper" is replete with contradictions
...
" Every time the narrator speaks, she is interrupted and
contradicted until she begins to interrupt and contradict herself
...
” p593


ART 18:  “There is no overt statement, for example, that invites us to find a socially induced
cause for the narrator's madness, to assume that her situation is that of all women
...
It is also true that if the narrator claims she thinks
writing would relieve her mind, she also says it tires her when she tries (p
...
Since she so often
contradicts herself, we are free to believe her only when her comments support our reading
...
Masquerading as a symptom of
"madness," language animates what had been merely an irritating and distracting pattern” p72


ART 24:  “Instead of presenting women’s daylight world apprehended as a nightmare, she
opens her story with the picture of a nightmare world apprehended as merely ordinary
...
"4Despite their evidently bizarre content, the sentences late in the story are
no less poised, lapidary, and decorous than the early ones: "Now he's crying for an axe
...
41); "Now why should that man have fainted?
But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" (p
...
” p275
“The narrator's adherence to linguistic good form corresponds to her adherence to social good
form
...
[W]hat is one to
do?" (pp
...
Merely personal opinion, whim, rebellion, or transgressive desire are strongly
preempted by the coercively rational understandings and prohibitions embodied in the neuter
pronoun: "Personally, I disagree with their ideas
...
But what is one to do?" (p
...
Rebellion is not only
doomed to be ineffectual, it would seem, but can manifest itself only as childishness, irrationality,
and/ or bad form
...
" It seems inaccurate even to say

that there is a dominant "mainstream" patriarchal discourse and a subordinate women's discourse
which exists as a kind of undercurrent
...
It is a story about language as it is embodied in a very specific type of
"patriarchal discourse": the medical diagnosis and its representation of women
...
” p327
“I would therefore back away from Ford's conclusion that "language is male-controlled" and remain
with the more specific charge that the discourse of medical diagnosis is a prime example of
patriarchal discourse
...
The wallpaper is not
an artificial covering over reality, a mere surface that can be stripped away; rather it is an
aggressive materiality, full of contradictions and impossibilities
...
The most we can do is to situate
ourselves within the terrain, inhabit and work it differently
...
“But,” Chopin interrupts, “it was a fair enough piece of work, and in many ways
satisfying” (187)
...
” p24-5


ART 2:  “As such, it is not surprising that when Edna tries to sketch Adele's portrait, she is
"greatly disappointed to find that it did not look like her" (55)
...
” p80


ART 17:  “For John, mental illness is the inevitable result of using one's imagination, the creation
of an attractive “fancy" which the mind then fails to distinguish from reality
...
Imagination and art are subversive
because they threaten to undermine his materialistic universe
...
” p288


Autonomy/power over body and self

ART 1:  “Edna proves herself an expert at judging the worthiness of the horses’ bodies… Can
this authority over racehorses be experienced in regards to her own physical existence, to her own
“race”? “ p29

“I don’t want anything but my own way”

“What Edna wants is to save the one story she has of her own—which is the story of her body—
from being controlled and ordered by someone else’s narrative logic
...
To save her story from a
compromised ending, Edna must remove herself from it
...
” ” 32 [give herself up - not
related to sex
...
]


ART 3:  “Already on Grand Isle “[s]he was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if
she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility
...
Her denial of agency, even if she actually has free will,
creates a situation where she might as well not have the power to choose
...

Leaning over him, she asks if he is asleep and kisses him for the first time, completely inverting the
gender roles of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale to which the title of the novel makes ironic reference
...
Now acting the
part of the prince, Edna must rouse her beloved from his sleep of silence, convention, and inaction”
p176


ART 11:  “Sleeping Beauty is safer to the public when she is asleep—Chopin's novel itself tells
us this
...
” p62


ART 13:  “The dinner party she devotes herself to organizing thus becomes a reversed wedding
that marks her departure from the grotto as matrimonial pandemonium (“a place represented by
Milton as the capital of Hell”)
...
Swimming and
flying are metaphors of woman's access to power
...
”” p482

“Such is the nature of her awakening: it is an awakening-unto-death
...
Or that she is ready to live as if dead
...
” p487


ART 14:  “Both texts repeatedly establish the extent to which the patriarchal pressures of that
period posed severe obstacles for even the most privileged women
...
But here, at
least, she manages to use her social identity in a very public way to navigate and even overcome
some of the social restrictions one might assume to be in place at this time
...
” p150
“As Edna herself comes to realize, she can exercise a certain amount freedom in choosing the kind
of woman she wants to be
...
This is essentially the
way one lives an ethical life—acting on, and being responsible for, the choices one is more or less
free to make
...
That Edna ultimately fails to sustain these
qualities may mean that she fails to uphold and live by what I am calling “ethics
...
Rather than sustaining or modifying her
identities?recently separated wife, artist,mother, lover?or only abandoning the ones that seem to
her impossible to realize, Edna abandons all of them in favor of stark reality itself
...
” p152
“Edna is neither absolutely determined by patriarchy and its limitations, nor free from her social
conditions and restraints—in any inhabitable, practical way—when she commits suicide
...
Because the
narrator’s final proclamation is both triumphant and horrifying, madness in the story is both positive
and negative
...
The fact that her unflappable husband faints when he finds her establishes the dramatic power
of her new freedom
...
Yet that this vision has come to exist and to be expressed
changes the terms of the representational process
...

Though patriarchy may be only temporarily unconscious, its ancestral halls will never be precisely
the same again
...

When she locks herself in the rooms so that she can crawl in freedom, John is for the first time
silenced “for a few moments”(36)
...
” p706


ART 24:  “In this light, it is even more significant that The Yellow Wallpaper begins with the
narrators wish that her house were haunted like those which frightened heroines suffer Gothic
horrors
...
Already she is afraid of her husband, and
already she is suffering
...
” p6
“…although the narrator comes to acknowledge herself “a little afraid of John” (34), anger comes
increasingly to be her dominant emotion
...
toward its proper object—the hero whom she
finally perceives as the villain, Her excited cry, “I’ve got out at last…so you can’t put me back!” (36)
represents a delusion only on one level; the narrator is lost in imagination, but in imagination she
will continue to be free
...
Pontellier, or Darwin, for failing to transcend his
time and place
...
”p45
“The nar- rator also interjects this information: “The Colonel
...
That her father was emotionally distant is appar- ent
...
Her inexperience with
tenderness betokens an emotionally distant father as well as, once again, an emotionally
unavailable mother lost to Edna through death
...
She is
living in "ancestral halls" (9), has just given birth to a boy, is surrounded by men?her husband, her
brother, and somewhere in the background, Weir Mitchell?and even the female or females in the
house appear to be cardboard figures cut out by the patriarchy?first Mary, the virgin mother who "is
so good with the baby" (14) and later Jennie (a word which means a female donkey or beast of
burden) who "is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better
profession" (17-18)
...
In this view, the narrator releases herself (and
other women) from the paper by tearing it down
...
Comments such as these reveal more powerfully than any direct
statement could the way she is trapped by the conception of herself which she has accepted from
John and the society whose values he represents
...
"The wallpaper," claims Hedges, symbolizes "the morbid social situation" (p
...
Gilbert
and Gubar talk of "the anxiety-inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as
their parallel confinements in texts, houses and maternal female bodies" and describe the
wallpaper as "ancient, smoldering, 'unclean' as the oppressive structures of the society in which
she finds herself" (p
...
”  p75

“But the ability to read the narrator's confinement in a room as symbolic of the situation of women
in a patriarchal society depends on an agreement, on a literary convention, which, I suggest, was
formed from contemporary experience-both literary and extraliterary
...
He is also a doctor and that compounds the situation
...
” p79
“The concept of madness is related to patriarchy since female madness is read as a result of
patriarchal oppression
...
“ p287


ART 20:  “Women "get through," she perceives, "and then the pattern strangles them offand
turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" (30)
...
No one escapes
...

When she cries, it is privately, even if “most of the time" (19), and what to her is a frightening loss
of energy is to him an encouraging placidity
...
The dimunitives he uses
to address her,like the room he chooses for her, are childish, but become ominous when imposed
on an adult
...
" “ p323


Alternative feminist expression:

ART 2:  “Chopin, through Adele, offers her readers more than one definition of feminist
expression
...
”
p406
“…to become a wife and mother is, on some level, to capitulate one’s self to patriarchal systems,
but this should not render a woman’s feminism suspect — and yet is so often does
...
” p406
“mother-woman”

“Chopin also, however, uses Adele’s character to show readers another form of resistance: Adele
reveals her strength and feminist identity by working the patriarchal system to her advantage
...
” p408

“While Charles Harmon argues that "Adele ensures that traditional gender roles are both reinforced
and parodied — indeed, enforced precisely through parody" (11), Adele's behavior is a little more
complicated
...
In other words, Adele's character projects the
ideal mother-woman image, magnifies its stereotypical qualities, and then, by allowing Adele — a
pregnant woman — to hint at a sexual identity, Chopin contests the boundaries of Adele's assigned
gender roles: is she a mother? a femme fatale? a saint? a wild woman? Chopin suggests Adele is
all of them, and, in doing so, she reveals an identity that confuses, and thus belies, static
stereotypes, and, importantly, she reveals Adele's ownership and authority of the mother-woman
role beyond the male-prescribed definitions
...
” p409

“Edna (and, ironically, many critics) immediately and wrongly perceives Adele as passive, selfsacrificing, and passionless because she is labeled "mother-woman
...
” p409

“Adele's husband has sent Adele to warn Edna that she is at risk of such ruin
...

However, as quickly as Adele offers this advice to Edna, she takes it back: "don't mind what I said
about Arobin, or having some one to stay with you" (153)
...
This suggests Adele's respect for Edna's choices,
and it suggests a feminist solidarity that Edna has denied Adele
...
” p412


“Chopin begins and ends the text with dramatic renderings of Adele, the "mother-woman," and the
parallel images of Adele contrast sharply as they move from a sense of idealization, to earthy
reality
...
For example, in the text's opening pages, a
traditional image of Adele is presented: she walks the island in her white dress "with the grace and
majesty" of a queen, holding her baby while her two other children hold onto her skirt (56)
...
Near the end of the text, however, Adele is presented in a way
that completely offsets the original, idyllic picture of motherhood and instead, Chopin presents us
with an instance of the flesh and blood reality motherhood demands
...
She rants against her husband, yells for and at the doctor, wanting to kill
one or both for neglecting her (169)
...
It is a wonderful image of a woman emotionally overwrought, yet certainly not overwhelmed,
as she voices her demands, her desires, and her command of her power as a life-giving force
...
These images beg to be united and reflected
upon
...
g
...
What comes to the forefront in all of these
connotations is the suggestion of a feminine power to be reckoned with, a dangerous as well as
creative force of life
...

With Edna, Chopin gives us an exhilarating, nihilistic escape from the patriarchal reality of our
world
...
” p415


ART 8:  “Mademoisellle Reisz functions as the only example of a free, independent woman
whose hardiness Edna must emulate if she is to succeed and soar above “tradition and prejudice
...
” p55


ART 9:  “This would seem to explain why married women like Adèle Ratignolle do not see the
oppression which controls them
...
Edna Pontellier, on the other hand, starts to take walks and
distance herself from her surroundings
...
” p337


ART 11:  “the reader has almost necessarily been an enthusiastic participant in Edna’s
mobilization and has been brought, by contrast, to scorn Adele’s essential passivity
...
And yet, of course, born perhaps from Chopin’s instinctive
ambivalence about the potentially co-optive nature of the form in which she works (which demands
its own kind of “realism"), there is a profound irony in Edna's evaluation of Adele
...
” p72-3


ART 14:  “Madame Ratignolle, as I hope to demonstrate in greater detail, is also able to wield a
significant amount of social power and agency,within and beyond her immediate domestic sphere
...
Still, she does
not seem unaware of herself
...
In some cases,Adele is able to extend the very boundaries of her social
identity: if her agency and control are limited to the domestic space, she nonetheless manages to
push the boundaries of that sphere beyond her household
...
” p155

“Not only does Ad?le understand how fictitious the social identities or roles available to her are—
with their fluid, contestable boundaries—she inhabits them in a practical way and thereby modifies
the overarching identity the novel, perhaps a bit playfully, assigns for her: mother-woman
...
As
such, Reisz is barely presented as a worthy alternative to Adele (Edna herself wonders how "she
could have listened to [Reisz's] venom so long" [98])
...
By providing this changing vision of Adele's character, Chopin prompts her readers to move
beyond Adele-as-stereotype, to Adele-as-woman
...
This is a
perfect image of motherhood serenity, suggesting a saintly, capable mother floating within the
angelic institution of motherhood
...
Specifically, Adele is in the
throes of labor and she is anything but serene as she impatiently paces her apartment in a
billowing white peignoir
...
Once again, Adele is dressed in white, yet this time the
angelic Madonna image cannot hold as Adele's assertive identity tears through any gentle
rendering and emerges as a volatile woman, a force of nature that no flowing white negligee can
mask
...
“
p413-14


ART 3:  “He hesitantly broaches the subject, telling the doctor that she is “not like herself,”
offering as an example that “She lets the house- keeping go to the dickens
...
The doctor’s commonsensical observation is
both simple and profound, for it goes against the human tendency to generalize and, especially in

emotionalized social contexts, to obscure differences by essentializing individuals in terms of
presumed group characteristics
...


In the context of the late-nineteenth century and in its implications for the novel, however, Doctor
Mandelet’s assertion that women are not all the same should be understood to refer to more than
superficial differences within the rigid category of Woman
...
That is the implication lying behind Mandelet’s utterance
...
In fact, later in his interview with Edna’s husband the
doctor himself restricts and depersonalizes female reality: “Woman
...
”p43-4


ART 11:  “…she perceives herself to be bound to her “feminine" nature most specifically by her
children, who simultaneously make her seem nothing and everything
...

The woman is legally a child; socially, economically, and philosophically she must be led by an
adult—her husband; and therefore the nursery is an appropriate place to house her
...
The narrator is to be forever imprisoned in childhood, for bidden to "escape" into adulthood
...
” p287


CULT OF TRUE WOMANHOOD:

ART 28:  “Since the public sphere, the ‘‘natural’’ place for men, was dominated by the ‘‘lustful,
amoral, competitive, and ambitious’’ male nature, the only sphere of influence deemed appropriate
for women was the private domain of home (Campbell, 1989a, p
...
This proscription was
designed, so suffrage opponents argued, to protect women from the corruption of public life and to
ensure that the four tenets of the ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood’’—piousness, purity, submissiveness,
and domesticity—were not tainted (Cott, 1987, 1997; Welter, 1966)
...
” p235
“Each of the four virtues of ‘‘womanhood’’ was inextricably linked to ‘’home,’’ ‘‘motherhood,’’ and
guilt for those falling short of the ideal
...
First,
notions of piety bound women to selfless sacrifice, compassion, and charity and effectively
precluded their participation in societal functions deemed impure
...
Like piety, the Cult regarded sexual
purity as an essential female characteristic
...
Purity thus elevated the status of
women’s moral authority and social power, while any social reform threatened this ‘’treasure
...
In contrast
to the imperative that women remain sexually pure until marriage by resisting advances of suitors,
women were expected to submit to their spouses sexually and in all other respects after
matrimony
...

Given her perceived frail, pure, pious nature, according to the Cult, the ideal locus for woman was

the home
...
” p235-6


ART 29:  “If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues which made up
True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the
Republic
...
” p152
“The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her
husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues-piety, purity,
submissiveness and domesticity
...
Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was
ashes
...
” p152
“ Caleb Atwater, Esq
...
”10 And Mrs
...
Without it she is ever restless or unhappy…
...
” p153
“Women were warned not to let their literary or intellectual pursuits take them away from God
...
Mrs
...
”17" p154
“The frequency with which derangement follows loss of virtue suggests the exquisite sensibility of
woman, and the possibility that, in the women's magazines at least, her intellect was geared to her
hymen, not her brain” p156


Becoming/Recognising oneself:

ART 3:  “…when she returns to New Orleans her husband fails to understand that Edna “was
becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with
which to appear before the world” (14, 55)
...
” p43

“She wants not only to recover a secure, original self but to transcend it
...
“ p48


ART 6:  Chopin subtly lowers our vision to see Edna "open her dress at the throat" (p
...
We
are unaware of it at the moment of occurrence, but this innocuous gesture in augurates our
participation in a kind of dramatic striptease
...
Thus, though such details as the facial description, the unbuttoning of
the collar, and Chopin's control of audience vision seem trivial, they in fact initiate one of the
essential motifs of the narrative: the uncovering of Edna's physical self that in turn reveals her
psyche to us
...
” p69


ART 12:  “Just before her suicide, we are told: “She understood now clearly what she had meant
long ago when she said to Adele Ratignolle that she would give up the unessential, but she would
never sacrifice herself for her children(‘p
...
What she is talking about is obviously a concept of
selfhood
...
” p54

“If these lines indicate that Edna's suicide is an escape from the tyranny of her children and the
restrictions on her freedom which they represent, other statements in this last section of the novel
suggest that Edna is actually sacrificing herself for her children, to save them from the shame of a
mother who drifts from one illicit affair to another
...
One can
see them as representing a confusion in Kate Chopin's mind or perhaps as stemming from a desire
to make some gesture towards conventional morality, to provide a ‘cover' for the real motivation
...
But this failure is not universal among all the
female characters in Chopin's novella
...
In doing so
they implicitly demonstrate the options available to women of this time period, options Edna fails to
exercise and sustain
...
To ultimately reject all the available social roles, as
Edna does by the novella's end, is not to live freely but to live chaotically and without meaning, is
to eliminate the very identities Edna would otherwise inhabit and use to represent herself
...
” p154


ART 15:  “In order to escape, she peels off the paper that symbolises the patriarchal tradition
that has crippled the woman’s mind as well as her identity
...
Since, like so many women up to the present day, she has
internalized society's expectations of women, this conflict is felt as a split within herself
...
First, women frequently feel mad because their own reality/feeling is in
conflict with society's expectations
...
” p80
“Second, women who try to express difference (do not submit to patriarchal expectations) are
frequently called “crazy
...
The declaration that she got out "in spite of you and Jane" supports this reading
...
In that case, she is figuratively born in to a new self
...

“ p52


ART 5: “bees and flowers are close to the earth, and the color pink, for the late nineteenth
century, is gender-coded to signify the feminine
...
The ending begins
with the incipient or potential pollination of flower by bee, a fertilization across different species and
outside the realm of the human, a fertilization which is at once impersonal, non-appropriative, and
symbiotic, asexual yet extremely erotic, inevitable, and as ancient and vital as the world before
words
...
" She loosens her long hair and caresses "the fine, firm quality
and texture of her flesh" (p
...
The powerful autoeroticism of the passage may momentarily
distract us from noting that a kind of psychic translocation has occurred
...
37)
...
p63


ART 9:  “It is as if Edna is reborn as a sexual and independent person, like Botticelli’s Venus
coming out of the sea
...
The
touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (Chopin 2000, p
...

Contrary to traditional expectations, it is not a man who awakens her senses and consciousness
...
” p38


ART 11:  “As she is aroused, rounded out by the infusion of physical desire that is an emblem of
her swelling sense of self, she is awakened to the damning imperatives of a sensuality which
repudiates her intellectual, spiritual, and artistic worth as they are defined within the system to
which she subscribes
...
Most
often, the answer has suggested a sexual awakening” p480


“She will try sex with a man she does not care about, thus dissociating the two intoxicants usually
brought together by tradition: love and sex
...
” p483


ART 19:  “The bedstead is the third symbol of the narrator's situation
...
As the nursery imprisons her in a state of childhood, so the bedstead
prevents her from moving "off center" sensually—not merely sexually--in any sort of physical
contact with another human being
...
” p287


The feminine adopting traits of the masculine

ART 5:  “Anti-social, asexual, and non-maternal, Mademoiselle Reisz is an accomplished
musician who, at the expense of intimacy and attachment, pursues a career and achieves the
individuation and autonomy Gilligan defines as masculine
...
Thus, her art, it is universally agreed, has the
stamp of “abiding truth" (A 27)
...

Gambling for high stakes and winning, as her husband does at billiards and on the Stock Market is
but another, intoxicating, forbidden male pleasure
...
”
There is no question that the older woman provides Edna with a more viable model than Adele
Ratignolle, who is, after all, trapped without even knowing it
...
The somewhat reluctant lover, Robert Lebrun,
remains an insubstantial figure and the 'love' scenes are brief, perfunctory and, in my opinion,
deliberately disappointing
...
The "little four

room house" would most likely have been built for that purpose, and, as New Orleanians knew
well, the most common means of inheritance for a woman of color in a placage was the acquisition
of legal right to the house in which she had been maintained (Gehman 38; Martineau, Society
327)
...
” p169
Placage was a recognised legal system in French and Spanish colonies of North America
(including the Caribbean) by which ethnic European men entered into the equivalent of commonlaw marriages with women of colour, of African, Native American and mixed race descent
...
p169
“As Edna Pontellier slowly becomes aware of the hidden sexual lives of the creoles, the gradual
revelation of this secret stratum of creole culture demolishes the fictitious distinction between
“white” creoles and people of colour
...
The assertion of this "lofty chastity" is a truly Bakhtinian moment in which
Chopin appropriates the mythology of the "respectable" and "virtuous" mothers of the Creole race
and gives it, through simple repetition, an ironic inflection
...
” p175
“…the short journey from this exultation to Edna's suicide shows Chopin's realization that Edna has
vastly over romanticized the life of the woman who exists outside the law and whose survival
depends upon her sexual allure
...
” p175


ART 21:  “
...
” p423
“3I3n California, where Gilman lived while writing "TheYellow Wallpaper," mass anxiety about the
‘Yellow Peril” had already yielded such legislation as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
...
White, Christian, American-born intellectuals—novelists,

political scientists, economists, sociologists, crusaders for social reform—not only shared this racial
anxiety but, as John Higham puts it, ‘"blazed the way for ordinary nativists” by giving popular
racism an "intellectual respectability
...
Crusaders warned of “yellow
inundation
...
‘Yellow-belly" and “yellow dog” were common slurs, the former applied to
groups as diverse as the Irish and the Mexicans
...
” p427
“Is the wallpaper, then, the political unconscious of a culture in which an Aryan woman’s
madness,desire,and anger,repressed by the imperatives of “reason, "duty"(p
...
11), are projected onto the “yellow" woman who is, however, also the feared alien?
When the narrator tries to liberate the woman from the wall, is she trying to purge her of her color,
to peel her from the yellow paper, so that she can accept this woman as herself?” p429
“Might we explain the narrator’s pervasive horror of a yellow color and smell that threaten to take
over the “ancestral halls,” "stain[ing] everything it touched,” as the British-American fear of a
takeove rby “aliens”? In a cultural moment when immigrant peoples and African Americans were
being widely caricatured in the popular press through distorted facial and bodily images, might the
“interminable grotesques” (p
...
29), their colors
“repellent, almost revolting”, “Smouldering” and "unclean" (p
...
18), their "new shades of yellow" (p
...
" p433
“In this light, Gilman's wallpaper becomes not only a representation of patriarchy but also the
projection of patriarchal practices onto non-Aryan societies
...
But for Gilman, an educated, Protestant, socialdemocratic Aryan, America explicitly represented the major hope for feminist possibility
...
” p434
“And Gilman’s boast that "TheYellow Wallpaper” convinced S
...
The immigrant “invasion” thus becomes a direct threat
to Gilman’s program for feminist reform
...
At least not within the notion of feminism that the text defines
...
The feminists as suffragists want
something; Edna does not want anything
...
Or she wants
everything
...
” p485-6


ART 14:  “As Steater herself argues, "No matter how much Edna's absolute rejection of her
conventional gender roles resonates with a sense of feminist triumph, it is a type of literary
romanticism that can quickly dead-end in despair once the book-cover is closed: Edna's escape
through death may feel freeing, but ultimately, she offers us no hope" (2007, 415)
...
(And of course, she was
no suicide herself)" (1991, 121)
...
Nor did she ever endorse such methods of escaping patriarchy,
in correspondence or public writings
...
But their
creators remind us—by their own example as well as that of other women and inherent possibilities
within their stories—that such obstacles, though they demanded remarkable strength, creativity,
discipline, could ultimately be overcome
...
” p79


ART 17:  “Jean F
...
” p589


ART 21:  “Even when William Dean Howells reprinted Gilman’s story in 1920 he wrote that it
was “terrible and too wholly dire,” “too terribly good to be printed
...
” p418
...
’” p419
“Fully acknowledging the necessity of the feminist reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper" which I too
have produced and perpetuated for many years, I now wonder whether many of us have repeated
the gesture of the narrator who “will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion"(p
...
Although—or because
—we have read “The Yellow Wallpaper” over and over, we may have stopped short, and our
readings, like the narrator’s, may have reduced the text’s complexity to what we need most: our
own image reflected back to us
...
” p16


Symbolism: 

ART 15:  “…the wallpaper comes to represent the restrictions imposed upon her life through her
roles as a wife and mother” p80

ART 16:  “In fact, the narrator herself answers some of these questions when she attempts to
describe the paper: it "commit[s] every artistic sin": "It is dull enough to confuse the eye in
following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study,and when you follow the
lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide?plunge off at outrageous
angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions" (13)
...
Further, the narrator
clearly comes to embody the wallpaper's aesthetic when she begins creeping as though she, like
its designs, is lame
...
" This, I think, is a key to understanding male and female discourse in the story
...
The conjunction of contradiction—“but”—occurs
56 times in this short space and there are numerous instances of other words—and, so, only,
besides—employed to mean "but
...
” p311


ART 20:  “Unveiled, the yellow wallpaper is a metaphor for women's discourse
...
" Once freed, it
expresses what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores,
suppresses, fears as grotesque, or fails to perceive at all
...
” p62


ART 27:  “Whose discourse does the yellow wallpaper represent? Discourse is not a covering,
like a jacket that fits one sex or the other, or a surface that can be removed or destroyed
...
When the wallpaper
appears finally to be wrestled away from the wall, the narrator is not outside language or beyond
language: she never does arrive at such a space, for language is all we know
...
” p328-9




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