Poetics of Space in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story ‘Yellow Wallpaper’
Abstract
Marina S. Berezhnaya (Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation)
The article deals with the poetics of space, system of images including the image of the yellow wallpaper in the story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story became an unconventional example and innovative writing approach of using an artistic ‘optics’ for describing women’s role and position within patriarchal society at the turn of XIX-XX centuries. The space of the room can be perceived as some disciplinary practice (panopticon) endowed with peculiar units of control and suppression (bars, wallpaper pattern, nailed bed, etc.) as opposed to images, retrieved from out of the depth of the protagonist’s unconsciousness. The interrelatedness of material outward environment and individual mind reveals the evolution of deeply buried and hidden imagery. Though artistic categories such as smell, color, shape (pattern) Gilman render an invaluable insight into reception and interpretation of the key image of the novel.
Key words: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, yellow wallpaper, female madness, poetics of space, feminism, patriarchal society.
DOI 10.23683/1995-0640-2017-4-12-21
Quote:
Berezhnaya, M. S. (2017). Poetics of Space in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story ‘Yellow Wallpaper’. Proceedings of Southern federal university. Philology. 4, 12‒21.
References
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Ammons E. (ed) ‘Writing Silence: The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Conflicting Stories: Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 34-43.
Bak J. Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Studies in Short Fiction, 1994, vol. 31, Issue 1, pp. 39-46.
Collins Dictionary [elektronnуy slovar’] URL: http://www.collinsdictionary. com/dictionary/english/creep (accessed 06.04.2017).
Davison C. Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in the ‘Yellow Wallpaper’. Woman’s Studies, 2004, vol. 33, pp. 47-75.
Gilbert S. and Gubar S. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984.
Gilman Ch. The Yellow Wallpaper, Sweden: Wisehouse Classics, 2016, e-book. (First Published 1892 in ‘The New England Magazine’ Boston: Small, Maynard&Co, pp.647-656).
Hume B. Managing Madness in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’. Studies in American Fiction, 2002, vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 3-20.
Shumaker C. Realism, Reform, and the Audience: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Unreadable Wallpaper. Arizona Quaterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture and Theory, 1991, vol.47, Issue 1, pp. 81-93.
Treichler P. Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1984, vol. 3, Issue 1-2, pp. 61–77.
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