Fantasy and the Real in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Han’s The Vegetarian: From a Lacanian Perspective

Abstract

This study explores the turbulent trials of the protagonists in both “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and The Vegetarian. The protagonists of both works demarcate the violence and irrationality of the textual world they inhabit. Although divided by two centuries, the two stories portray strikingly similar central themes. Both protagonists have repressed painful childhood experiences. When these traumatic memories try to resurface over what Jacques Lacan calls the Symbolic Order, or the social structure of that era, both female characters have the uncanny feeling, or the source of the Real, and the converse is equally true. Their husbands, who lack sympathy, think of their familiar yet estranged wives as chilling ghosts, realizing that they do not know anything about their wives’ true nature. In a sense, it can be said that these uncanny experiences and images of the ‘once unremarkable couples’ are derived from unbridgeable gap between reality and primordial satisfaction which the women pursue unconsciously. Interestingly, this process of subversion takes place passively to begin with. However, the intervention of the Real abruptly reveals the hidden cracks of the hegemonic world; and the aspect of the fantasy and the Real. (Kyungpook National University)