Madness and Techniques of the Self in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ＂The Yellow Wallpaper＂

Abstract

Conventionally, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ”The Yellow Wallpaper” is often considered by critics as a representation of a woman's transformation under the patriarchal discourse of madness, especially as a medical case of female postpartum depression and the outcome of its ill treatment. This ”epidemic” reading indicates how female madness has been taken as nothing more than a psychiatric symptom defined by male authorities in the understanding of mental abnormality. However, this negative presupposition on women's abnormal behavior and their unorthodox creations are seriously problematic. Michel Foucault, in a lecture delivered in 1975, also expresses his concern for this academic ”psychiatrization” of abnormality. Therefore, we should take a different stance and critically reflect upon the too-easily-determined cases of mental illness, including those of madness that have been generally taken for granted in the reading of female aberration. Like the spread of rabies, what really circulates in society is not the disease itself, but the interpretations and misinterpretations of it. This article takes a more positive attitude to Gilman's ”The Yellow Wallpaper” and attempts to present the female narrator's techniques of herself in defiance of the patriarchal power-discourse of madness. Next, the article will further use the narrator's desire for companionship as a supplement to the weakness of the Foucaudian paradigm of self-technique. Finally, the article will briefly reflect upon the freedom in madness presented in ”The Yellow Wallpaper” and discuss the dilemma between power, personal freedom, and one's responsibility for others.