Marking Her Territory: Feline Behavior in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

Abstract

In the 1980s, critics aligned Charlotte Perkins Gilman's heroine of The Yel low Wail-Paper (1892) with Charlotte Bronte's wild-haired, brutish Bertha Mason, crawling on all fours in the locked attic of Thornfield Hall. Mary Jacobus argues, The woman on all fours is like Bertha Mason, an embodi ment of the animality of woman unredeemed by (masculine) reason. . . . [B]y the end she is all body, an incarnation not only of hysteria but of male fears about women. Perceiving the narrator as a four-legged beast, Jaco bus goes on to posit that the smooch the narrator leaves while crawling along the wall of her nursery prison is a mark of repression imposed not only on female sexuality but on women's writing; the yellow smell signifies menstruation and female genitalia.1 Akin to Jacobus, Judith Fetterley makes the same transatlantic connection between Gilman's narrator and Bronte's