Reproducing Feminism in "Jasmine" and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Abstract

Reproducing Feminism in Jasmine and "The YellowWallpaper" Asha Nadkarni Charlotte Perkins Oilman's 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," has been an urtext of American feminism since its 1973 republication by the Feminist Press. Nonetheless, celebrations of Oilman's naturalist story too often ignore the extent to which the gender oppression it depicts is raced and classed. Published over a hundred years later, Bharati Mukher jee's 1989 novel Jasmine would seem to address the very issues that Gilman ignores.1 Instead of being driven mad by patriarchy, Jasmine's illegal immi grant protagonist escapes from India to the United States where she is allowed to take control of her destiny and "become an American." 2 While Gilman's tale of a privileged white woman's descent into madness may serve as an allegory for many Anglo-American Second Wave feminists, Jasmine seemingly offers a happier narrative of feminist development—one that does not end in madness and one that is ostensibly available to all.3 As anyone who has read Jasmine will realize, however, its happy ending is brought about through a largely uncritical narrative of assimilation. Just as Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" depends on a race- and class-specific account of patriarchal oppression, Jasmine models a form of US exception alism (as the protagonist's westward trajectory suggests) with an exclu sionary feminist twist; although Jasmine is successful in freeing herself of Feminist Studies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 218 Asha Nadkarm 219 the marks of difference that would trouble her accession into the United States, her experience does not apply to most immigrant women. Both works, moreover, display a distinctly racial logic. I will use the concept of "eugenic feminism" to describe this logic and argue that a coher ent feminist subjectivity in both "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Jasmine can only be forged by rejecting all racial and ethnic difference.4 For Gilman, the problem of creating a feminist self is a potentially maddening process of freeing that self from her color, one that is too easily betrayed by the messiness of biological and cultural reproduction itself. Likewise, to "become American" in Mukherjee's novel means employing a purifying process similar to that upon which Oilman's story turns. As such, eugenic feminism shapes an identity in negative terms, repeatedly returning to raced and classed others to define them as precisely what must be abjected in order for a "pure" feminist subject to emerge. In this essay I read Jasmine as a successor to Gilman's classic feminist tale in order to argue that even a "multicultural" feminist progress narrative can contain a eugenic impulse. Originally appearing in the New England Magazine in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is Gilman's semi-autobiographical story of taking Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's "rest cure" to alleviate her depression after the birth of her daugh ter.5 The story charts the narrator's growing madness and preoccupation with the wallpaper of her sickroom and ends with her identification with the woman she sees "crawling" (55) behind the "bars" (52) of the prison like pattern. Her ability to free the woman behind the wallpaper is made possible by her descent into a madness that by the end of the story is almost entirely complete. Early readings by Elaine Hedges, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny, and Jean Kennard take up the story as a universal text of women's struggles against the patriarchal structures that constrict them, casting the narrator as a heroine who chooses to become mad rather than assume her proper place in the patriarchal order.6 Forbid den to write, the narrator's main task becomes one of interpretation — of trying to read the wallpaper—and it is precisely this process of interpreta tion that becomes both maddening and ultimately liberating. If the narra tor, as the universal feminist subject, can free herself through writing and interpretation, so too can US academic feminists engaged in similar tasks. 220 Asha Nadkarm In her groundbreaking analysis of race in "The Yellow Wallpaper" (also published in this journal), Susan Lanser takes issue with precisely this claim: she argues that such universalist readings create a feminist...