THE YELLOW HYBRIDS: GENDER AND GENRE IN GILMAN’SWALLPAPER

Abstract

Born in the nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mikhail M. Bakhtin became well-known thinkers toward the end of the twentieth. Recently labeled the leading theorist of 'first wave' feminism,1 Gilman also was a writer and one of the earliest sociologists in the United States.2 Russian Bakhtin, most famous as the promoter of dialogics, is also known as a philosopher who theorized on the need for a sociological poetics of literature.3 hybrid careers of Gilman and Bakhtin prompt both the study of other hybrids and the combination of the two thinkers in a study. This article approaches some of the many hybrids of Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper, which include gender and genre, such as the hybrid femininity and sexuality of the protagonist in a text that is both realist and gothic. Accordingly, I make use of a hybrid critical perspective that is both feminist and dialogical.4 Since the present volume is dedicated to the short story, I will start by clarifying my approach to the notion of with reference to Gilman and Bakhtin.5Perhaps because There is no single consistent use of the term 'genre', scholars disagree on the genre status of Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper: (Michaels); autobiography (Rogers); and one could add 'literature of hysteria' hysteria (Diamond), among others.6 If we take into account all these views, The Yellow Wallpaper shares the generic cannibalism of the Bakhtinian novel. Its classification as diary enhances its prosaic and novelistic features, as one of the units into which the novelistic whole usually breaks down ... [such as] everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc).7 This kind of prosaic writing has been regarded as the starting point of women's literature.8 As a dialogical feminist, I find it disappointing that for Bakhtin, the preferred literary exponent of dialogics was not really the novel but only the novels of male authors. In this article I attempt to expand Bakhtin's scope by examining the dialogics of a short story that was authored by a woman.Bakhtin's obsession with the male-authored novel in the midpoint of his career prevented him from identifying in other genres the characteristics he attributed only to novels. Other thinkers such as Henry James or Virginia Woolf have celebrated the democratic, modern, experimental, and hybrid character of the short story.9 Nowadays, the short story cycle has been labeled the clearest antecedent of the novel.10 Furthermore, if Bakhtin's interest in the reader's role led him to focus on the novel, Poe assured us that the short story needs an active reader,11 and, for Charles E. May, the short story gives way to a more intimate form of communication between author and reader.12 As I argue here, Gilman's short story demands an active responsive reader that is able to produce a dialogical reading. For instance, one of the features of Bakhtin's dialogic/novelistic hero is his ability not to coincide with himself.13 In The Yellow Wallpaper, the depressed female protagonist has already been altered by her illness and is susceptible to more alterations. Hence Gilman's text takes part in a dialogic criticism of the supposed stability of identity. Considering all this, and given that Gilman referred to The Yellow Wallpaper as her little book,14 one can strategically accept that it can still be a short story. Such a strategic definition allows me to study the possibility of dialogical short stories and to evaluate the (sub)genre of this one in particular: is it a realist short story, a gothic one, or both?15 Interestingly, for Bakhtin's circle, genres are epistemologies or forms of thought. As ways of thinking, genres may contribute to reinforce the social system, as happens with the epic, or to destabilize and criticize it, as happens with the novel. Finally, if The Yellow Wallpaper were both dialogic and feminist enough, we would have to attribute Gilman the creation of a new genre or form of thought: the dialogical feminist short story. …