Confinement and Domesticity: Glancing Women Enslavement in Gilman’s
Works through Panopticon Gaze with Special Emphasis on “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Adisha Manna
Assistant
Professor
Department of
English
Sri Sairam College of Engineering
Anekal, Bengaluru Karnataka, India
Abstract:
This paper is written to
show the pre-eminence of subjugation which hinders the overall development of
women by confining them to gender specific roles through authoritarian surveillance
upon each of their action. A woman is expected to endear fidelity by limiting
herself to domiciliary chores where she is exposed to incessant gazing that
robs her of her own subjectivity and freedom. The subjugation of women has been
viewed through the lens of internment in home – a panopticon cell where each
action of the inmate is gazed scrupulously to close all the doors of
deliverance and emancipation for her. Male gaze occupies a distinctively
regulatory role internalized within women’s lives. This gaze-regulated
ascendancy operates much in the same way as Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon does.
The epistemology of this hegemonic gaze has been established through the works
of Charlotte P Gilman with special emphasis on The Yellow Wallpaper’ and gaze
theory.
Keywords: Confinement, Enslavement, Feminism, Gaze,
Gender, Hegemony, Panopticon, Patriarchy
Dominance of one over another is preponderant to social
existence. Upon this supremacy of hegemony, stands the most contested and
debated root of human existence called Gender. Gender inequality has always echoed itself through the
relegation of women to domestic chores which has been preponderant to their
role and social position. Variegated social
institutions have given shape to the stringency of limiting human capabilities
and on the altar of this stands a woman striving and re-striving to prove her
abilities outside domiciliary errands. But the stringency of our hegemonic
society is such that a woman cannot break the shackles of confinement. This
has been veritably questioned and averted by women themselves at various
junctures of history. Yet, domestic confinement could not be subverted. It
continues to be a matter of grievous contention even now. Standing on such
constraining pedestals, the question arises whether women are really unshackled
in the presumed safe harbor called home? In her book, To
Harold and Beyond: The Life and Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne J.
Lane discusses how women are inevitably "locked into their homes." It
is said that these "rigid" limits placed on women are
"oppressive or suffocating restrictions" (Lane, 117). As a result,
one aspect of socially imposed restriction is represented by the male figure in
The Yellow Wallpaper, and every single male character in the narrative
assertively displays this domination. Women, meanwhile, are firmly restricted
to household environments. The story, however, addresses a number of topics
relevant to the sufferings of nineteenth-century women, particularly their
limitations due to restrictive conventional gender roles. It is not only about
improving one facet of women's lives. Gilman claimed that she had created the
story to prevent people from going insane because she had experienced a similar
type of nervous collapse after a rest treatment to the one the narrator was prescribed.
Thus, it is possible to argue that this tale is about the entrapment and escape
of women.
As Gilman herself writes in The
Home, Its Work and Influence (1903) “to
the woman-the thousands upon thousands of women…the home need be neither a
prison, a workhouse, nor a consuming fire” (Gilman, 3). Gilman persistently
accentuates the issue of being chained to the domestic chores in majority of
her works so much so that in Herland
she envisioned a world free from the drudgery of household plodding. Analyzing
Gilman’s, The Yellow Wallpaper through a feminist lens reveals that her
imaginative world defies articulation within the confines of male-dominated
language and ideologies. The oppressive nature of sexist gender roles symbolized
by the narrator's confinement in a room that mirrors a prison becomes evident
in the wallpaper’s pattern. The visible, outer design represents the societal
bars that imprison women, constructed by patriarchal norms. Beneath this, the
sub-pattern symbolizes a woman’s body struggling to break free, serving as a
metaphor for all women bound by the restrictive rules and expectations imposed
by patriarchal structures. Such confinement is no less than enslavement and at
this juncture the panopticon comes into play. Jeremy Bentham’s
eighteenth-century Panopticon view of prison in Panopticon Or the Inspection House (1791) was of an annular menagerie built around a central
watchtower. The construction is planned with spatial unities in which seeing
and being seen continues incessantly. It allows the guard to eye upon the
inmates and thus control their behavior. This structure as pointed by Foucault in
Discipline and Punish (1975) is “a
cruel, ingenious cage” (Foucault, 205) just like the harbors that shackle
women. A careful scrutiny of the
domestic environment will open the door of captivity, a place where one is
robbed of his/her freedom. When we speak about privacy at home, we talk of an
idiosyncratic liberation. This in fact propelled Gilman to raise the question
“In the home who has any privacy?” (Gilman, 36) in The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903). Privacy means the decent
seclusion of an individual, the right to do what one likes unwatched,
uncriticized, unhindered. Gilman notes “Neither father, mother, nor child has
this right at home” (Gilman, 38). Women stand at the very pinnacle of such a
constraint with meagre subjectivity. To explore this vicinity further, I choose
to focus upon the following works of Gilman: Herland (1915), and most
importantly The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892).
Androcentric ideology propagates literature which has been traditionally
considered to be great works of art. In such works, to the male protagonists
when the female characters play a role, they often stand as marginal and
subordinate, and are represented as complementary or subservient. Gilman ousts
this customary practice in her well-acclaimed work Herland (1903). She brings to the altar, the most debated political
issues of her time which bred suffering, corruption, illness along with the
persistent subjection of women. Herland
is a feminist utopian novel in which Gilman envisages a plain inhabited only by
women and deliberately gives the role of narration to a man to satirize the
stringent society of her times. Three friends namely Van, Jeff and Terry go
forth in exploring the female inhabited continent. What grips most of our
attention is that the men fall under the inexorable surveillance of women from
the very onset of their expedition in Herland. Before they could tread any
further, the inhabitants of the land discover them, which is followed by their
imprisonment. Gilman here dethrones male domination by taking a firm stand against
the age-old ritual of domestic imprisonment of women. Herland here symbolizes
the panopticon structure that is designed to descry the inmates and in turn
control them. What intrigues my attention here is the reversal of roles, the
women take up the role of panopticon guards and the men are cornered as
captivated inmates. When Terry exclaims “A man wants a home of his own, with
his wife and family in it” (Gilman, 98). Gilman veritably ridicules this
travesty which is evident in Ellador’s reply to Terry’s misogynistic statement
“Staying in it? All the time?...Not imprisoned surely!”(Gilman, 82). A woman is
confined to the role of a house-servant and this confinement further extends
itself to the role of familial gaze where she is caught up in an unbreakable
chain of seeing and being seen. Gilman subverts this domestic milieu by
fabricating a world where men are relegated, imprisoned and robbed of their
subjectivity through continuous observation and internment.
Women have often been perceived as hysterical and weak but the veritable
genesis of such nervous exhaustion is rarely understood. Conventional gender
roles are rooted in the doctrine of biological essentialism, which asserts that
an individual's identity in terms of femininity or masculinity is biologically
predetermined. In essence, it claims that a woman is inherently female by
virtue of biology, rather than being shaped by social constructs. This notion
holds significant weight, as it serves as a justification for patriarchal
systems to perpetuate the belief that women are inherently the ‘weaker sex’.
Thus, what appears to be a biological fact is, in reality, a facade that masks
deeper ideological discrimination. When S. Weir Mitchell diagnosed Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, he dictated her suffering to be a stretch of ‘nervous
prostration’. He prescribed a remedy often opted by the nineteenth century
physicians known as the Rest Cure treatment and asserted it to be the
recuperative regimen to treat Gilman’s mental health. His diagnosis inculcated
a forceful upshot of locking Gilman away in his Philadelphia Sanitarium for a
month. The term ‘diagnosis’ is strategically employed to embody the
authoritative voice of the male-dominated medical establishment, which seeks to
reduce women’s complex psychological struggles to mere physical symptoms. This
terminology not only signifies institutional power but also elevates the
logical, practical, and empirical over the emotional or experiential. It’s this
very voice that dismisses the narrator’s belief that the house is haunted as
trivial and superstitious, systematically undermining the gravity of women’s
mental health by framing it through a narrow, reductionist lens. This in turn
resulted in Gilman’s mind being chained by the patriarchal roots of barring the
intellect and restricting any other exploration in a constructive field which
did no good to her psyche rather took it to the worse of all fettles. Furthermore, she was
cautioned by her physician to refrain from engaging in any intellectual
pursuits, including writing or painting. Within this narrative, Gilman
underscores the profound psychological trauma of such treatment, illustrating
how enforced isolation from quotidian existence can precipitate a descent into
madness, particularly for women (Korb, 284). Gilman penned her worsening apperception in The Yellow Wallpaper speaking of her
gradual descent into madness fueled by her husband and physician.
I intend on exploring how Gilman’s neurasthenia was the reverberated
culmination of a Gaze nexus. My argument lays its feet on the realm of
surveillance which extends to the level of paranoia. As pointed by Foucault in Discipline and Punishment (1975) that
gaze becomes the perfect medium for spreading domination. Gaze manifests power
which spreads over the minutest aspects of life perpetuating itself not by
means of external force but by means of internal penetration into the psychic
pores.
In addition, the narrator employs every element of the short story to
underscore the theme of entrapment. The setting, for example, reinforces this
motif. Although the house is depicted as ‘the most beautiful place’, the
narrator’s description is laced with irony. She characterizes it as a haunted
and quite isolated house that is set well back from the road, surrounded by
hedges, walls, and lockable gates. She senses underlying legal troubles and
concludes that residing there would undoubtedly tempt fate. The narrator’s tone
evokes the plight of a prisoner lamenting their confinement within a penal
institution. The “domestic sphere” she inhabits mirrors a jail, with its
apparatus resembling “children’s gymnastic equipment” like “rings and things”
but serving as “paraphernalia of confinement” (Gilbert & Gubar, 60). To
her, it feels as stifling and torturous as a prison. John, in this scenario,
assumes the role of the warden, with his wife meticulously concealing every
aspect of her life. The yellow wallpaper further exacerbates her sense of
disorientation and irritation with its “outrageous angles” (Gilman, 8). It’s
painted in a “repellent… revolting… unclean yellow” (Gilman, 8), a hue that,
according to her perception, is loathed by children due to their craving for
freedom. The color yellow is notably evocative; it’s known to make infants cry
and is associated with decay, illness, and envy. This color could symbolize the
deteriorating marriage that confines the woman to domesticity. The figure
imprisoned behind the paper becomes a fixation for the narrator, driving her
towards madness. In other words, the yellow wallpaper, with its imprisoned
figure, could be a reflection of the woman herself, trapped within the
constraints of an antiquated house and societal norms, with her husband acting
as her captor. The room where Gilman having been infantilized was forced to
repose by her husband symbolizes a panopticon structure where she being trapped
is seen to fight a continuous battle of emancipation. Being restricted and
confined to one room, Gilman was not empowered to pursue her interests. Her
post-partum depression turned to a paranoic nervous depression being subjected
to the hegemonic gaze of her husband which robbed her of her subjecthood and
she persistently fought to define and redefine herself. Under this patriarchal
gaze of restrictions, Gilman seeks liberation in studying the varied patterns
of the yellow wallpaper. She meticulously gazed at the wallpaper which led
Gilman to engender her feminine double in it, a woman who represented her
repressed self. She envisioned a faint feminine figure in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) who gradually came to shape the more
Gilman gazed at the wallpaper as she says “It is the same woman, I know, for
she is always creeping” (Gilman, 44). The patterns of the yellow wallpaper to
Gilman replicated a reverie of prison within which the woman was locked up just
like Gilman was locked up in the room. This is a clear manifestation of power,
in Power/Knowledge (1980) Michel Foucault points that this “power
reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts
itself into their actions and attitudes” (Foucault, 30). Foucault in his Discipline and Punish (1975) theorizes
the modes of power through Panopticon gaze which involves an authoritative
structure patterned after Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century Panopticon view
of prison in Panopticon Or the Inspection
House (1791) which culminated a
devious method of inquisitive and incessant gaze that perpetuated to frenzy.
This Panopticon gaze constructs a nexus between the Observer and the Observed.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, I find John,
Gilman and the envisaged woman all tied up in this nexus of seeing and being
seen. Evidently seen in the lines written by Gilman “There are things in that
paper that nobody knows but me” (Gilman, 28) which unfolds Gilman’s willful
gazing but unlike the hegemonic grounds of the panopticon gaze, Gilman observed
only to liberate. The more she spectacles the feminine repressed figure, the
more she realized her own helplessness and the dire need of liberation.
Gilman’s room is much like the Panopticon structure of coercive confinement
trapped within which the narrator of The
Yellow Wallpaper strives to emancipate the woman she envisioned. This
dissension of nervous tumult flows to a denouement where she crawls and creeps
over the room tearing off the wallpaper hysterically, trying to liberate the
engendered woman locked up in the prison like patterns. Ascending dominance of
confinement (Gaze) thus leads to a state of grave paranoia and insanity - “To
be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one
has chosen it” (Gilman, 67) writes Gilman herself in in The Man-made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911)
The panopticon menagerie was designed to ensure downright discipline and
order. The captured inmates like the madmen, convicts, workers, school children
were expected to exhibit an indoctrinated behavior post their internment. My
point of contention here is that such imprisonment can never bear efficacious
results. After prolonged servitude, a mind that has been alienated from social
affiliation for years can never miraculously bring in success to the
“pedagogical experiments” (Foucault, 204) of which Foucault speaks in Discipline and Punish (1975). Similarly, Gilman points in The Man-made World: Or, Our Androcentric
Culture (1911):“the man-made family is a despotism” (Gilman, 17). What
grips over my attention is Gilman’s repeated accentuation of familial and
domestic captivity which runs parallel with Foucauldian philosophy of
punishment. The lines from Women and
Economics (1898) “Her restricted impression, her confinement to the four
walls of the home, have done great execution…the denial of freedom to act”
(Gilman, 65) highlights that house arrest is no less than imprisonment. Under
the menacing gaze of the dominant and omnipresent kinsfolk, a woman has to
“adjust, disadjust and readjust her mental focus a thousand times a day; not
only to things, but to actions; not only to actions, but to persons; and so, to
live at all, she must develop a kind of mind that does not object to discord” -
The Home: Its Work and Influence (Gilman,
160).
In light of the aforementioned discussions, the unnamed female
protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper embarks on a dual journey—first, toward
achieving a sense of selfhood, situating herself within the confines of
patriarchy, and subsequently, challenging the constructs, norms, and values
imposed by this male-dominated society in an attempt to escape its confines.
Her anonymity amplifies the narrative's universality, representing not a
singular woman in a fixed context, but the collective plight of women subjected
to oppression across various societies and eras. The pervasive presence of eyes
throughout the room evokes the concept of the ‘male gaze’, a representation of
patriarchal dominance. This idea underscores the dynamic in which men, as the
agents of patriarchal society, are the observers, while women are relegated to
the status of objects to be observed. The act of looking grants control and
power to the observers, whereas those being looked at are rendered passive,
objectified, and powerless, much like figures displayed in a window for
scrutiny. This notion of the male gaze parallels Michel Foucault’s theory of
the Panopticon. Foucault’s analysis of institutional structures factories,
prisons, schools reveal how they are designed to ensure maximum visibility,
leading to the internalization of discipline by those within. The subject,
believing they are under constant surveillance, adjusts their behavior
accordingly, even when they may not actually be watched. Consequently,
individuals unconsciously embody both the role of oppressor and oppressed,
policing themselves within the confines of a surveillance-based power
structure.
The Yellow Wallpaper stands as a seminal precursor to feminist literature, carving out a path
for the feminist movement to evolve, with the narrative’s conclusion offering a
glimpse of hope. The narrator transitions from passive confinement to active
subversion, as demonstrated by her crawling and creeping around the room,
symbolically overcoming her greatest obstacle: her patriarchal husband. This
shift signifies the feminist movement’s progression from its nascent stages to
a more assertive phase. The narrator, in her apparent descent into madness,
opts for perceived insanity over a stifled life of patriarchal submission,
signifying her liberation from the ideological chains of masculine control.
The portrayal of insanity in the final scene carries both affirmative
and critical connotations. Positively, it can be viewed as an act of
emancipation, a rejection of patriarchal hegemony in favor of self-realization.
As Simone de Beauvoir posits, in a male-constructed society that deems women
inferior, women can dismantle this imposed inferiority by rejecting male
supremacy (Beauvoir, 674). By negating the very values patriarchy upholds,
women assert their independence and autonomy. Similarly, Hélène Cixous calls for
women to embrace their freedom, rejecting the idealization of male dependence.
She argues that strength lies in self-reliance, and rather than perceiving
themselves as "castrated" (Bray, 57) without men, women should
cultivate their own freedom and autonomy.
On the other hand, the conclusion can be seen as a cautionary tale,
suggesting that those who resist patriarchal norms may be driven to madness.
However, as earlier noted, this madness is preferable to the silent
acquiescence demanded by patriarchy. Cixous contends that in order to uncover
her true self, a woman must endure the alienation imposed by a male-dominated
society.
In summary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
serves less as a mere fictional tale and more as a feminist manifesto, a
political declaration of women’s independence. It seeks to prevent women from
descending into madness under patriarchal oppression, offering them a means to
break free from the suffocating grip of male dominance. The story powerfully
denounces the misconceptions surrounding women and presents a path out of the
labyrinth of patriarchal subjugation.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper can
be interpreted as a feminist proclamation of liberation. The narrative has been
critically examined through a feminist lens, highlighting its critique of male
dominance and the systemic control exerted over women. While earlier
interpretations suggested that the narrator-wife is ultimately destroyed by the
psychological effects of her confinement, Michel Foucault's theories on Jeremy
Bentham's Panopticon offer a deeper understanding of her experience. In this
framework, the yellow wallpaper symbolizes an omnipresent surveillance, much
like the watchtower in the Panopticon. This pervasive scrutiny induces a state
of paranoia, driving the wife into schizophrenia. Paradoxically, it is through
this perceived madness that she breaks free from the patriarchal constructs of
‘acceptable’ feminine behavior, thereby reclaiming a form of autonomy.
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