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Confinement and Domesticity: Glancing Women Enslavement in Gilman’s Works through Panopticon Gaze with Special Emphasis on “The Yellow Wallpaper”

 


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.

Works Cited

Bak, John S. (1994): “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper’”. Studies in Short Fiction.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1953): The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape.

Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon Or the Inspection House. Dublin:T. Payne, 1791.

Bray, Abigail (2004): Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 1991; Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York : Pantheon Books, 1980.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 1984.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall Paper. United States, Small, Maynard, 1901.

---. The Home: Its Work and Influence. Charlton Company, 1910

---. Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

---. Man-Made World: Or Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton, 1911.

---. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. University of California Press, 1998.

Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Korb, Rena (1997): An Overview of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper Short Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale.