engleski

Madness and the fantastic in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper“ and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea“

The paper will analyse the overlaps in the uses of madness and the fantastic in fin de siècle short stories, with particular focus on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper“ (1892) and with reference to their earlier uses as exemplified by Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story “Green Tea“ (1872). The analysis will point to the ways in which the medical discourse of the late nineteenth century that produces the female protagonist’s madness (‘temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency’) in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is put under question within the text by the progress of her first person narrative. Keeping in mind the specific late nineteenth-century socio-cultural context of the text’s production, defined by Bram Dijkstra as “the male creation of (and many women's compliance with) the principles of the cult of invalidism, the physicians’ encouragement of the cult, and the increasing incidence of madness in women” (1986: 36), the analysis of Gilman’s short story will highlight its use of the fantastic as a strategy that questions the contemporary gendered medical authority and the fin de siècle gender roles. While the medical and social authority in Gilman’s story takes writing to be the cause of the female protagonist’s disorder, the text suggests that writing is the chief means of asserting her autonomy and writing her own subjectivity into existence. The liberating effect of writing and of fantastic visions of the ‘mad woman’ in “The Yellow Wallpaper” will be contrasted with the stultifying effect of the fantastic visions of the male protagonist, vicar Jennings, in Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”. The latter story, narrated from the authoritative point of view of a doctor Hesselius, also connects the cause of the protagonist’s madness – his fantastic visions – with his interest in reading and writing, using both science and metaphysics to reason out the fantastic and expel it. Confronted with the inability to rid himself of the fantastic and what it comes to symbolise – the repressed aspects of his personality that he is trying to drive out – the protagonist in “Green Tea” is driven to suicide. In conclusion, the paper will show how, despite the differing outcomes, in both stories the fantastic opens up the space within the text inside which the protagonist can confront his or her repression and his or her alienated gendered self, using the fantastic in order to voice an implicit rebellion against the contemporary socio- cultural norms.

madness; fantastic; gender; autonomy; narrative strategy

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