Nature and Culture in the American Gothic 9786062617011

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Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

Ioana BACIU Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

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Ioana BACIU

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Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

Ioana BACIU

Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

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Ioana BACIU

Editat de Pro Universitaria SRL, editură cu prestigiu recunoscut. Editura Pro Universitaria este acreditată CNCS în domeniul Științelor Umaniste și CNATDCU (lista A2-Panel 4) în domeniul Științelor Sociale. Copyright © 2023, Editura Pro Universitaria Toate drepturile asupra prezentei ediții aparțin Editurii Pro Universitaria. Nicio parte din acest volum (fragment sau componentă grafică) nu poate fi copiată fără acordul scris al Editurii Pro Universitaria. Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României BACIU, IOANA Nature and culture in the American gothic / Ioana Baciu. Bucureşti: Pro Universitaria, 2023 Conţine bibliografie ISBN 978-606-26-1701-1 82.09 Referenți științifici: Conf. univ. dr. Dana BĂDULESCU, Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași Conf. univ. dr. Radu ANDRIESCU, Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași

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Redacție: tel.: 0732.320.664 e-mail: [email protected] Editura Pro Universitaria

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Elena Onea Liviu Crăciun Vlad Pătruța

Librăria UJmag: tel.: 0733.673.555; 021.312.22.21 e-mail: [email protected] ujmag.ro Ujmag.ro

Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 7 I. Masculinity and Hysteria .................................................................................................... 23 I.1. Hysterical Narrative: Dora as Gothic Heroine ....................................................................23 I.2. Hysterical Man ..................................................................................................................................25 I.3. Medical Masculinities in Turn of the Century Gothic ......................................................30 I.4. Decadent Man, Effeminate Man: Roderick Usher and Masculinity ...........................42 I.5. Hysterical Man in Poe: “The Cask of Amontillado” ...........................................................49 I.6. “The Turn of the Screw” as a Hysterical Narrative ...........................................................53 II. “Now Why Should That Man Have Fainted?” Hysterical Narrative, Woman, and Man in “The Yellow Wallpaper”............................................................ 67 II.1. Hysterical Narrative in “The Yellow Wallpaper” .............................................................67 II.2. Woman as Nature in “The Yellow Wallpaper’: Re-signifying Writing as an Act of Nature” .....................................................................................................................83 II.3. Hysterical Woman, Hysterical Man in “The Yellow Wallpaper” ...............................97 II.4. The Medicalization of the Woman’s Body in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: From “Bodilessness” of the Cultural Body to the Hysteric’s Body ....................... 100 II.5. The Medicalization of Space in “The Yellow Wallpaper”........................................... 113 II.6. Hysterical Narrative: Wandering Meaning, Wandering Uterus ............................. 125 III. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic: Marriage is a Lottery .................................. 139 III.1. From Princess to Housewife: Walt Disney’s Snow White and Domestic Gothic ................................................................................................................ 142 III.2. American Myth and Gothic Princesses in Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil”........................................................................................................... 147 III.3. The Gothic Bride: “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” ................................................... 164 III.4. Gothic Wives and Mothers in “The Mouse”.................................................................... 178 III.5. The Gothic Child: “Charles” ................................................................................................... 197 Conclusions............................................................................................................................... 207 Bibliography............................................................................................................................. 211

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Nature and Culture in the American Gothic

Introduction

Arguments for a book based on the Nature/Culture divide can easily be reduced to its main tenet: the persistence of patriarchal culture’s strategies to cast femininity into the realm of Nature and thus eliminate it from Culture by Othering it. Philosopher Judith Butler phrases the concern accurately in Gender Trouble: “The binary relation between culture and nature promotes a relationship of hierarchy in which culture “freely” imposes meaning on nature, and, hence, renders it into an “Other” to be appropriated to its own limitless uses, safeguarding the reality of the signifier and the structure of signification on the model of domination.” (50) The American Gothic texts which were chosen as relevant for the completion of such an endeavor offered an unique opportunity: united by genre, but pinpointing different stages in the genre’s development, they reunite literary celebrities and lesser-known authors, male and female writers. It is, unsurprisingly, the latter who are the lesser-known, and among these, the one who was also a housewife, Shirley Jackson, only enjoys stardom in her own subcategory genre, the domestic gothic. It is not, however, the “celebrity status” of either the selected authors or of the genre that the present book concerns itself with. As a research sample claiming its stakes from cultural and gender studies, whether the American gothic is categorized as a minor genre1 or not, its cultural prestige, is irrelevant to the goal of this – its aim is to showcase the social shifts in the sex-gender system at various moments in time. As Teresa Goddu (the author of Gothic America) has shown, the American gothic is not merely escapist fiction, but it offers an X-ray into the nation’s hidden ailments: the more popular a genre is, the richer its potential to unearth the far-ranging concerns of its time and age.

1 For the evolution of scholarly interest in the American gothic, see Jerrold E. Hogle’s article,

in which he remarks that not much attention was paid to the genre up until Leslie Fiedler’s 1963 study, which identifies American literature itself as gothic (The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic 3).

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Ellen Moers coins the phrase “female gothic” in 1976, defining it as any gothic text produced by a woman (in Literary Women), Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith offer a comprehensive survey of what the term has come to mean from the 1970s onwards (The Female Gothic. New Directions), while Roberta Rubenstein reads Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) as a sample of female gothic in which the traditional gothic house of the nineteenth century (Rubenstein)2, cyphered male, is recast as feminine, as a reflection of deviant mother-daughter relationship. Despite these twentieth century developments and the canonical male writers’ influence, such as Poe, the origins of the genre are female. Intriguing as the new female gothic is, I maintain that canonical texts are still relevant to the gender implications of hysterical narrative, and perhaps even more so, as the gothic commences as defined by the female (Anne Radcliffe), is appropriated by the masculine (Poe), and then returns to its female origins (Jackson). In the first chapter, I will use Elaine Showalter’s definition of the term and subsequent analysis of Freud’s discursive practice to show that not only “cut and dried”, established narratives can be gothic, but also texts that do not openly declare themselves/are perceived as such. Furthermore, even texts that are already interpreted as gothic “vertically”, at the level of imagery can still have their Gothicism explored “horizontally”, at the level of “the writing subject and its addressee”, according to the Kristevan model (qtd in Cancalon 103).The latter I will attempt to evince in the readings of James and Gilman’s texts as being constricted by/escaping the authorial confines of their male engenderers, applying Foucalt’s concepts of discursivity and author function to tease out the narrative’s inherent gothicism. Following David Punter’s statement that “there are very few actual literary texts which are “Gothic”; that the Gothic is more to do with particular moments, tropes, repeated motifs that can be found scattered, or disseminated, through the modern western literary tradition” (xviii), I argue that these generic features of ambiguity and mutability are the very ones that allow for the genre’s versatility, which also incorporates the excess and hidability of the hysteric’s speech; the more replete with the possibility of hiding, the more gothic/hysterical a text. The classic eighteenth century gothic text resorts to a topography distinct in anxiety-producing vastness and inscrutability which poses a threat to the vulnerable and the exposed, but it can become such a space itself: the hysteric uses the narrative to hide herself (and, as I will claim in the sections about male hysterics, himself) According to Roberta Rubenstein and Richard Pascal (Walking Alone Together: Family Monsters in 'The Haunting of Hill House'). The latter also identifies the classic gothic theme of escape in Jackson’s fiction (“Pascal, "Farther than Samarkand": The Escape Theme in Shirley Jackson's "The Tooth"). 2

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inside the texts of her/his own making, creating a narrative of excess in which he/she has ample room to hide, to preserve its identity which is constructed as “Other” by the hegemonic patriarchal superscript. Dora and Freud’s are competing narratives, each with their own discursive strategies: the patient produces speech, the therapist cuts to the essence of that speech; the anonymous Gilman narrator writes and John her husband overrides her opinions; James’s governess produces a complete manuscript, but it passes through many hands and is seen by several eyes before it is narrated by a man, who already has already introduced her as an unrealible source whose point of view is apriorically flawed; Roderick Usher’s hysteria contaminates the narrator, the reader and the house itself. The gothic heroine who paradoxically “triumphs” in death (her own or someone else’s – Miles’ in the case of James’s novella) or madness (Gilman) also needs to assert herself “horizontally”, by subverting the male-controlled narrative. Hers will be framed by the man’s, in the case of both James and Gilman. Hysteria’s definition as “excessive femininity” is, again, a male-issued definition, equally plural as the many shapes of the gothic. What does it mean to be “excessively” feminine? What are femininity’s boundaries and who defines them? If the emancipated bike-riding, suffrage-supporting New Women of the turn of the century were decried as “masculine” and hysterical women as overly feminine, it follows that any variation from the theory of the separate spheres3, however slight, would then promptly be rejected as improper; hysteria, thus, just as the gothic, functions as an umbrella-term for all that is socially forbidden. Fred Botting defines the gothic as the “writing of excess” (Gothic 1); the male will attempt to control and “cure” the woman/narrative of that excess, by reducing the female speaking Subject to the role of patient, thus delegitimizing her speech, even if the “cure” results in her obliteration. In Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle, Andrew Smith’s discussion of late nineteenth century degeneration theory in relation to the formation of imperial masculinity inevitably leads towards readings of seminal Victorian gothic texts as connected to the issue of class, in fact, of the emerging middles class, represented by paragorns of trustworthy masculinity such as the doctor.4 Smith’s contention is that Gothic fiction in which the doctor himself is gothicized is destabilizing for The theory of separate spheres. For details, see Deborah Rotman’s article (“Separate Spheres? Beyond the Dichotomies of Domesticity”). 4 See Galia Benziman’s 2006 article (“Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure”), Gale M. Temple’s 2014 analysis on the medical science of the day on Hawthorne’s short stories (“'Affrighted at the eager enjoyment': Hawthorne, Nymphomania, and Medical Manhood”). 3

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the notion of manhood and nationhood, which would indicate a shift in perception from recent gothic scholarship that focuses on the place of the woman as Other to theories of masculinity (Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle). If American gothic is said to be purged of the “class war” and replaced by the “sex war”, in the esteemed opinion of Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel 63), it is not, however, free of anxieties about masculinity: the decadent culture deplored by Max Nordau in Europe has its expression, in America, in the unrestrained compulsion to buy (Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain). Socially denounced vices such as alcohol, leading to increased criminality in cities, are sources of degeneracy, and representatives of the American gothic such as Poe are further feminized in their dalliances with the consciousness-altering substances.5 Chapter I begins with the definitions of hysterical narrative and the connections with the gothic heroine, taking Freud’s Dora case as the guiding character, drawing on the scholarly work of Shoshana Felman, Elaine Showalter and Michelle Massé who established parallels between the gothic mode and the language of hysteria. Just as the terms that define the gothic can be vague, so is the definition of hysteria, a blanket-term for an array of symptoms medicalized as a pathology with no other etiology besides the feminine gender itself. The euphemism contained in the phrase “feminine excess” is, of course, sexuality, identified as repressed by James’s governess in the psychoanalytic readings of Edna Kenton and Edmund Wilson and properly diagnosed, according to the diagnoses of the day and age, by Stanley Renner (“"Red hair, very red, close-curling": Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the "Ghosts" in The Turn of the Screw”). As a merger of two narratives that compete with each other within the same text, a hegemonically dominant one (Connell and Messerschmid), and a repressed, marginal one, both the gothic and the hysterical triumph in their exposure of hidden social illnesses. The hysterical narrative I focus on here, the prologue to Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), emerges in the American consciousness of last decade of the nineteenth century as reflective of a Zeitgeist fraught with fin-de-siècle anxiety made manifest in the revival of the Gothic genre percolated by Darwinian, homosexual and imperialistic fears.6 5 For a discussion of Poe’s stance towards the temperance movement, see David S. Reynolds’

article from Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views edition (“Poe’s Art of Transformation:“The Cask of Amontillado” in Its Cultural Context”). 6 See the many critical interpretations of Dracula, for instance, as “the enemy from the East”, sexual predator that targets the Empire’s “pure women” (Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra) in order to plunge it into degeneracy and decadence. For a comprehensive survey of the

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The well-known fact that the gothic gets its name from a Germanic tribe of the many that migrated to Europe following the dissolution of the Roman Empire is a historical event which is still retold as a catastrophe for civilization. The collapse of the Roman empire under the invasion of “hordes of barbarians” is rendered through the Western eyes of the generations which are the result of that same “colonization in reverse” of an exploitative empire with a policy of domination and conquest which reached its chronological and geographical limits. The terms that are used, “barbaric” and “fall” of the “decadent” Empire, which translated to the fall of civilization, present the genre as “the symbolic site of a culture’s discursive struggle to define and claim possession of the civilized, and to abject, or throw off, what is seen as other to that civilized self.” (Punter 5). In certain instances, however, the gothic re-gothicizes that which is already othered. Freud’s findings in the Dora case, published in 1905 under the title “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, are both distinctively modern and gothic: the genre which developed and evolved from late eighteenth century fears of the past which comes back to haunt one is revived a hundred years later as the return of the repressed. In his discussion of the Dora case, Freud notes that perversion is a term relative to the cultural boundaries of social acceptability, the pure, unconscious drive unchecked by sublimation: “When someone has become coarse and clearly perverse, we can more correctly say that he has remained so, he represents a state of arrested development.” (A Case… 42). Whichever guises it assumes, the “barbaric” always finds a way of returning to haunt the “civilized”, whether it be in the form of Nature, Woman or the Colonial Other; it only does so, however, to reveal those aspects of the social or individual body that sublimation has failed to morph into respectability. Following the definition of hysterical narrative and the connections between the language of psychoanalysis and masculine domination,7 Chapter I also includes hysterical definitions of masculinity as they appear in the late nineteenth century narrative and the connections between the language of psychoanalysis and masculine domination. I read the effeminate critical history, see Jean Paul Riquelme’s excellent annotated 2002 edition (Dracula (Case Studies in Contemporary Fiction)). For a useful discussion of the Darwinian influence on the turn of the century gothic, see Kelly Hurley’s 1996 book (The Gothic Body. Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle). 7 I use the term as it is defined by Pierre Bourdieu in the eponymous book (Masculine Domination): “an effect of what I call symbolic violence, a gentle violence imperceptible and invisible even to its victims. I exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling.” (1-2)

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men of Decadence, foreshadowed by Poe’s Montresor and Roderick Usher, as male hysterics, especially due to their hyper-sensitivity and irrational behaviour. Starting with the exploration of hysterical narrative defined as fragmentary, unreliable and ultimately controlled by the male, I then take Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” as a representative example, focusing on the story’s Prologue and its discursive strategies in further filtering the governess’ manuscript through several male gazes8.The equivalence between the discursive modes of the gothic and hysterical is based on an incursion into the narrative strategies of “The Turn of the Screw”. The story’s prologue, in particular, is useful in identifying the strategies by which the governess’ hysterical narrative is again, by a process of male re-appropriation, in fact co-opted by the plurality of voices represented by Douglas and the narrative “I”, retraceable to James himself. The story thus appears to be an edited hysterical narrative; a male-curated, male-approved version of what a hysterical narrative should be like, a revised manuscript having been subjected to the scrutiny and gaze of several editors until embedded in a frame narrative which, like Gilman’s room/page, consigns the hysteric to a closed environment. Like Flaubert’s exploitation of the figure of the hysteric, James’s hysterical governess, despite being given the opportunity of relaying her own account, does so by resorting to an inescapably male cultural frame. My incursion into hysterical narrative was engendered, in the beginning of the first chapter, by outlining the similarities between the gothic and the hysterical, taking Freud’s Dora as my guiding heroine – the purpose was to show that the typically Gothic narrative of entrapment is to be found in texts that, though not Gothic per se, but belonging to the field of “medical discourse” by dint of their authority, can still trap a secondary, unwilling, female script within its textual architecture. Consequently, the Doras scrutinized, censored and kept prisoner in gothic narratives controlled and curated by the male characters’ “medical gaze” have more easily yielded their charge. Hysterical narrative, however, births itself not solely by virtue of its labyrinthine style and fragmentariness, but also through its narrative perspective. The authoritative voice of the psychoanalyst is to order and retrace Dora’s hysterical ramblings, whose purpose is to hide her trauma, the trigger of her disease; underneath, the patient’s story remains untold, rendered useless by the therapist’s accusation of transference, but the seasoned reader of gothic narratives recognizes in this the villain’s attempt to cover his tracks. 8 The role of the male gaze in constructing femininity in film was described by Laura Mulvey

in her seminal 1975 essay (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”).

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Hysterical narrators, unreliable by the very nature of their disease, break with the tradition of the “female malady’s” ascription to the feminine. The male, and not only the female, hysteric, I argue, is an emblematic figure of the gothic, blurring the distinctions between what is appropriate culturally and culture’s Other, Woman. The example of Gustave Flaubert as a self-coined hysteric of substance is meant to emphasize that the male-generated medical and cultural discourses are allowed to change the meaning of signifiers such as “hysteric” in the nineteenth century’s system signification because they are part of the hegemonic ideology that shapes it. It is useful, in a capitalist logic, for Flaubert to identify himself with his bored bourgeois housewife as she is his creation; by doing so, Flaubert also performs a certain variant of the female gender that allows to construct his social image as eccentric writer – thus, he never truly exists the realm of cultural prestige while masquerading an actual liminal social persona at no peril; his stance is hysterical, but never Gothic, since his purpose to parody an unsavory reality, not enact it. Just like Dora supplied the prototype for the unacknowledged Gothic heroine buried under the cyphers of male medical speech, Flaubert’s pretentious and patronizing “I am Madame Bovary” does not, in fact, stand for the explosion of gender binaries into one genderless psyche in which the writer is capable of empathizing with the feminine to the point of fusion; it is, plainly, the man of culture’s reappropriation of a feminine medical construct, that of the hysteric, in a circular process in which masculine culture cannibalizes itself, consuming its own images of the feminine. Chapter II is an exploration of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a hysterical narrative, drawing largely from the works of Foucault, and, on occasion, Derrida and Žižek. Inclusion of a female-authored narrative of entrapment seemed, by now, necessary as a foil to the inherently limiting re-appropriations of hysterical discourses set by Freud, Flaubert and James. The Gothicism of Gilman’s tale also resides in its apparent inescapability from the patriarchal confines of language. I argue that the medical discourse touted as authoritative is nothing but what Foucault describes as construct of power-knowledge, influencing the unequal dynamic of the two competing narratives of John the physician/husband and Jane the patient/wife. These Nature/Culture binaries are not only reversed, but altogether exploded by the woman’s escape out of the page – in Derridean terms, she embodies the “floating pure signifier”, the wandering uterus that corresponds to Plato’s definition of hysteria. John-the-physician administers Plato’s pharmakon poorly to the unreadable woman/text, whose “wandering uterus” I read as a metaphor for the meaning’s meandering, shifting nature in the story. After tracing the Nature/Culture distinctions, I focus my attention primarily on the last scene, which has the double function of reversing the power balance 13

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by turning John into the unlikely male hysteric and to embody the Derridean trace in the organic, chthonic yellow smooch that resignifies the male act of writing as feminine. The sections on gothic medicine and gothic masculinities from chapter one are applied to Gilman’s text to examine the relationship between Jane’s Foucauldian “docile body” and the disciplining enacted by her physician husband. I consequently trace the parallels between the traditional specular pleasure of the male which turns the woman’s body into a canvas for his own desire and her transformation into imago into the performance of femininity through hysteria in the photographic documentation of patients undergone by Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière. The physicians in turn of the century texts such as Dracula perform old and new techniques of power-knowledge to adapt to outdated and modern types of femininity and masculinity; what is aberrant femininity, i.e. hysteria, in Charcot and Freud, is vampiric womanhood in Stoker. Complicit in her own hysterization, woman willingly performs her gender in its pathologically enhanced guise; if this disease is indeed a “male invention”, like Didi-Huberman argues, it is one meant to reinforce the discursive regimes of power through the medical gaze as embodied by photography, another form of specular pleasure harnessed to the formation of the cultural myth of the hysteric. Embodiments of the nature/culture divide, the hysteric and her doctor are complicit in the perpetuation of gender binaries. If hysteria is a mere “mask of femininity”, one of its many performances, it is the most accurate to contrast the physician’s civilizing role in society: excessive femininity becomes a foil to restrained masculinity. The issue of woman’s “bodilessness” reveals that not only the “hysteric”, but the woman herself is a fantasy of male power-knowledge: in certain instances, i.e. legally and socially, her presence is permissible as long as it is curated by the male gaze; in the case of the medical gaze, the woman is allowed to exhibit her body, but only as teaching material to advance science. In the 2004 film adaptation of Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp’s character, played by Reese Witherspoon, tells her suitor Rawdon Crawley, soon to become her husband, that “Two men only I will let in my bedroom: my husband and the doctor.”9. Though the sentence itself is not to be found in the pages of the novel, the process of filmic selection and adaptation to a different audience to that which would “read between the lines” of an ample novel, such as Thackeray’s (Vanity Fair), dots the I’s and crosses the T’s. What is indirect in the pages of the book is delivered to the spectators with the precision of an arrow aiming at a bull’s eye: Becky is unwilling to 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVRYVI0BKXc (Witherspoon)

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compromise her respectability by sleeping with Rawdon before marriage, for that would potentially have disastrous consequences for her future, as such a gesture would not guarantee the security of her social status as a married woman, i.e. Crawley’s also wedding, and not only bedding her. The embeddedness of women’s sexuality and their reputation/ respectability means that Becky needs to send a very clear message: her body does and does not belong to herself; it belongs to the society that she desires to be a part of and thus forces her to play by its rules; it is only to be seen and put on display for the benefit of those representatives of authority vetted by the discursive regimes of power, one through the institution of marriage, the other through the correspondingly prestigious medical establishment. As an aspiring member of the upper class, her body and the way she uses it must abide by strict moral and social codes enforced by the sanctioned enforcers of discipline and punishment and by allowing them and them only into the private space of her bedchamber (an area gendered feminine), she is self-disciplining by presenting a docile body.10 As a typical social climber whose only chance at respectability is to “marry up”, Becky is acutely aware of the disadvantages of her birth in a classist world and intent upon correcting them. She astutely reads the codes of the world she wishes to be part of and takes the necessary measures. An anti-Pamela or an antiClarissa, but not exactly a Shamela, either, Thackeray’s realistic heroine opposes the image of the sentimental ingénue by presenting an empowered stance compared to that of the eternal victim and fleer of man’s unwanted advances. Becky’s sexuality, as she first views it, is not a curse that makes her the target of predatory men’s abuses, but a charm meant to be used to her advantage. Her statement about husbands and doctors serves the purpose of simplifying attitudes towards women’s behaviour in the nineteenth century by expressing them in more practical terms: morality, simply put, is embedded in the woman’s body, and the doctor and husband are the regulators of that morality, the corresponding avatars of the executioner, herald of the Law, in the civilized world. What the husband and physician have in common is not only access to the private sphere of womanhood – for, as Foucault has shown, the This is clearly apparent in her dishonor when she allows a man who is not her husband into her room, one whom she was trying to seduce for money. Believing that she had indeed been unfaithful to her, Rawdon leaves her and Becky is forced to survive in Belgium by winning at cards; by the end of the novel, she embodies the literary trope of the fallen woman she had striven so hard to evade. Even for an experienced gambler such as Becky, seduction is a tricky game with potentially catastrophic consequences – one can just as easily lose all by a risky move as win prodigiously by a series of lucky streaks. Seduction is a tricky game for even the most experienced of players. 10

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disciplining of bodies is no long administered through pain, nor is it enacted publicly – but a private form of surveillance, a domestic panopticon (which foreshadows the same theme in Jackson) in which the privileged project and gather information off of her body. They both embody morality and the Law: when Rawdon returns and finds Becky with Steyne, he immediately reads that as a transgression and a violation of his power over her body; like the physician’s, his gaze also assesses and issues sentences. The doctor’s alleged objective gaze also measures and diagnoses; the observation of a woman’s reproductive apparatus, her pregnancies or venereal diseases are a way of determining whether she is a virgin or not, whether she has been faithful to her husband or not, having, in a nut-shell, an important role to play in her destiny. If, in Gilman’s short story, John fills both positions, it is because his authority over her body is complete; furthermore, is her brother is also a physician, also “of high standing”, the reification of the woman’s body as mere object being passed from the authority of her paternal lineage to that of her spouse describes a perfect circle encapsulating the woman, restricting her freedom. Chapter III is an incursion into the 1950s domestic gothic of Shirley Jackson’s short fiction. Moving from the strategies of female oppression from the turn of the century, the gender binaries are found firmly in place, but the female character’s attitude is different, as she resists her assigned role in the sex-gender system. In “The Mouse”, “Charles”, “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” and “The Possibility of Evil”, the spinster, bride, wife and child become the gothicized counterparts of the Disney fantasy of the perfect home in which labour is gendered and the social construct of the housewife, relayed to the isolated space of the home, is created. In section I of Chapter III I try to outline the ideological premises of separate gender roles inside and outside the home as observed in Disney’s 1937 adaptation of the classic Grimm brothers fairy-tale, reading it as an early anticipation of the housewife myth in mid-century American culture. Still mindful of the recent trauma of the depression era, the animation repurposes domestic work as pleasurable on both sides of the gender divide; the boundaries between nature and culture are temporarily blurred as men and women share in the creation of a comfortable home by each excelling at their assigned, genderspecific, tasks: nature is woman’s helper, as the animals respond to the young girl’s nurturing instinct, while the men perform labour-intensive skilled work in the mine, a metaphor for the factory. In the following chapter I will elaborate on Shirley Jackson’s reinterpretation of well-known fairy tale tropes to articulate the inherent Gothicism of any story beleaguered with aspirations of domestic perfection and magical, unrealistic bliss, especially if the “happily ever after” is in direct connection to an elusive American 16

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dream. In Jackson’s stories, small-town princesses and evil witches might as well be the same; the victim child is preternaturally experienced for his age; Prince Charming could well be a serial killer, a fate devoutly to be wished for by the unconsoled new bride who married despite all odds pointing to the contrary and the relationship between the individual and the collective is just as tenuous as in old Salem. The connections between the individual and the community in Jackson’s fiction can be traced to the Puritan theme in gothic American literature, especially to the works of Hawthorne, where sin and the doctrine of innate depravity contaminate the individual’s sense of self, leading her to believe in her superiority over her community. In the next three subchapters, I continue the exploration of Jackson’s short fiction with texts which have received (with the exception of “Charles”), comparatively little critical attention. The gothic spinster, bride and wife represent avatars of “bad” femininity which reclaim their origins from the witch. The following short story explores the psychological mechanisms and frail identity that prompts an aging unmarried woman to marry someone who could be another “James Harris” demon lover type but is, in fact, much closer to the grim reality of a serial killer. As many gothic heroines in texts belonging to female gothic have done, the moment of their identity formation as Subject coincides with their descent into madness or death, as in the case of “The Yellow Wallpaper”; the gothic bride’s strategy is to exact control over her narrative by actively choosing an outcome that might involve her own death. Is she survives the honeymoon, the gothic bride can easily become the gothic wife, who dismantles expectations of domesticity and motherhood by obliterating the symbol of female fertility – a small pregnant mouse that rampages through the couple’s freshly painted kitchen. Finally, the third and last section of my exploration of Jackson’s fiction will end with the figure of the gothic child. A character rife with potential for the projection of the parents’ desire, the child resists objectification much in the way that the female Subject does. The male misreading of the female body/text is copied by the mother’s inability to correctly interpret the disruptive. gothic nature of her own child, on whom she had projected a fantasy of her own making. In my reading of “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”, I use Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, Guy Debord’s concept of the commodification of spectacle and the body as merchandise and Mulvey’s “male gaze” to unpack the main character’s self-hysterization/self-gothicization. Jackson’s iconic “demon lover” briefly resurfaces not as a spinster’s fantasy before her descent into madness, but as her willfully-chosen husband. The tale of the woman who marries someone who might very well be a serial killer is another variant of the female protagonist whose life purpose has always 17

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revolved around a male figure of authority – that of the father, now of the husband, and cannot find meaning except by deferring to a third. The objectification and self-objectification of women, as well as their treatment as merchandize, is significant in the story, as well as the symbolic patterns of numbers, such as the repetition of number three. Through the symbolic consumption of her sensational story by the community, Mrs. Smith temporarily acquires celebrity status and, therefore, relevance. She fashions herself into an object to be consumed, making sure that she also picks a husband who consumes her completely and, in killing her, is certain not to leave any trace of her behind - the serial-killer. Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism was useful here, especially in establishing the difference between value and riches. Mrs. Smith’s exchange value makes her a mere commodity to be traded inside the community, her value being based on the market rules of demand and offer. As she herself does not seem to place a lot of value on her life, she consequently chooses the lowest bidder. “The Possibility of Evil” is remarkable due to its re-assessment of women’s access to history and male power in the American tradition as defined by competing types of writing, whose symbols, alongside biblical and fairy-tale imagery, I discuss as length. As “The Lottery” singles out a woman for sacrifice, in this small-town story the community’s the matriarchal figure of Mrs. Strangeworth, who believes the town belongs to her because of her family’s contribution to its prosperity from its very foundation, gives her the write to interfere in ordinary people’s lives by sending them horrible anonymous letters which plant suspicion and mistrust in their minds. Using Biblical and fairy tale imagery, Jackson fashions her protagonist into the snake of temptation embedded into a small-town setting of corrupt Eden. In asserting female power, Miss Strangeworth cannot fully inherit the legacy of her forefathers, resorting to the strategy of covert violence in influencing her fellow dwellers’ lives as a means to retrieve a sense of a lost glamour and status belonging to a bygone age. As the ideal of womanhood is still relayed to the symbolic sphere of Nature, her place is the fallen garden from which her proverbial roses continue to emanate their forbidden scent over the town. Darryl Hattenhauer remarks upon the connection between the theme of consumption in Jackson’s short fiction, as many of her stories place the woman at the center of commodities and their exchange (like in the absurd tale “My Life With William H. Macy”); the housewives who shop, barter, mend are always present in the shopping sphere, in the grocer’s shop, or, if they are not, their image circulates in their communities’ gossip of it; they are “subjects circulating in an absurd economy” (79). In “The Possibility of Evil”, as Hattenhauer points out, “the protagonist does not circulate. Rather, 18

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her letters circulate for her.” (Shirley Jackson's American Gothic 80),so that the exchange between the individual and the community is still present. “The Mouse” is more chilling than the previous stories, perhaps, due to its apparent innocuousness, but it preserves the theme of men’s writing versus female writing and women’s spaces versus male spaces in the gothic house which was the main topic of discussion in Gilman. Featuring a Gothic housewife who is involved in a silent battle of wills with her husband over their procreative future, Mrs. Malkin eloquently conveys her rejection of motherhood by single-handedly killing the pregnant mouse that has invaded their kitchen and then putting it up for display in her husband’s study, which she has also painted a very dark, unpleasant, mousy grey. Nature and Culture are clearly at odds in this gothic story as the husband continues to display the privileges of culture, colonizing the space of their new apartment with a room entirely dedicated to his allegedly intellectual work, as he pressures his wife into joining his fantasy of having a child, the “Donald Emmett Malkin” of his heart’s desire. Mrs. Malkin’s performance of femininity, as she embodies several avatars of the woman vetted by the sex-gender system, is used to subvert the husband’s expectations as she ultimately refuses to be reduced to her biological reproductive function. In “Charles”, it is the embracing, instead of the rejection, of motherhood where domestic gothic rears its ugly head and Nature and Culture compete. An anonymous, generic housewife sends her son Laurie off to kindergarten without suspecting that he will invent another little boy, named Charles, whose misadventures and naughtiness in school will soon become the talk of the household. The mother is, of course, oblivious to the gendered behavior she herself stamps on the little boy, glorying in his newly-found independence as the ultimate proof that he will grow to be “a true man”. The woman’s internalized vision of masculinity is mocked, by Jackson, in the subtle parallel she creates between young Laurie’s swaggering manner and the macho tropes of the western. When the mother finally attends the PTA meaning where the teacher discloses, much to the wife’s dismay, that there is no Charles in Laurie’s class, she understands the extent of her own blindness. Ironically, it is her other tasks as a housewife which prevent her from being enlightened any sooner, as taking care of Laurie’s baby sister, who has a cold, is the reason why she misses the first meeting. Paired with the infantilization of the husband and the metaphor of surveillance in detecting (and judging) the mother who is responsible for the shameful “secret of Charles” – i.e. failing to properly educate the little boy, Jackson creates yet another story where the Puritan distinction between the public and the private is blurred. As the image of the man who sets out into the world to make it his own, Laurie is the projection of his mother’s desire of a “perfect child”, which, according to the 19

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cultural codes of the day and age, is the man-to-be, exposed as a male cultural construct appropriated by the female. If the ideal of masculinity itself, however, is flawed, by defining men in relation to the violence and disruption they can cause, like “Charles” does in his class, the mother’s projection of her desire on her son cannot be but gothic. The gothic house also has a special place in this paper, and is consequently discussed in all three chapters, as the site where the battle of feminine Nature versus masculine Culture rages and the space where civilization yet again collapses under the invasion of the barbaric. Whether it be a flat, castle or manor, the house is the staple locus suspectus of the Gothic mode11, the negotiating ground where nature and culture intersect. As any man-made construction, a symbol of culture and of man’s conquering of the wilderness, the gothic manor’s final overtaking by unchecked nature is a transparent parallel to the unbridled returned of the repressed. The literal colonization of nature, followed by its symbolic, cultural displacement in anthropocentric space of the house entails the observance of rules and hierarchies pertaining to patriarchy. The head of the house is still the man, and those living “under his roof”, that he traditionally provides for and protects, owe him obedience. The Victorian “Angel of the House” is no exception to this rule, as the wife and offspring are subordinate to the authority of the patriarch, regardless of the dominion that the wife might hold over the affairs, expenses and upkeep of the household. In most Gothic narratives, the house always withholds its secrets from the female newcomer (perceived as an intruder into the layered centuries of generational patriarchal consolidation), usually a new wife who gradually becomes wise and wary of the dangers of this new and unfamiliar home. The danger to the heroine is thus extreme in these Bluebeard narratives12, since, after leaving the father’s home, there is no cultural space for the new bride to inhabit but her husband’s. The Victorian home in Jane Eyre, with the infamous attic make famous by Gilbert and Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination) at the height of second wave feminism, is such a space, if not Gothic per se, culturally dominated by the male and helping the male erase past errors in repressing them in hidden recesses; the Earnshaw family stead becomes is continuing site of To the point of attaining a life of their own. See Dennis R. Perry’s and Carl H. Sederholm’s study on the influence of Roderick Usher’s sentient house on literaturean film (Poe, "The House of Usher," and American Gothic). 12 The connection between female curiosity, the Bluebeard myth and the gothic house is explored by Anne Williams in the third chapter on her book on the poetics of gothic (“The House of Bluebeard: Gothic Engineering” 38). 11

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patriarchal oppression for women and children while Hareton, then Heathcliff, are in charge. Even when the new wife is given the house keys by either the husband or the housekeeper (who is usually also the keeper of the husband’s secrets), she is either tested (like in the Bluebeard story, where the key to the forbidden room magically obeys the master by remaining stained with blood) or her destruction by the house is attempted (Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House). The house as the setting of a happy and thriving home with the wife at its center is acceptable as long as it bends fully to the will of the master, being one of the many symbolic sites of male power. The curiosity of women is censored and backfires in accordance with Pandora’s myth – a trespasser in matters that pertain to culture, the woman must contend with the “naturally” ascribed functions. Consequently, as a dweller in her husband’s property, the Victorian wife can do little to stamp her own individuality on it, as she is ultimately replaceable, potentially one of many “Bluebeard wives” in passing on the lord’s property, while the mansion and the children continue to bear his name. As a representative of nature, the woman’s biology is pruned into abeyance to societal norms – the house thus becomes the respectable environment for the inclusion in the realm of culture. As far as the rebellion of the female against artificially imposed servitude to the biological is concerned, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is symptomatic of male-dominated spaces rejection of the feminine. Incorporating autobiographical elements of the author’s own post-partum depression, the protagonist’s unravelling madness occurs within the oppressive walls of the “ancestral hall” that her husband, John the physician, rents for the summer. In her excellent 2014 article “‘Affrighted at the Eager Enjoyment’: Hawthorne, Nymphomania, and Medical Manhood”, Dale M. Temple evinces the clear-cut boundaries drawn by nineteenth century physicians in projecting their own fear of the feminine onto women’s bodies through the medicalization of the latter. At the end of the century, psychoanalysis, this anatomy of the psyche in the sense of the penetration of the doctor’s razor-sharp reason into the passive woman’s mind, is already a symbolic act of violation of the hysterical patient’s privacy – but the patriarchal intrusion under the guise of professional begins earlier and is accordingly reflected in literature. Temple’s article focuses on Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, linking nineteenth century discourses on nymphomania and alcoholism to underlying collective anxieties about protecting a healthy, vigorous, and, above all, reasoning masculinity (a symbol and pillar of expanding imperialism) against the degenerative dangers represented by the drunkard, on the one hand, and the neurasthenic, hysterical, madwoman (also a pillar of society, but only in the guise of a mentally healthy mother and wife), 21

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on the other. The physician’s ideal masculinity (well-spoken, intelligent, mannered, poised – in a word, cultured) is situated at the opposite pole of the drunkard’s effeminate weakness in succumbing to the emasculating (and non-productive) effects of alcohol. Since, as Michel Foucault shows in his study on the history of sexuality, the bourgeois pursuit of pleasure was regulated by the upper classes according to the norms of emerging capitalism, pleasure is viewed in relation to its intrinsic market value. Good pleasures, those that allow the individual to fully contribute his labour on the market, are distinct from those that render the working man a useless cog in the capitalist machine. The very appearance of the concept of “sexuality”, the plethora of taxonomies and denominations dedicated to the detailed description and categorization of behaviours into healthy and deviant ones, is centered around their symbolic connection to power. The clear-cut difference between Nature and Culture in the gothic is encapsulated by the house as a space of masculine domination; this can be challenged, however, by the female characters who inhabit it, especially if they embrace the “madwoman in the attic” persona, as Gilman’s protagonist ultimately does: with every female character that brings “nature” into the house, male dominance is destabilized. The place of nature in the realm of economic production is evidently inscribed in cultural production; thus, woman’s role is to preserve gender roles as they are. As a symbol of male capital and male wealth, the woman is the symbolic keeper of that fortune, and any change in that status would potentially upset the social and economic order: “Karl Marx argued that under capitalism man is further alienated from the natural world. […] The crumbling manor house and separation from an ancestral past reflected the dissolution of a way of life, and the genre appealed to the human sense of longing for return to a natural world that offered a sense of permanence.” (Foy 293) In Gilman, the gothic house is stifling to the woman because it is the materialization of her oppression, but it can become the battleground for her assertion as subject. At the end of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane has turned the masculine house into a hysteric’s body with a wandering uterus, exploding the aberrant brain/womb anatomy of the building; she has “brought nature” into the space of culture, the more so as the “ancestral hall” functions as a mental asylum/hospital, all masculine-controlled spaces. Shirley Jackson’s characters reprise the victory of the feminine in the gothic house, sometimes ambivalently (like in “The Possibility of Evil”), mimicking behaviours of male violence, sometimes incontestably (Mrs. Malkin in “The Mouse”). In any case, the Nature/Culture binary is constantly challenged by the female characters of the woman-authored texts, the tracing of which is the underlying premise of the present book. 22

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I. Masculinity and Hysteria

I.1. Hysterical Narrative: Dora as Gothic Heroine In her 1993 essay “On Hysterical Narrative”, Elaine Showalter takes issue with the phrase having become “the waste basket term of literary criticism, applied to a wide and diffuse range of textual techniques, and, most alarmingly, taken as a synonym for women's writing and the woman's novel.” (24) Defined as fragmentary, incoherent and elusive, pre-dating Freud (Max Simon Nordau had approached the topic with Teutonic levels of commitment in his 1892 Degeneration, a detailed study of decadent literature and its harmful cultural consequences), hysterical narrative needs to be ordered by the psychoanalyst into a cohesive, unitary narrative that, once recognized by the patient, will prove that psychoanalysis is, indeed, the “talking cure”: In Freud's view, the nature of the story, rather than the predilections of the story-teller, dictated the form. As he explained, hysterics were unable to tell a complete, "smooth and exact" story about themselves. They left out, distorted and rearranged information because of sexual repression. […] Thus, the therapist's role was to suggest, edit, or construct such a narrative for the patient. Freud was confident that, no matter how elusive and enigmatic the hysteric's story, the analyst could reconstruct a logical, scientific, and complete narrative. (25-26)

Freud’s language when describing his method has also been amply psychoanalyzed by literary criticism13; Showalter notes his metaphors of psychoanalysis as the “key” to unlock the patient’s resisting mysteries, as in the Dora case, a form of archaeology as the doctor “digs” for buried repressed memories or military victory as the patient is divested of her See the 1985 collection edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (In Dora’s Case: Hysteria, Femininity, Feminism) on the topic. Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, Teresa de Lauretis, Elaine Showalter, Juliet Mitchell are just a few of the most well-known names. 13

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weapons (26), metaphors which all have in common the reification of the female subject, her transformation into the object of the analyst’s male desire. The Dora case itself, as Showalter argues, is no more than Freud’s own hysterical narrative from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who projects his own neuroses onto the voiceless patient, who does not have the means to present her side of the story: But if Freud is an unreliable narrator, a very different plot emerges. In this case, Dora is a victim of Freud's unconscious erotic feelings about her that affected his need to dominate and control her. Dora has no voice in Freud's text; we hear nothing of her direct dialog, and her historical and Jewish identity are both suppressed. He never understands her story at all and simply tries to bully her into accepting his version of events. His interpretations of her problem reflect his own obsessions with masturbation, adultery, and homosexuality. Thus the "hysterical narrative" reflects Freud's hysteria rather than Dora's. She never becomes a subject, only the object of Freud's narrative. (27)

Showalter’s analysis goes on to retrace the corpus of feminist scholarship that put the Dora case as a literary text side by side with nineteenth century female literature, among which Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” features prominently as an example of hysterical narrative and of the gothic heroine as representative of such a text. (30-31) If the Dora case can, indeed, be read as a Gothic work in which the heroine attempts to flee the villain’s (i.e. Freud’s) guiles to entrap her, as Michelle Massé posits (qtd. Sholwater 31), can the male narrators of Gothic fiction not also be read as hysterics? Michelle Massé’s, in her 1990 article “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night”, which traces the parallels between Freud’s Dora and the Gothic heroine (679), insists on the female protagonist’s existence outside the patriarchal forms of hegemonic male discourse: the woman is not believed, is infantilized, her desires are belittled and overwritten, her entire life, being, in fact, a form of repetition compulsion, as she has to relive in her marriage the patriarchal oppression that her own father had subjected her to. As the figures of father and husband merge, the “marital Gothic” that the author speaks of can be seen as a form of punishment for the character not having obeyed “the no of the father.” One of Dora’s hysterical symptoms is the loss of her voice; the doctor’s rest-cure in Gilman’s famous story involves refraining from writing and all kinds of mental activity. This double silencing – first a subconscious, self-inflicted one; the second, arbitrarily imposed – underscores the versatility of the hysterical subject, as it both hides and reveals – it hides from the prying gaze of the medical “other” who is aggressive in his intrusion (madness can be, in a sense, liberating), and it reveals the patient’s true self, her identity as displayed through her own 24

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words, in her own narrative. Hysteria can be, from Dora’s point of view, a subterfuge that allows her to “keep her mystery” and remain inviolable; it is a means of self-defense; it is also a means by which she is no longer the passive object of the doctor’s constructed narrative, one in which he “had not only to fill in the gaps in the hysteric's own story, but also to overcome her resistance to his narrative interpretations. In order for the therapy to work, the hysteric had to accept and believe the analyst's story.” (26) Dora is a failed case, as she interrupts her sessions with Freud (which he attributed to transference), which means that she refuses to “accept and believe” his interpretation. By simply leaving the analyst’s narrative, Dora resists it and becomes a free subject. Hysteria can be seen, thus, as a space of liberation for the Gothic heroine as she offers her own side of the story, forbidden, as that may be, by the clinical authorities of the day: Basing their theories on the famous case studies in which the hysteric is invariably a woman and the doctor is always a man, literary critics then assume an equation between "hysteria" and "femininity." When a male analyst/narrator is retelling the story of a woman, however, the label of "hysteria" has significant relations to power and credibility. How can Dora's narrative be seen as plausible and coherent when Freud is so determined to reject it and when it is told in a culture where women's plots are so limited? (“On Hysterical Narrative” 31) If it’s the hysteric’s body that cruelly betrays her and she has to resort to writing as a form as externalizing her disease, the “tell-tale” hearts, “vulture eyes”, black cats of Poe’s fiction betray the same mental affliction, adequately betrayed, in turn, by fragmentary discourse and Poe’s famously unreliable prose. A discussion of “male hysterics” in literature seems to be long overdue, if not to merely redress the balance between the male/female hysterical narratives. I.2. Hysterical Man As a student and translator into the German14 of Martin Charcot, having visited his famous clinic at the Salpêtrière, Freud was aware of the Not a very good one, according to Georges Didi Huberman (1982); Freud added notes and altered the material that he was translating in 1892-1894. He was also allegedly disappointed with his Parisian experience, as he was expecting more praise and encouragement from his tutor, who instead demolished his medical preconceptions. During his time in Paris, Freud performed necropsies of hysterics and attended lectures, but his faith in the accuracy of his own beliefs was shaken. He unsuccessfully tried to lift his spirits by taking cocaine, to which he became addicted. Perhaps a surprising use of a strong drug for the modern reader, it was not viewed as such in the age, where depression was rather the more dangerous disease to have rather than addiction, as it was viewed as a form of degeneracy. (79) 14

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existence of male hysterical patients, as well, despite their admission into the Paris clinic after his departure from the French capital. Despite the Viennese clinician’s own hysterical narrative in the case of Dora being undiagnosed until its much later twentieth century feminist readings, such an instance of a nineteenth century self-diagnosed male hysteric exists – it is the case of the realist French writer Gustave Flaubert. More than mere speculation based on the famous “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” catchphrase, whose source was oral, not written, and thus difficult to attribute properly (Leclerc), there is evidence of his actual diagnosis as revealed by his correspondence, in which he declares that “men can be hysterics just like women, and that I am one....” (134). Jan Goldstein rightly assumes that “if nineteenth-century hysteria was a conceptual space for the conventional, stereotypical definition of femininity, it was also, by that same token, potentially a conceptual space for the subversion of gender stereotypes.” (134) and that “Applied by men to women, and most typically by male doctors to their female patients, the category "hysteria" was inevitably bound up in relations of power and generally served a stigmatizing, repressive function. But applied by a man to himself, that same category might disclose radical possibilities.” (135) Goldstein also insists on the interdependence between two pillars of the patriarchal cultural status-quo: the male-dominated field of literature and the medical establishment. Futhermore, B.F. Bart claims that the male protagonist of Flaubert’s Carthage-set historical drama Sallambô is a male hysteric, the author having been aware of the condition and its adaptability to both men and women. (“Male Hysteria in "Salammbô"” 313-314)15 Apparently well-versed in contemporary medical discourse, realist French writers of the nineteenth century (Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal) relied on recent developments in the field of medicine, psychiatry in particular, as trustworthy sources for the fleshing out of their own realistic/naturalistic characters, but also because, in some cases, their decidedly bourgeois station in life meant that they were the sons of doctors and thus familiar with the language of medicine from home. (Golstein 135) Charles Baudelaire’s review of Madame Bovary is quite perceptive of Bart’s article starts from the premise that the hypothesis of male hysteria became known first in England and later in France: “In the English-speaking countries, medical thinking was more advanced. By the 1820's, it was already known there that men, too, could be hysterical; Edgar Allan Poe described a male hysteric in a Tale he wrote in 1839.” (Bart 313). He explains that Freud’s identification of the disease’s cause as sexual repression, which led to the break with his collaborator, Brauer, and then proceeds to prove that the work’s male protagonist, Mathô, is also repressed, desiring and dreading his encounter with Salammbô. (316) 15

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Flaubert’s hysteria as he bases much of his praise on the author’s perceived ability “to divest himself of his actual sex and make himself into a woman. The result is miraculous, for despite his zeal at wearing masks he could not help but infuse some male blood into the veins of his creation. ... Like a weapon-bearing Pallas issuing forth from the forehead of Zeus, this bizarre androgyne houses the seductiveness of a virile soul within a beautiful feminine body.” (qtd in Goldstein 144) Though Flaubert’s own description of his hysterical symptoms16 after a particularly severe bout of writer’s block or as the expected companions of literary creation (Goldstein 143) overlap perfectly with women’s own experiences with childbirth and post-partum anxiety, in Baudelaire’s terms, Emma sprouts from its progenitor’s temple a fully-formed Amazon whose weapons remind one of Dora’s metaphorical defences that had to be “wrest” by the analyst one by one. Whether Baudelaire’s misogyny, his fear of the female body and its rejection of it as abject “other” are accepted for a fact (DalMolin) or merely considered “a structural necessity and a theoretical axiom that undergirds the very poetic principles of Les Fleurs du mal.” (Marder 8), the above quote remains relevant due to its reliance on stereotypes of “masculine” and “feminine” traits in describing Emma Bovary’s “virile soul”. Far from being monstrous, this type of birthing is much preferable to the messy, abject and disgusting act of actual childbirth, rejected by Baudelaire, to whom nothing was more repulsive than the pregnant female body. (Marder 7-8) This higher, “clean” birthing by the male intellect instead of the base, purely biological female womb is, of course, yet another cultural reinscription of the superiority of the male/culture and woman/nature’s inferiority and, implicitly, of male writing versus female writing, as these “painters of modern life”17 seem to live in constant fear of their work not being fully appreciated by the “right” public. As Andreas Huyssen explains in After the Great Divide, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, in a century where increasingly wide-spread education penetrates the barriers of social class and gender, modernity is also a harbinger of male anxieties of their monopoly of culture being taken over by the recently literate masses. He also describes them in an 1867 letter to fellow writer Georges Sand: “J'ai des battements de coeur pour rien, chose compréhensible, du reste, dans un vieil hystérique comme moi. - Car je maintiens que les hommes sont hystériques comme les femmes et que j'en suis un. Quand j'ai fait Salammbô j'ai lu sur cette matière-là 'les meilleurs auteurs' et j'ai reconnu tous les symptômes. J'ai la boule, et le clou à l'occiput.'” (qtd. in Bart 317) The accelerated heartbeats for no apparent cause, the suffocating knot in the throat, the nail in the head are hysterical symptoms recognized as such by the French clinicians of the day. 17 “The Painter of Modern Life” is an 1863 essay by Charles Baudelaire in which he tackles various topics, spanning the city, modernity, painting, women, the dandy, make-up etc. 16

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It’s no wonder, then, that in this enlarged arena where the male writer now has to compete with the female writer, new cultural boundaries have to be created so as to separate the inferior, more-recent mass-culture, to which female writers bring their popular contribution, and “high-culture”, which remains the monopoly of the sophisticated male. (Huyssen 45-46) Not surprisingly, Flaubert’s the desired public is male and one of his biggest anxieties is that the public will think of him as a writer for “kitchen-maids”. Surely, the only way to prevent his misogynist and classist fears from coming true would be by enlisting of the support of the literary authorities du jour, “men eminent by the dint of their high office” that will “vouch” as to the legitimacy of his work. (Goldstein 141) When commenting on the same famous “I am Madame Bovary” phrase, Huyssen also highlights the fact that the inscription of gender in the field of cultural production is socio-historically determined. Following in the steps of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Huyssen then proceeds to interrogate the overlap between the “nervous” male writer and the female character, agreeing with Christa Wolf’s statement that, for all the apparent bravery in identifying with a female character, “Flaubert was not Madame Bovary” (qtd. in Huyssen 45-46). In fact, as Emma is portrayed from the very beginning as an avid consumer of popular literature, her frustration and personal tragedy having fed from lush, over-the-top romances that Flaubert himself strongly disengages from, the power imbalance between the author of “high” literature and women as mere passive receivers of the processes of cultural production is clear: “woman (Madame Bovary) is positioned as reader of inferior literature – subjective, emotional, and passive – while man (Flaubert) emerges as author of genuine, authentic literature – objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means.” (46) Flaubert’s anxiety echoes Hawthorne’s frustration with the “mobs of scribbling women” and Baudelaire’s statement that he wants nothing to do with “wives, daughters and sisters” and that his literatures is not for such a public. Ultimately, Flaubert’s re-appropriation of the “hysteria”, just as he has appropriated femininity itself shows not only the constructed, scripted and performative nature of gender, but how “masculine domination”, to put it in Bourdieu’s terms, is clearly at play here. As the male writer is the main contender in the field of cultural production, his appropriation of the “female malady” is only paraded as transgressive. Flaubert is not above making use of the hysteric’s appeal, which is more likely to ensure a numerous readership; he however rejects the notion that this readership be comprised of women similar to Emma, whose nervous disposition was brought up by the reading of romances. Through a self-described hysterical himself, Flaubert as author seems to be the type that refuses to produce the type of literature that “infected” Emma Bovary with her illness in the first place. 28

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A hysterical man, especially if a writer, is a dangerous thing. According to Max Nordau’s study, writers of the likes of Flaubert, whom he calls “degenerate” (he includes Symbolists, Naturalists, and Decadents in this category), can “infect” many more with their disease – their readers. A woman can be prevented from writing or, if she does defy such norms, can have her work delegitimized due to her gender (as in the case of Hawthorne’s “damned mobs of scribbling women”), but hysteria and masculinity have an interesting relationship in a man: does the “feminine disease” tar the author’s privilege or does it enhance it? Already enjoying the advantages of his gender (as we have seen in the case of Flaubert), a male hysteric might choose his fame to instill his ideals in a wider readership. Consequently, writing becomes a sort of predatory political act because of its radical potential – that of influencing the masses. This is exactly Nordau’s theory, who lists the French writer among the culprits sowing degeneration in the ranks of the lower classes: The great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally not fin-desiècle. It is true that the spirit of the times is stirring nations down to their lowest depths, and awaking even in the most inchoate and rudimentary human being a wondrous feeling of stir and upheaval. But this more or less slight touch of moral sea-sickness does not excite in him the cravings of the travailing women, nor express itself in aesthetic needs. The Philistine or the Proletarian still finds undiluted satisfaction in the old and oldest forms of art and poetry, if he knows himself unwatched by the scornful eye of the votary of fashion, and is free to yield to his own inclinations. […] It is only a very small minority who honestly find pleasure in the new tendencies […] It consists chiefly of rich educated people, or of fanatics. The former give the ton to all the snobs, the fools, and the blockheads; the latter make an impression upon the weak and the dependent, and intimidate the nervous. (Degeneration 7)

Because the poor imitate the rich, the unseemly new tendencies which focus on the morbid and the ugly, this anti-aesthetic movement’s poisonous influence trickles down from the upper classes to the lower. Nordau’s clarification that the fin-de-siècle is the invention and privilege of spoiled nobility does nothing if not reinforce the idea that the political power in the male resides in his capacity to impose his will as the norm. In the beginning of his treatise, Nordau begins by calling the fin de siècle a fitting phrase as it echoes the degeneracy of the French nation’s upper classes, a term which he finds inadequate and Europe-centric given the asynchrony in the ascent and decline of cultures and empires throughout the world. The “terror of annihilation” (3), while not new, is met differently by the late nineteenth-century man as “the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever.” (4) In decrying the bad example that 29

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degenerate writers carve out for the easily influenced masses, thus planting the seed of future moral decay and assigning the guilt to the “fallen” aristocrat, Nordau not only nostalgically looks back on a mythical past where the end of the first millennium was rejected by a population vigorous, healthy, “throbbing with life”, but reinforces the class differences already prevalent in society: the long-standing upper classes have exhausted their vital energies sooner, while the “new”, rural populations transplanted into the city during the industrial age, with their fresh influx of red-blooded strength, uncorrupted from aristocratic corruption, are the human basis upon which the future is built. The degenerate tendencies in society, have, in a word, nothing to do with the end of this century or any another, but are the result of the misguided promotion of wrong values – the planet will go on regardless of the cyclical replacement of one burnt-out culture with another. In his defense of health versus the sickly appetites of a mentally and physically exhausted nation, Nordau’s metaphors link health and wholesomeness with a nature “blooming insolently forever”; his conclusions are compelling because, while they articulate the primacy of the organic in nature’s unstoppable, Schopenhauerian will to live, it is not Darwinian. In saying that it is the cultural, and not the biological, which determines a nation’s well-being, the author of Degeneracy emphasizes the idea of sickness and its worship as constructs. The hysteric, thus, either male or female, is a construct, as well. I.3. Medical Masculinities in Turn of the Century Gothic18 Studies in masculinity in the past decades have attempted to trace the formation and evolution of definitions of masculinity in English and American literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s groundbreaking 1989 study (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire) is interested in “making generalizations about and marking historical differences in the structure of men's relations with other men.” (2). The author’s interest is not only to further establish the field of queer studies as legitimate within its own right, but, besides the place given in culture to the sexual Other, to see the way in which “men’s bonding” shaped Western culture. Reflecting on the increasing popularity of masculinity studies, Bryce Traister (Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies 282) identifies Elaine Showalter’s 1989 distinction between feminism criticism and This chapter was also published as an independent article: "Medical Gothic Masculinities in Bram Stoker’s "Dracula"", Linguaculture International Journal, vol. 12, nr. 1/June 2021, pp. 77-86, https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2021-1-0188 18

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gynocriticism as the starting point of an articulation of a parallel rhetoric that interrogates notions of masculinity. Looking back on twenty years of masculinity studies, Traister notices several “idées fixes”, as he calls them, within the field: the heterosexuality studies promoted by Michael Kimmel in his 1996 book (Manhod In America: A Cultural History), which focuses on masculine ideals in a world also shaped by feminism, including the bold and inaccurate claim that masculinity has been insufficiently explored, despite Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel describing American literature as largely depicting the exploits of a brotherhood of men as early as 1960. (Traister 282). Sedgwick’s 1990 book (Epistenology of the Closet ) certainly posits itself against the grain of such heteronormative readings of American culture as insufficiently emphatic of defining masculinity as it lends attention to the articulation of male homoerotic desire.19 In 1999, Katherine Snyder publishes her study on unmarried men (Bachelor, Manhood and The Novel 1850-1925), dedicating, like Sedgewick’s reading of “homosexual panic”, a chapter to Henry James, while Michael Roper and John Tosh’s study (Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800) offers an array of essays that explore the changes in masculinities from beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Mark Carries’s review of the Roper and Tosh anthology begins by articulating what masculinity meant for Thomas Carlyle in 1825: not only asserting one’s willpower through violence, but the ideals of Empire-building men as “explorers and adventurers, of statesmen and generals, of engineers and industrialists.” (Carries 672). Carlyle’s work of a historian interested in the lives of great men clashed with early nineteenth century views of masculinity, as writing was not considered a manly profession, especially for someone with claims of earning a living and supporting a family. Hawthorne’s “damned mobs of scribbling women” draws attention to the respectability of writing as gendered ideological territory worth fighting for. As a genre whose resurgence is reactivated by collective subconscious fears, it is no surprise that the late nineteenth century decadent movement heavily influenced the gothic genre: anxieties about technology20, the successes and failures of science (Penner and Sparks), masculinity, Empire21 For a reading of Dracula in the context of Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality trial, see Talia Schaffer’s article (“"A Wilde Desire Took Me":The Homoerotic History of Dracula”). 20 For a more recent discussion of the topic, see Herbert Sussman’s 2012 study (Masculine Identities: The History and Meaning of Manliness). 21 For a reading of imperialism, race and gender, see Anne McClintock’s 1995 book (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest). For a reading of gothic imperialism, see the collection edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre). 19

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and social degeneracy were identified in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle), with masculinity yet again challenged by prominent Decadent, dandy, proponent of aestheticism Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Punter and Byron 39). These two classic texts, which both make use of the motif of the double,22 are indicative of a psychological, but also cultural split along definitions of masculinity; beyond parables of good versus evil, they show oppositions in the individual perceptions between an old, outworn perception of a socially acceptable variant of manhood which is not yet completely shed and new, emerging ones society is as yet resistant to. In Jekyll and Hyde, the respectable doctor’s shadow is an awful, primitive Jagernaut of such uncanny, superhuman strength that it finally overpowers the Jekyll’s “medical manhood”; Dorian Grey’s portrait is the one that ages instead of its model, displaying the signs of moral corruption and in both cases, death of one of the constituent parts entails the death of the other. Interestingly enough, in both cases the Other is not projected outwards on the figure of Woman, but is a doubling surging out of man’s own volition; masculinity as defined not by opposition with the feminine, but by opposition with itself, with its old and new permitted and forbidden avatars, is at stake. In the turn of the century game of competing masculinities, it is only natural for the Man of Culture’s response to societal shifts redefining his place and role to find its place in the gothic. The present section will be dedicated to the articulation of masculinity/masculinities in Poe and the way in which it was shaped by the characteristic decadent effeminacy of the male, lending a distinctly hysterical, high-strung chord to his narrators, resembling the over-sensitive vibrating “luth suspendu” of Usher’s epitaph. Allan Lloyd Smith sees the dead mother at the origin of Poe’s preoccupation with the aesthetic qualities intrinsic in “the death of a beautiful woman” (American Gothic Fiction 156) his most poetic of topics. The psychological condition of Poe’s male characters has already received 23 attention from critics linking it with the medical discoveries of the day, such as Bret Zimmerman, who uses phrenology to determine Roderick Usher’s psychological profile from his physical description and identifies finds evidence of the theory of moral insanity in “The Tell-Tale Heart” (“"Moral Insanity" or Paranoid Schizophrenia: Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"”). Ralph Tymms’ exploration of the double in German Romantic literature (Doubles in Literary Psychology) begins by tracing its origins to “magic and the earliest speculations on the soul.” (15) 23 The great psychological portraitist and writer Fyodor M. Dostoievski wrote about Poe’s stories, some of which were translated into Russian in 1861. (“Three Tales of Edgar Poe”). 22

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Tabitha Sparks’ book on medical practices in the nineteenth century and their illustration in literature draws attention to a certain “competition” between doctors and women24 at the end of the nineteenth century, a hostility based on the emergence of the New Woman, the emancipated first-wave feminist who wished to free the female body from the mechanisms of male medical surveillance by advocating the use of birth-control and encouraging women themselves to take up the profession. The 1864 Contagious Diseases Act allowed, in the United Kingdom, the arrest of any woman that looked as though she might suffer from venereal disease (Sparks 133). Since there was no objective way for a policeman to assess the state of a stranger’s health (for that, he would have needed the previous expertise of a doctor, in the private quarters of home or hospital), the law essentially permitted the literal policing of under-privileged, lower-class women’s bodies by the actual merger of Law and Medicine. Furthermore, there was nothing that these women could do to oppose arrest, as they would be taken into custody first and interrogated later. Designed as a measure against the rampant spread of syphilis25, which was contracted by respectable household fathers who visited prostitutes and then passed on to the wife, the law was not only sexist, equating contamination with womanhood while completely neglecting the responsibility of the men and targeting an already financially and socially disadvantaged category, the prostitutes. (133) The fear or worship either towards the doctor or his patients (respectable wives or prostitutes) is reflected, in gothic turn of the century fiction, in the respective ambivalent attitudes towards women as makers or breakers of home, and, exponentially, in the construction of Empire, and are embodied in the stereotypes of the angel-of-the-house and night-walker/ female vampire. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, the two vampirized women, Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, represent two avatars of turn of the century femininity– an acceptable variant of the New Woman (Mina Harker, technologically adept and the men’s right hand in documenting the journey of his exclusion from Britain), and the hypersexual Lucy, whose name evokes the lux, light, of the Western civilization; she is the star to which empire and look for salvation, who turns into a “street walker” during the night, i.e. prostitute after her death, and is promptly vanquished through impalement in her grave by professor van Helsing and his helpers, Quincey Morris, and Especially with the admission of women in colleges and the appearance of the first qualified female doctors. 25 A disease which first appeared in Europe in the late fifteenth century, during the withdrawal of the French army from Italy. According to one theory, it was brought from the Americas by Columbus’ crew; according to another, the baccillum pre-dates the discovery of the New World (Farhi and Dupin) 24

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John Seward. The figure of Mina (Wilhemina) is a non-threatening avatar of the New Woman because she uses her practical secretarial abilities (which would have allowed her to earn a living on her own in the city, had she not married her lawyer husband) to vanquish the foreign force which has completely emasculated her spouse; she is an acceptable New Woman not because independent of the male and emancipated, but because she can assist the men for the fulfillment of the greater good. Jonathan’s long illness after his visit at Dracula’s castle means that he is unable to protect his wife; the vampire’s targets are the women, as they are the symbolic preservers of the nation’s future. Jonathan’s masculinity and his failure to protect his wife are replaced by the joint forces of the professor (the Dutch van Helsing), the psychiatrist (John Seward, who works in a mental asylum) and the adventurer (the American Quincey Morris, who dies in Transylvania while inflicting Dracula’s fatal wound). Western masculinity is thus a collective apparatus meant to protect and preserve womanhood from the grip of the foreign male; it resents, disciplines and punishes women who are hypersexual (Lucy is more vulnerable to the vampire’s power because, out of her three suitors, she would like to marry all) and rewards those who use their intelligence and skill to help men (Mina). Dracula thus provides an accurate picture of the turn of the century preoccupation with medicine and psychiatry, the change of mentalities regarding new and traditional types of women; it engages with technology, it combines the epistolary novel with typewritten transcripts from diaries, medical notes and clippings of newspaper articles; it is a modern novel whose Gothicism consists of the fear of the past and the foreign (an Eastern vampire dating back to times immemorial), barbaric and primitive, is conquered by the Western forces of progress, as embodied by the specialized, professionalized men. The novel showcases the triumph of modernity and of the Western civilization which, despite anxieties of its own collapse and fears of its inability to cope with the demands of a new age, adapts to it brilliantly: the advances of science are not to be feared, but embraced; the New Woman can, after all, be of assistance to Man and join forces with him for the common preservation of the species; even the more occult and eccentric specialists, such as the Dutch professor (who seems to be an odd combination between an eccentric lover of the occult and a caricatural Dr. Freud, with his Germanic accent and combination of scientific and pseudo-scientific methods,26 such as the hypnosis which he applies to Mina, Foucault himself, when drawing the distinguishing line between scientific and literary discursivity, leaves psychoanalysis out of the former. While he acknowleges Freud as a 26

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thus revealing her telepathic connection with the vampire) contribute their share. Progress, as the overarching meaning of the plot seems to show, is met with least resistance by the novelty-fearing masses, when that which is menacing by virtue of being new proves its merits slowly and gradually. The actual usefulness of things which were previously Othered because feared is proven, of course, at the time of a crisis – what better device to craft a plot in which the Westerner is forced to face his shadow and use it for his own advantage, for lack of other options. The turn of the century poises civilization on the cusp of the old and the new: it is merely the full rejection of both that would entail disaster; pretending that the vampire, whose very existence cannot be explained by science, would be catastrophic, but, conversely, attempting to vanquish it just by resorting to the instruments of modern science would be equally damaging. John Seward’s medical records of his Dracula-worshipping patient’s ramblings, Renfield, complete the end of the century’s urban landscape with the familiar space of the mental hospital, but it is in the character of Van Helsing that the two collaborating and opposing forces of old and new science fully meet. In this turn of the century world, garlic garlands and blood transfusions, crucifixes and hospitals not only coexist, but collaborate; past knowledge of vampires and obscure diseases inflicted by monsters is preserved and new knowledge, further professionalized as “science”, builds on it instead of rejecting it fully, acquiring the “power-knowledge” construct articulated by Foucault and reinforcing the dominant ideology. The scene of Lucy’s obliteration in her guise as minion of the Un-dead is also striking from the point of view of the medical and pseudo-medical preparations, tailored to the measure of both laymen and specialists of his trade. The following excerpt from Dracula is emblematic for the mumbo-jumbo of scientific and pseudo-scientific paraphernalia to be found in professor Van Helsing’s medical bag, highlighting the semantic differences between the concepts of knowledge and science, between the sum of unofficial systems of thought and official ones: Van Helsing, with his usual methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and some plumbing solder, and then a small oil-lamp, which gave out, when lit in a corner of the tomb, gas which burned at fierce heat with a blue flame; then his operating knives, which he placed to hand; and last a round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire, and was founder of psychonalytic discursivity, he does not deem his method scientific. Thus, a comparison between Van Helsing and Freud as both using methods deemed unorthodx and pseudo-scientific by the medical community of the time would be appropriate.

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Like a surgeon carefully placing the instruments of his craft at the ready, van Helsing retrieves objects will play a part in the future extinction of the vampire: the soldering iron will be used to seal the door of the crypt, the oil-lamp, practical and discreet, will assist in the inconspicuous carrying on of their covert dealings; the medical operating instruments (the knives will later be used to decapitate the corpse) are placed right beside the heathen wooden stake, the latter’s evident phallic nature underscoring the same penetrating nature in the first, only sublimated. The baseness and uncouthness of the stake and hammer, decidedly lower-class (“used in the coal-cellar”) proves van Helsing’s praised open-minded-ness – his lack of elitism in harnessing the benefits of each social class, regardless of prestige, in fighting the vampire. Seward’s own comment on the anticipatory feeling given to him by the professor’s preparations, the scientist’s typical elation before a discovery or experiment, is lost on the medical laymen in attendance, as those as yet unaware of the true meaning of each object and the role they will play is puzzling – they are, as yet, signifiers without a signified. Seward’s excitement bespeaks less the worries of Morris and Holmwood, Lucy’s suitors, who anticipate her second, and real, death, but a doctor’s prevailing interest in the operation itself, rather than the patient; carried away by the scientific potential of his professional idol’s preparations, his pupil is more fascinated by the ritualistic nature of the medical act than the recovery of the “patient”. As a socially productive entity, Lucy cannot be recovered; the redemption of her soul is the stated purpose of the intervention, which in fact veils their preoccupation with the protection of the Victorian social body by eliminating one of its predators, a voluptuous vamp who feeds on innocent babes27 (the epitome of monstruosity asthr femine ideal dictates that she should bear and protect children, not devour them; as a killer of the young, she has fully morphed into the complete opposite of sweet, obedient, child-rearing feminity Victorian society wants her to be). She cannot be saved, lest in soul, which is what the men declare is their intention; regardless of this, Seward’s interest in the process betrays itself as not colored by personal or religious objection; it retains the medical student’s excitement for a necropsy, where the human body, divested of the middle-class cheap sentimentality, can fully Lucy’s monstruosity as a vampire also consists in her rejection of motherhood (May 19). For a class and gender-based reading of Victorian family ties, see Claudia Nelson’s book. (Family Ties in Victorian England) 27

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allow itself to treat the corpse at what it really is –an object – without sentimentalizing or aestheticizing it, thus fully making use of its “medical gaze”. What might be construed by others as a desecration of a body is, for him, a stimulating opportunity to learn. The enactment of the final blow to the Un-Dead is similar, in a way, to the purely medical act of the administering of the blood-transfusions a vampirism in reverse via Science that is supposed to counteract Dracula’s initial aggression. This fails because the parasitic nature of the transgression does not stop at the mere exchange of bodily fluids between predator and preyed-upon; the blood-sucking is symbolic, as it also turns the victims into the original vampire’s slaves and copies as they retain a hypnotic, telepathic connection with him even when he is far away, and he is thus able to trace them. The reversal of the vampire’s depletion of blood cannot simply be counteracted by blood transfusions; by consorting with the Un-dead, she is now unclean also in soul, not merely in body, by having espoused someone other than her intended. The scientific method of the transfusion shows “new science”, for all its claims to astuteness, to be less perceptive than the tried and tested efficacy of the gruesome stake-to-the-heart, garlic-in-the-mouth of van Helsing’s knowledge. Similar to the beheading of the Gorgon, the men simply collect their instruments and leave after annihilating the ultimate predator of males (vamp/prostitute) and children (degenerate mother), whose gaze petrifies and emasculates; a medical gaze for a Medusan one, a (vampiric) blood-sucking tooth for a life-giving, blood-filling transfusion. When commenting of the medical gothic aspect of the novel, Tabitha Sparks notices the policing of Lucy’s body by the doctors, Seward and Van Helsing, who administer the transfusion while the patient is asleep, having previously been given a narcotic. This recalls the same yielding, passive female body as that of the sleeping Lucy as a vampire in her coffin, which Sparks interprets as symbolic of the medical establishment’s battle to control the physiological and reproductive function of the docile woman; symbolically, “Stoker rests medical progress on the woman’s prostrate body and gives the male new, generative power” (125). Sparks’ choice of words echoes the life-giving energies of the Frankenstein narrative, where the narcissistic scientist feeds upon the success of his enterprise, on which he pins his sense of worth. The ability to restore Lucy to health and happiness is the “re-generative power” found at the very core of the medical profession; the doctor’s mission is to heal, and his science and success are based on the glorification of a violation - a transfusion secretly performed on a heavily sedated patient. From a Foucauldian point of view, medical discursivity is part of the regimen of power; if Lovelace’s desire to preserve Clarissa’s body is a violation both aesthetic and perverse, when the purpose 37

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is construed as noble (i.e. the salvation of a fair maiden’s body and soul) masculine domination is encouraged. From the pure perversity of the rake’s gaze we move forward to the objective medical gaze whose higher purpose is to treat the patient as the object of scientific inquiry, a step on which, through observation and experimentation, new science is built. Unsurprisingly, as Sparks remarks (125) their own act is a reiteration of Dracula’s own gesture; what they believe to be a civilized way of fighting the barbaric is the repetition of the same subjection of the feminine to the masculine, only by different perpetrators. That Lucy can receive the blood of several men in the attempt to make her better proves that the patriarchal Victorian society has a collective claim over the female body; it is when the perpetrator is foreign that the vampirization of the feminine, its exploitation by the male, is forbidden. The contrast between the impressive size of the wooden stake, “three feet long”, sharpened and charred in a fire to ensure its efficiency, and the almost neglected operating knives, draws a parallel between old and new knowledge that van Helsing is able to mix and match to an optimal proportion, in true alchemist fashion: the first one is primitive, but effective, redolent of the brute force of the vampire which must be met with corresponding withering impetus, while the second is a spawn of the first and its sublimation. As instruments that penetrate the female’s body, both stake and scalpel allude to an intrusion upon a body that resists this violation either by seduction (Lucy - as-vampire asks Arthur to embrace her, but he wisely rejects her advances, as instructed by van Helsing) or death (as in a necropsy, the patient’s body is now the property of science, having lost all individuality). A pathologization from the point of view of religion symbolized by the primitive, but effective superstition of the stake through the heart (accompanied by prayer) is replaced by the pathologization enacted by science, for Lucy is an abomination from the point of view of both, an aberration of spirit and nature. Only after the “foul Thing” leaves Lucy’s body and her “purity” is restored is her fiancé allowed to kiss her. The other, more horrid details of the desecration of Lucy’s body are glossed over quickly, in a few lines: the goodbye kiss is swiftly followed by the corpse’s beheading; its mouth filled with garlic, in a very matter-of-fact account contrasting with the detailed description of the UnDead’s shrieking and “withering”. The soldered door to the grave ensures that the ritual is final; the key is symbolically given to Arthur, the would-be husband, in a gesture that, for lack of practicality, remains purely symbolic. In Abraham van Helsing, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris, bourgeois morality reflects the noble features of traditional masculinity such as courage and a worship of chaste, modest femininity, which, in its turn, is intersected by science. Science as power-knowledge poses the doctor at the fore of masculine hegemony under 38

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the guise of medical authority which polices and disciplines those female bodies which are unruly28, such as the prostitutes. 1864, the year of adoption of the Venereal Disease Act29 by British Parliament, which legally allowed the arrest of suspicious-looking women off the streets, was also the year of the publication of art historian John Ruskin’s lecture of femininity which defines wifely duties as eminently passive30, thus underscoring the coexistence of conflicting Madonna-whore dichotomies in Victorian society. By dropping into Lucy Westenra’s Victorian tomb and awaiting the return of the child-feeding vampire, van Helsing and his crew are literally making sure that a lascivious night-walker is permanently taken off the streets.31 A perverted figure of femininity, debauched and preying on children, instead of nurturing them, Lucy as a vampire is the complete opposite of the bourgeois ideal of the wife: immodest, assertive, openly sexual, polygamous:: “She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth - which it made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.” (204) The blood on her lips and the flush in her cheeks are not merely the marks of fulfilled or anticipated sexual appetite; the profusion of blood is immodest due to the connotations of broken maidenhood and its symbolic debasement by Lucy, a woman who is not only ashamed by it, but also flaunts the proof. The sacramental red stain on the white sheet, the new bride’s evidence of purity, is re-figured as monstrous and obscene in the vampire’s stained clothes. The discursive regime of imperial British power is thus built on the science of its men and the reining in/sublimation of women’s drives. The woman attains, as a vampire, all that was forbidden to her as a respectable beautiful middle-class young woman waiting to settle down in the comfort of domesticity. Like Becky Sharp, the men that she allows into her bedchamber are only those authorized to prevent her moral and social dissolution; even if she does get blood transfusions from several different suitors, symbolically consorting with all, she is ultimately punished for this pre-marital exchange of bodily fluids by being written out of the plot. The way in which she is killed is also significant. Because her vampiric self is empowered, she becomes masculine; the act of biting, of plunging her elongated teeth into her victims, is in itself penetrating, phallic. The gesture that undoes the vampire – the stake through the heart – has to be performed Tabitha Sparks adequately refers to the gothic medicine in Dracula as “treating in order to punish” (127). 29 Repealed, due to public pressure, in 1869 (Sparks 117). 30 In “Lilies of Queens’ Gardens”, published in Sesame and Lillies. (Ruskin 38). 31 Van Helsing even remarks that, as a yet unexperienced nocturnal predator, “The career of this so unhappy dear lady is but just begun.” (204) 28

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by her fiancé as it most closely resembles a consummation of their erotic connection in a corruption of a wedding night scene. If Arthur cannot sexually enjoy Lucy in the socially sanctioned rites of bourgeois marriage, all other forms of her sexuality must be obliterated. The type of bodilessness that haunts the pages of Dracula is similar to that of Jane’s from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. When it comes to the vampiric woman whose unbridled appetites are offensive to middle-class notions of propriety, she has to be socially erased, for when woman becomes too bodily, she is socially bodiless, following the same logic according to which hysteria had to be “invented” or constructed as the illness of feminine excess – too much of one leads to the exclusion of the other. When Arthur realizes that the coffin is empty and glances at Lucy’s silhouette, he asks: “Is this really Lucy’s body, or only a demon in her shape?” (Stoker 204), to which Van Helsing replies “It is her body, and yet not it.” (204) The ghostliness/ bodilessness of Jane is also echoed in Lucy’s; societal views of a woman’s body’s symbolic status simply erase the young woman’s corporeality as legitimate. Lascivious and voluptuous Lucy simply cannot be herself; she only exists as the male projection of purity envisioned by her suitors and husband-to-be. Any such manifested attitudes can only be the result of her possession by an alien, malevolent spirit, that of the vampire. According to Donna Heiland (Gothic and Gender: An Introduction ), being a woman is in itself a gothic experience due to the inherent oppression of this gender, while for Stéphanie Genz, the solution to escape the female body’s entrapment is “the denial and reinvention of the body.” (74) which, in Lucy’s case, represents her literal transformation into the Un-Dead. When the “possessed” body is that of a male, as in the case of Jonathan Harker, who is preyed upon by Dracula’s three brides in the Transylvanian castle in a scene that doubles Lucy Westenra’s blood transfusions by three different men, he is emasculated; the trauma of the ungodly sights witnessed by him sends him into recovery for months and he is barely present in the remaining pages of the novel, but to haunt them. His assertive wife, Mina, is much more present than he is, playing an active role in the vanquishing of the vampire, despite being its target herself. Because Lucy’s vampirization also affects her body, while Jonathan’s does not (he is violated psychologically, but also in the flesh), only the second can be redeemed. The different responses in the male and female body faced with vampirization highlight the gender disparities in Victorian sexual politics: a woman who is strong in the face of physical and mental depredation, such as Mina, can uplift a weaker man (Jonathan) and join the men in protecting the nation, while a naturally sensual woman (the “sweet”, but less intellectual Lucy) is vulnerable and can consequently expose the country to 40

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vampiric infection. As Jennifer Wicke brilliantly argues (“Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media”), the vampire’s barbaric multiplication is counteracted by the parallel duplication allowed by modern technology. The woman’s body is thus not only useful from a strictly biological point of view, by increasing the ranks of the nation in producing children; when it can do neither but it also compromises itself morally, it is obliterated. The biological requirements of gender are again subverted in Stoker’s novel when Lucy’s reversal of femininity is doubled by Mina’s. In an iconic scene, the vampire breastfeeds her as if she were a child. (“Feeding the Vampire: The Ravenous Hunger of the Fin de Siècle”). This perversion of motherhood and the fixation at the oral stage of sexuality is a regression; the intellectual faculties of Mina, one of the staunchest and most effective of Dracula’s opponents, is thus countered by the vampire’s reduction of the dangerous “intellectual woman” to her bodily reproduction. By forcing her to breastfeed off of him, the vampire infantilizes her and reduces her to the biological. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the woman’s body fights its reduction to biology by embracing its effacement; it is not a signifier or a signified, it is rather a trace, the symbol of femininity’s journey in the social body and the displacement of the wandering uterus. The physician’s role is to use its power –knowledge to pathologize, subdue and punish the unruly female body; as a hysteric was treated by various means which were meant to bring the wandering womb back into its proper place, all women that do not conform to the gender ideology of the age can be dubbed “hysterical”, as they travel towards precincts which are not culturally sanctioned as feminine. In Dracula, gothic medicine is also an instrument of female repression and the reinforcement of the discursive regimens of the cultural hegemony in a bid to define progress, à la John Ruskin, in the queenly terms of clearly separated spheres. In the treatment of Lucy and Mina’s passive bodies, the symbolism of the uterus haunts Bram Stoker’s novel, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Gilman’s texts, as well; in the first, its policing of motherhood describes the womb, the site of female reproduction, as male property, as the second and third, by giving access to only husband and doctor into the private space of femininity, the bedroom, symbolically merge the disciplining and punishing roles of the two. So far, I have traced the construction of medical manhood in a key turn of the century text – Dracula – so as to show the medical establishment’s complicity in the construction of systems of knowledge-power which control the bodies of women. Medical masculinity is an embodiment of the “Man of Reason”, the Western ideal of manhood par excellence; in the following chapter, I will explore a different version of turn of the century masculinity, one which opposes the brave, self-sacrificing, nation-defending 41

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men of Stoker’s text – that of the Decadent Man. Shifting the focus from the woman’s body to the man’s, I will look at male hysterics in two of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, and James’s “The Turn of the Screw”. I.4. Decadent Man, Effeminate Man: Roderick Usher and Masculinity Compared to the dynamic doctors of Dracula, the passive Roderick Usher could never have been called upon to save the nation from the depredations of a monstrous new-comer or to protect Empire’s women, as he could barely save himself. Isolated among the ruins of past wealth, this avatar of masculinity is the remnant of a bygone era, relaying him to a state of immobility and passivity, much more similar to the emasculated Jonathan Harker than the dynamic Van Helsing, Holmwood, Seward and Morris. Usher’s lassitude and hypersensitivity feminize him. His frail mental state, likened in the epigraph with the receptiveness of the “luth suspendu”, is similar to the hysterical woman’s strained psyche, while his passivity recalls the haze of the opium eater, mentioned in the beginning of “Usher” to refer to the “utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life-the hideous dropping off of the veil” (76). Coming upon the strange-looking House of Usher is thus likened with the addict’s return to reality from a substance-abuse haze, to which he awakens with a shudder; as the narrator enters the gothic mansion/text, taking the reader with him, it is exactly the opposite impression that he/she will be left with. Roderick’s odd manner is consistent with the hysteric’s alternation between a passive, normal state, in which he/she can be mistaken for cured, and the state of crisis, but also bears the stamp of the opium eater’s vacillation between lassitude and hyperexcitability: In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence --an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy --an excessive nervous agitation. […] His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision - that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation - that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement. (81)

Experiencing the ancestral home, the odd events that occur within it, is comparable with a drug-fuelled trip instead of “the bitter lapse into 42

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everyday life”, an incursion into the fantastic that only another rude shock, a brutal “dropping off of the veil”, could effect - coinciding, of course, in the story’s circularity, with the narrator’s projection back into reality at the end of the narrative, as the Usher mansion is swiftly and silently gobbled up by the tarn, as if it had never existed in the first place. An experience in and of itself, this sentient house, Roderick’s double can be likened to a medicated hysteric in his passive and active states, in crisis and in the drug-induced torpor that follows it. An aristocrat with easy access to leisure and entertainment, his apartment is filled with “many books and musical instruments” that “lay scattered” about. The dual nature of art, of literature and music, is revealed in its potential to both titillate and subdue, as Roderick uses it as a means of escapism from the harsh reality of his sister’s disease and the guilt of the possible incest involved in their relationship. The “drug” of reading, like any drug, is deceptive, and its results cannot be fully anticipated: it can be a “good” trip or a “bad” one, with disastrous consequences for Roderick’s mental state. The ultimate proof of literature’s unexpected effect is found in the final scene of “Usher”: asking his friend to read to him so as to distract himself from the grief of Madeline’s recent burial and the storm, the act of reading has the opposite outcome to that intended: it further hystericizes Usher, making reality all the more real, as if the Mad Trist’s misadventures were luring Madeline out of her grave, bringing Roderick to a paroxysm of terror which ends in his death. Literature or opium as a “cure” for Poe character’s hysteria bears the ambiguity of Derrida’s pharmakon from “Plato’s Pharmacy”: it is both medicine and a drug. Usher House is not merely a sentient house, but a hysterical house on drugs, averse to physicians, who are always leaving it in befuddlement, unable to attend to either of its tenants (“On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on.” 79). The narrator’s first perception of Usher is that of the bored aristocrat, an effeminate Decadent deprived of vital sap and the will to live, another one of the scattered books and instruments lying about: “Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality - of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world.” (80) Whether his supine position is the result of an opium dream or not, Roderick’s hysterization and feminization become apparent in a side-by-side reading with Foucault’s parallel between addition and the attributes of femininity: 43

Ioana BACIU immoderation derives from a passivity that relates to femininity. To be immoderate was to be in a state of non-resistance with regard to the force of pleasures, and in a position of weakness and submission; it meant being incapable of that virile stance with respect to oneself that enabled one to be stronger than oneself. In this sense, the man of pleasures and desires, the man of non-mastery (akrasia) or self-indulgence (akolasia) was a man who could be called feminine, but more essentially with respect to himself than with respect to others. (Foucault, The History of Sexuality. The Will to Knowledge. 85)

Roderick’s inability to “control himself” is most relevant when it comes to his mind, and in this sense he lacks the “virility”, as Foucault puts it, to withstand the psychosis that drives him mad. The proverbial Weltschmertz of the turn of the century describes by Nordau and hysteria, the malum sine materia of the illness without a visible cause, are connected in “Usher”, as the former is a symptom of the latter. The characteristic “spleen” or ennui of Decadent men is also a form of “feminine excess” and an evil without a palpable reason. Interestingly, Foucault’s reference to the addict as “the man of non-mastery” is oddly relevant to the definition of the gothic house in entrapment narratives as the symbol of masculine hegemony, for in Usher the mansion is the expression of both Roderick and his twin sister. The sentient house destroys him just like his thoughts overtake and poison his mind; the part which is most nefarious, however, and which climaxes in his death, pertains to his sister. This particular gothic house can be read as a testament to Roderick’s “non-mastery” over himself, his unwise attachment to his sister, which ultimately kills him. Who else is more symbolic of the main character’s greatest weakness than his sister, who, just like the hint of opium in the beginning, merely lingers in the narrative’s fringes? Roderick’s double and opposite, Madeline, is not merely “half” of the house itself, but its complete counterpart, the soothing opium haze following a hysterical attack. In discussing the legacy of the “House of Usher” in the subsequent decades from the story’s publication, Dennis Perry and Carl Sederholm also view Madeline as the hidden gothic trigger of the story’s plot: Perhaps the most powerfully effective “Usher” image for Gilman is the presence/absence of Madeline. While she is only seen three times briefly by the narrator—walking in a distant room, in her coffin, and returned from the dead—she virtually shapes the narrative. We learn early on that Roderick’s peculiar behavior is a result of Madeline’s “long-continued illness,” a behavior amplified immeasurably after her death. She is the absent instigator of Usher’s art and song, of his reading, particularly Vigiliae Mortuorum (Vigils for the Dead), and of his “anomalous species of terror” (403). Like John, Usher fears his female counterpart’s unusual condition, perhaps seeing his own impending downfall reflected in her. As symbolic (Madeline) and real (Gilman narrator) mothers, their health is basic to the health of the family; their lack of health, like the fissure and the smooch, is indicative of the impending

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psychological destruction of the family. Her “suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death” suggests her awareness of her influence on the men, and possibly her vengeful plans (410).(Perry and Sederholm 32)

While he does not explicitly make a connection between the upper classes and degeneracy, as writers mostly belong to the middle classes and not the aristocracy, Nordau offers a good summary of symptoms which apply to all genders. Degeneracy in the male is usually the result of substance abuse (drugs or alcohol), while in women, it leads to lewd behaviour. The degenerate, regardless of gender, exhibits signs of hysteria in his over-emotional behaviour, narcissism, “eccentricities of form and behaviour”; he is “passionately fond of glaring colours and extravagant forms; they wish to attract attention and make themselves talked about” (c.f. Legrain, 26) and has a compulsion for buying (27). One of Nordau’s main claims in his intersectional study of fin-de-siècle culture and class is that many degenerates can be mistaken for geniuses (he is referring here to the decadent artists), but can easily be recognized by the “excessive development of the powers of imagination” (cf. Lombroso 24), a clear characteristic of Usher himself, talented in many respects and often praised by his narrator friend. His psychosis, fuelled by his own conviction of the house’s sentience, is but one example of his unusual “powers of imagination”: “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved - in this pitiable condition - I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." (82) What spleen and hysteria have in common is their inexplicability: the wealthy bachelor’s boredom and satiety with the world is irrational, while the woman’s hysteria, rooted in trauma according to Freud’s discoveries, is a behavior confounds her physician’s skill. In Poe’s fiction, it is the detective, and not the doctor32, who opposes the unreliable narrator’s madness from the gothic tales. If detective fiction in Britain is crowned by the figure of the composed, rational, gentlemanly Sherlock and Poirot, a man of few words and sharp wits, Poe’s “man of culture” is “the supremely rational” Auguste Dupin (Zipster 44). Compared to the dull noblemen represented by Roderick Usher who seem vampirized, drained and pessimistic because the looming new century brings anxieties of the aristocracy’s uselessness, heralding its displacement by the bourgeoisie and challenging the legitimacy of an entire social class. “In “Usher” the medical men are presented as suspicious, incompetent grave-robbers whose “eager inquiries” about Madeline’s burial suggest the need to secure her within the family crypt (Tales 409).” (Perry and Sederholm 34) 32

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In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, it is rather the narrator who tries to resist the hysterization of the gothic house it cannot escape and, like the reader, becomes infected by it. Hysterical man, thus, is not only represented by the likes of Flaubert, the literary intelligentsia poseur masquerading as marginal for attention – his victims are actually the middle classes, on whom he might assert a nefarious influence. Baudelaire’s view of Poe undoubtedly influenced the former’s aesthetic, which, in turn, was the inspiration for what Max Nordau deemed the “degenerate” Decadent movement. Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on Baudelaire as “painter of modern life”33 are also relevant for the “decadent hysteric” constructed by Baudelaire and Huysmans via Poe, as the traces of degeneracy found in the incestuous body and mind of Roderick Usher foretell the sumptuous luxurious decay of both Paris and Jean Des Esseintes. The effeminate feature of the hysterical Usher will then give way to an analysis of the construction and prototype of Poe’s male hysterics and how their discourse is Gothicized in relation to decadent definitions of masculinity that blur the clear-cut bourgeois differences between the genders34. In the previous chapter I have argued that the already Othered figure of the hysteric can transcend its status of medicalized marginality as long as its image can be capitalized upon by the male writer (Flaubert). In the case of Poe, the individual plunges into the Other as a missing constituting part of himself; in the case of Dora, the conscious and the unconscious play complementary parts in the game of repression, “so that while one idea is excessively conscious, its corresponding opposite is repressed and unconscious.” (A Case… 46) This definition of “successful repression” in a hysteric does nothing if not highlight the Gothicism of the disease, whose repression-based narrative favours the eventual “the opposite of the idea to be repressed is excessively reinforced.” (A Case… 46) Like Roderick Usher, who oscillates from one extreme to the other, nineteenth-century literary criticism of Poe is varied; seen, along the lines forwarded by Baudelaire, as a man of genius fittingly misunderstood by the society he lives in, a rather European spirit crushed by the mercantile thrust of money-obsessed America, an interesting blend of scientist and artist35,

Besides The Arcades Project, in which Benjamin undetakes a survey of the Parisian galleries iconic for the consumer culture of the nineteenth century, his love of the French transpires best in his works on Baudelaire. (The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire). The title is a pun on the French poet’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life”. 34 See Michael Murphy’s chapter in his book on the influence of Marcel Proust on American culture (Exquisite Corpses, Buried Texts ). 35“Poe is rather a scientist than an artist.” (Lawrence 96) 33

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either too realistic or imaginative36, too cold37 or too passionate38, too close to sin or too far removed from it to probe it. Karl-Joris Huysmans’ “decadent Bible” was published in 1884, almost half a century after Poe’s death in 1849. Already popular in France due to Baudelaire’s translations,39 (A Rebours), acknowledging the American writer’s influence on the novel’s main character, Des Esseintes, as that unique writer who can “satisfy the requirements” of his mind (78). Huysmans sees Baudelaire as superior in providing an X-ray of the soul’s “thought and feeling”, while Poe, working “in the sphere of morbid psychology, “carried out the scrutiny of the will.” (78). Entitling his 1840 collections of Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque40, Poe seems to vacillate between his two main modes, caricature/satire and psychological terror, both described by Daniel Hoffman as subdivisions of the Gothic (“Grotesques and Arabesques” 11). According to these definitions, the grotesque describes its monsters with some profusion of detail, while the arabesque uses the same intricacy of pattern to obscure instead of revealing. Tellingly. Hoffman, notes, the absence of anthropomorphic representation in the arabesque, religiously motivated by the interdiction of the representation of God in Islam, is consistent with Poe’s evasion of the human form – terror, in his tales, is created by a consistency of uncanniness that permeates the plot for the required effect. The application of two spatial terms corresponding to jocular and serious tones to gothic narratives, in Hoffman’s view, underscores Poe as a writer who transforms the tableaux vivants into tableaux morts (11) while simultaneously showing the intrinsic duplicity in what he calls “desperate” attempts to unify the perception of a split self: “How can we tell reality from its mirror, the world from its picture in a work of art, the image from the image of the image? [...]Identity itself, the very vessel of perception, may be fatally flawed, fatally broken in twain.” (Hoffman 13). The poetics of looking lends to the works of Poe an aesthetic element central to the interpretation of his identity politics. In my discussion of hysterical narrative in Gilman’s and James’ text, the Subject formation of “He added to a Greek perception of form the Oriental passion for decoration.” (Stedman 126) Lawrence: “All Poe’s style, moreover, has this mechanical quality, as his poetry has a mechanical rhythm. He never sees anything in terms of life, almost always in terms of matter, jewels, marble etc., - or in terms of force, scientific.”(99) 38 Thomas Holley Chivers sees in his works: “an equal blending of Art and Passion.” (“New Life of Edgar Allan Poe”) 39 Baudelaire did not correspond with Poe, but thought of him as a kindred spirit. In a letter he admits to having recognized in his writings phrases and words he could have written himself. He is also the one to dub him a poète maudit. (Samuel 88) 40 The two terms were borrowed from an essay by Sir Walter Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition”. 36 37

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the female characters is articulated through the hysterical narrative by the same tension of opposition to the male dominant discourse; in Poe, the male narrator’s conflict is with himself, within a psyche split between masculine and feminine. As Camille Paglia notes, “His women have many names, but there is only one narrator, one voice. Poe’s persona or Magister Ludi is the Romantic male heroine of passive suffering.” (573). Emphasizing the gender ambiguity of his characters, Paglia uses the term “male heroine” to refer to the narrators, not a single one of whom is female. Initially a genre defined by the feminine, a captivity narrative of nubile heroines on the run from male villains, the gothic retains its feminine characteristics, its excess and association with Woman/Nature in the works of male authors and their male characters. Camille Paglia lists Poe among her trinity of American Decadents, among Hawthorne and Melville, whose works she reads as following the footsteps of English Romanticism which “fuses with a debilitated Puritanismin a “style of sexual perversity, closure, fragmentation or decay” (Sexual Personae 572). In the following pages I will argue that, instead of representing the universality of the human psyche tortured by the problem of innate evil/imp of the perverse, the question of their madness in Poe is gendered. His narrators are not just mad, but proper hysterics, in a reverse journey to return to the phallic mother; his stories are subversive because they undermine standard views of masculinity as stable. His mad narrators, interpreted for so long as embodying typically male anxieties of the fear of the feminine, express that fear by becoming themselves, feminine, by merging with that which they fear most. The oppositions remain, but it is no longer clear which category the characters belongs to, whether the male is still rational one and the female, the seduced, blurring the boundaries between the two. Poe’s obsessive concern with dead women is constructed along the already-feminine tropes of a genre that embodies the feminine Other. To be closer to Ligeia or to Berenice is to also die, symbolically and metaphorically, in madness, and rejoin them in death; madness would permit the fantasy to come true, but it entails the loss of their masculinity, for to follow the woman into death/madness is to become feminized oneself. The ultimate proof of self-annihalition is to become that which your fear. Poe’s narrators are feminized not only by madness itself, but by assuming the passive, stereotypically feminine stance of powerlessness, in a reversal of the process undergone by the female characters. Gilman’s protagonist begins the stoy as passive, the stereotypically male view of femininity as lack; she is dispossessed of the object of her “work”, a castrated phallic mother. As a Decadent, effeminate man, Roderick Usher also seems emasculated; the appropriation of feminine hysteria is connected to his own 48

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perception of himself as “Other” due to the possible guilt of incest, it is a strategy of evading the strain of difference by fusing with feminine nature. Bedecked with all the signs of Culture littered around his once-resplendent home, Roderick is the ultimate representative of the male fear of Culture’s regression back to nature, the main fin-de-siècle obsession amply described by Nordau. I.5. Hysterical Man in Poe: “The Cask of Amontillado” Poe’s mad narrators act against themselves and in spite of themselves; frequent assurances of rationality and self-awareness notwithstanding, they ultimately give in to the seduction of the irrational. The opposite stance is assumed in Poe’s detective stories, with their game of detection (as in the famous “The Purloined Letter”, which garnered the attention of both Jacques Lacan41 and Jacques Derrida42). The social Darwinism of the mid-nineteenth century, present in the theories of phrenology and physiognomy43 (now fully understood as pseudo-science) of Poe’s gothic stories are also the seduction narratives of the gothic – in this instance, however, it is the male that is fleeing seduction and entrapment. Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his studies on the novel (Theory and History of Literature: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), heteroglossia, polyphony and polyglossia have been appropriated by an array of genres. Included upon publication in the West in his study of the novels of Dostoevsky, the concept of “carnival” will be further developed in the dissertation on François Rabelais in close connection with that of “grotesque”. Bakhtin’s major contribution to literary criticism consists in rejecting the mononuclear, controllable view of the literary text, arguing for a multitude of languages (heteroglossia) or voices (polyphony) within the novel. The carnivalesque is the preexistent state or condition necessary for these plural voices to coexist. Drawing on the legacy of the ancient Greek Saturnalia, carnival perpetuates the tradition of the celebration of reversed values, of upside-down customs, the beneficial, healthy disruption of order that would otherwise lead to the implosion of society under the many restrictions of civilization. The fête of misrule, carnival allows the many voices of the novel to coexist without sliding into cacophony.44 In “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” (Ecrits. The First Complete Edition in English). In his 1975 response to Lacan’s article (“The Purveyor of Truth”). 43 For a full analysis of phrenology applied to Roderick Usher, see Brette Zimmerman’s article. (“Phrenological Allegory in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"”). 44 An interesting parallel with the roles and uses of carnival in literature could be linked to Robert Darnton’s 1985 book, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural 41 42

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In the guise of a deceptively straightforward Gothic story, Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado is set during the Italian carnival, depicting the unfolding of a murder at the very time when the habitual norms of conduct are abolished. From the point of view of the narrative, the criteria of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque are met when the characters make use of language to meet different ends – the very definition of heteroglossia. The speech of Fortunato, the murderer, is effective on two layers of meaning – a superficial one, which facilitates the benign conversation with the victim, who “did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation” (374), and a second, secret one, whose significance is only visible to Montresor. The ruse the murderer depends on is perpetrated through the clever use of language – although the code they use is the same, victim and executioner understand and mean different things. As early as the second paragraph, the careful choice of words betrays the way in which Montresor intends to inflict revenge upon his victim. If Fortunato’s defenses are lowered due to the spirit of carnival and wine, rendering him unable to “read between the lines”, the careful reader will make the connection between “immolation” and Amontillado, that the cask of Amontillado will become the means by which Fortunato will become the “immolato” of Montresor’s palazzo, his prized, undiscovered possession. Half a century undisturbed, Fortunato’s earthly remains will eventually meet the expectation of the canonical locus suspectus of Gohic fiction it first seemed to advertise. The title, thus, is simultaneously revealing and misleading, apparently subverting its very purpose. By advancing expectations denied by the text, only to be confirmed later, Poe resorts to the stock conventions of Gothic fiction, where the very mention of a cask, hidden in the damp, intricate catacombs of an Italian palazzo, is a transparent invitation to lurid discoveries. The cask of Amontillado, for readers who are not acquainted with its significance prior to the explanation in the text, bears the ominous implications of Gothic fiction. Amontillado could easily be mistaken for a toponym, for it takes its name from the Montillado region of Spain. The first association to spring to mind is with Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho – the cask already has the readers wondering about its mysterious contents, while the Spanish name establishes the connection with the preferred Southern European setting of Gothic literature, ever so abundant in casks,

History (Darnton). The deviant behavior of the apprentices who tried and murdered their master’s cats reminds one of the mockery made of authority during carnival. Unlike the coronation of a King of Fools, the fake trial of the cats takes part outside of carnival as a result of the unsublimated pressures of their work.

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cabinets and secret passages awaiting the hero/heroines’ discovery45, leaving the reader to wonder what the contents of the enticing cask might be. However, as the narrative begins to unfold, the meaning and contents of the cask are revealed: the Amontillado is nothing more than a brand of sherry, of which Montresor boasts of having unwittingly purchased a crate without having asked Fortunato’s allegedly expert opinion. If the curiosity of the readers has been assuaged, even baffled or disappointed, the cask successfully sparks the interest of the victim: Fortunato’s ego is deliberately stirred in order to lure him to the catacombs, where he will be murdered. From the moment in which he leads his friend to his vaults, the conversation between the two takes place under the auspices of heteroglossia. Montresor, the intradiegetic narrator, is the only one who knows that there is, in fact, no real cask except the casket (coffin) of mortar and stone he is going to build for his naïve victim. The double entendres (cask-casket, fortune-misfortune, trickster-fool) continue, for the immurement of Fortunato in the intricate vaults of Montresor’s castle constitutes precisely the kind of grim discovery the reader of gothic literature expected to stumble upon in the first place. The victim’s name - Fortunato – the one whom Fortune favours, the lucky one, is dressed as a fool during the carnival. Again, this is a source of deliberate polysemy on the part of Poe, who capitalizes on the double meaning of ‘fool’ as both jester/trickster and dupe. Thus, Fortunato’s garb, meant as a merry disguise occasioned by the festive atmosphere, could not be more becoming. He literally becomes the fool, providing cruel entertainment for his injured former friend and future murderer. The carnival is also the time when the habitual order of things is reversed, when luck is no longer to be depended on. A man to be feared and respected, with only one weakness, pertaining to pride in being a skilled connoisseur of wines, Fortunato finds himself in a position of misfortune and helplessness: “The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells.” (374) The presaging ridicule of his attire is contrasted with that of the narrator, who assumes the outer signs of nobility and power: “Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; and putting on a mask of black silk and drawing a roquelaire closely about my Austen’s first novel was published in 1817, 39 years before Poe’s short story. Here, the impressionable young heroine is influenced by Radcliffe’s novel to such a point that she can barely contain herself upon arriving on the grounds of the century-old Northanger Abbey, home to her friend Eleanor, whom she has made in Bath. During her stay, Catherine expects skeletons and terrible secrets to loom in very corner, to which effect she pries open a cask and an old Japan cabinet, in addition to furtively exploring a closed part of the house to discover proof of Eleanor’s mother’s murder by her very husband. She thinks herself terribly foolish when her exploits prove fruitless. 45

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person, I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo.” (375) The image of the pair leaving for the catacombs accentuates the inequality of the couple: the intoxicated Fortunato, in his silly attire, appears as helpless as a lamb, leaning on his sober friend for support. With his features covered and majestically draped by his cape, Montresor is the very personification of nemesis, suggestive of Mr. Death leading a childlike victim to doom. If Fortunato’s name is indicative of good fortune, Montresor is French for “my treasure” (mon trésor), the reference to treasure referring back to the mysterious contents of the elusive cask. Nonetheless “trésor” is phonetically similar to “trahison” - the treason the narrator is guilty of by luring Fortunato towards a horrible death by making use of the motive of the treasure. For Montrésor, the “treasure” at stake is the life of Fortunato himself; while for the victim, the cask of precious cargo (which is, ironically, quite banal in comparison to the gold-filled trunks of treasure-hunters) is a Pandora’s box hiding his fall due to his weakness for liquor. By the cunning use of reverse psychology, Montresor repeatedly warns his victim of the dampness of the vaults, entreating him to go back, as if to persuade Fortunato that it is the victim’s own foolish persistence that brings out his death. He is not aware of the truth he speaks when he says that the cough will not kill him (“I shall not die of a cough” 376), a statement which Montresor is eager to confirm (“True, true.” 376). Montresor continues his double entendres by drinking to the long life of his friend and by explaining his family’s coat of arms and motto. The serpent biting the heel it is crushed by could be a Biblical reference to the book of Genesis, to the fall of man and the exile of the Adamic couple from the Garden of Eden46. If the polyphony and heteroglossia of the text have, thus far, concerned secret vistas of communication between reader and Montresor, leaving Fortunato in the dark, the dual interpretation of the heraldry is the first to hint towards the incomplete assessment of the situation by Montresor. As the sole narrator of the text, he is convinced of the utter control over both narrative and his victim; for him, the defeated snake stands for his righteous vendetta over Fortunato, as further shown by the motto, Nemo me inpune lacessit. However, the Biblical reference reverts the meaning back to Montresor, who is clearly the man about to sin, forever cast out of Paradise, especially as he perpetrates his murder “for the love of God” (380). The reference to the secret society of the Free Masons, of which Montresor is obviously a member, advances yet another instance of Each of the trespassers of God’s interdiction are condemned, including the snake: “And I will put enmity/between you and the woman,/ and between your offspring[a] and hers;/he will crush your head,/and you will strike his heel”. http://www.biblegateway.com/ passage/?search=Genesis+3&version=NIV, Consulted on February 14, 2016. 46

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heteroglossia, since Montresor will temporarily assume the de facto stance of the mason by immuring his friend in the deepest recess of the catacombs. The overall menacing mood of the text seems too self-consciously constructed to be in earnest, for Poe’s complete appropriation of the Gothic paraphernalia is strewn with as many instances of comic relief as there are misunderstandings and double-entendres. The bells on Fortunato’s fool cap echo the subversive nature of Poe’s text. Their jingling, noted on several occasions by Montresor, seems to accompany each reference to Fortunato’s intoxication, but also mark the pair’s passage through the vaults, as if during a funereal procession to the grave. As the twosome leaves in search of the Amontillado, Motresor notices that “The tread of his gait was unsteady, and the bells jingled as the strode.” (Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” 376); when they stop in the underground corridors for a first drink, “He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled” (377), followed, immediately after the explanation of the coat of arms, by “The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Médoc.” (377) The repeated jingling of the bells surrounding the Biblical reference, alongside the self-declared change in perception of Montresor himself, ought to raise an alarm as to the sinful act that is about to happen – a subconscious warning ignored by the murderer, read, instead, as a reminder of Fortunato’s foolishness in having first offended, then trusted him. The last reference to the fool’s cap marks the definitive enclosure of Fortunato: “I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells.” (380-381) – a last chance for undoing the deed, which the murderer decides to ignore, attributing it to a different cause: “My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so” (381).There are several, polyphonous voices and relationships at work in the text, as well as disruptive elements that make the nature of Poe’s text unreliable. There are questions that remain unanswered: what is the reason behind the murder, how much is the narrator to be trusted, is Fortunato the only “ignoramus’, the only one to not comprehend the real implications of his predicament, are bells of the jester’s cap jingling for one, or two “fools”? The many possible interpretations and intertextual layers of the Gothic text seem to define Poe’s short story as the very definition of the carnivalesque, proposing expectations only to subvert and thwart them at a later stage. I.6. “The Turn of the Screw” as a Hysterical Narrative “How Many Times Can They Turn the Screw?” laments an article title in faux exasperation with the filmic reprisals of James’s popular novella. 53

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Exaggerated for the purposes of emphasis and clickbait, the piece ranks the nine most intriguing adaptations of “the most famous ghost story”, including the 1992 one, generally perceived to be a flop, but given a solid 9/10 by the author (Nightshade). Regardless of variations in critical reception, this version is intriguing rather for the slight changes in setting and aesthetic that it brings to James’s story than for its faithfulness to it. The peculiarity and queerness of its characters, is allegedly adapted “for the MTV generation”, with “startling images, enigmatic musical cues, and quick-cut editing techniques”; these are idiosyncrasies that give its distinctly eclectic early 1990s flavor. The changes in time frame which combine the early nineties with the sixties adds an extra layer of flamboyance to the editing, in which perceptions of modernity and joie de vivre act as a foil to the governess’ own unpreparedness to face the real world, explaining her subsequent madness. The opening scene, if anything, is a testament to the contrasts that this ingénue is pitted against that largely shape her view of the world – she is portrayed as a beautiful, inexperienced young thing dressed in modest garb that seems to have been borrowed directly from the 1890s. Her employer exhibits the wealthy flamboyance of someone ironically reassessing the fashions of the past – nevertheless, he is outrageously modern, poised, and sophisticated, while she is shy, unassertive, dated – the pair literally look like they are one century apart. With the governess’ seclusion at Bly, it seems that she is merely returning to the Victorian milieu that she belongs to, while the dazzling quarters of the rich, handsome uncle’s London estate remain inaccessible by virtue of insurmountable differences in both space and time. What catches the viewer’s eye is not the by-the-book representation of the governess as an inexperienced ingénue, but the eccentricities of the wellto-do dashing bachelor who steals her heart and who is credited with supplying her with the motive of her erratic behavior. Julian Sands’ knight in shining armor is eccentric and even “camp”, as Jane Nightshade claims, overplaying his character. His dress and manner are those of the dazed opium eater whose most outrageous behaviors can be excused just because he is rich, charming and handsome. The interview scene begins with him greeting the interview while lying on a high, four post Victorian bed, inhaling what could or could not be hallucinatory substances on what seems to be a hookah to music reminiscent of the 1960s - his slow, soft speech as he takes off his tinted glasses to greet his prospective employee recalls the opium eaters of the century (Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). The vast cultural spaces that separate them is denoted by the physical distance between them, as well the room’s partitioned design: the governess’ part of the room is decorated according to what could be the minimalist, pure geometry of either 1960s or 1990s design, with glass walls, a leopard fur carpet, block colors and purity of the lines, while his side of the 54

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room is more similar to a Victorian bedroom than anything else. Dark wooden essences, carved, gilded fabrics attest to the influence of Orientalist opulence, while the Mr. Cooper’s clothes themselves – the striped trousers, sateen vest and frilly Renaissance shirt, correspond to the aloof allure of the flamboyant aristocrat caught at a time of leisure, drifting off in an opium haze. This hybrid space, half bedroom, half office is redolent both of modernity and reliance on reinterpreted cultural signifiers of past decadence, as the moneyed classes themselves keep their privileges by dint of wealth, surviving in a bubble of comfort oblivious to the changes in the outside world or the lives of ordinary people, such as the governess. To pass through the modern glass doors of the office/bedroom is to be lured into the past via a promise of modernity foreshadows the young woman’s regression into a fantasy realm of the past in which her role as savior of the children can be fulfilled; this is mediated by the enticing figure of the handsome aristocrat. Highly inappropriate for conducting of an interview, the room is a setting for self-fashioned performance of aristocracy as conceited, selfish and spoiled. It is consciousness of their privilege that allows them to greet their prospective members of staff as unprofessionally as they like, even in a camp, in Jane Nightshade’s words, manner. Though Mr. Cooper does deign to eventually get up from bed and actually properly interview the governess, it is only when her diffidence makes it clear that she might not take the job, some two minutes into the scene, that he assumes a more engaging stance. The luscious image of luxe, calme et volupté that he had presented so far might be shattered, but it translates in a shift of the power balance between the two. The governess is asked to come closer, sitting on the great pillows strewn on the floor, harem-style, thus being positioned even lower in contrast with the high Victorian post bed, but this first imbalance creates intimacy (or the illusion of intimacy) by the woman’s inclusion in the coveted upper-class space of the bachelor’s bedroom. Her fantasy of transcending class and the fulfillment of erotic drives is materialized by the literal breach of this spatial divide. Julian Sands’ exaggerated portrayal of a bored and rich young man whose only worry seems to be the care of two children who have rudely interrupted his spleen (or performance of it), as well as the double visual encoding of the modern office/Victorian bedroom, might be a means of announcing the governess’s own projections on the scene. The book that influences her perception of her employer is Jane Eyre, which ends with a happy marriage between a young woman in her exact position and the mysterious aristocrat, who is also stuck caring for an unwanted child; the social gulf between the two, as well as its perceived insurmountability, might be colored by the young woman’s own prejudice, as the story is, at this 55

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point, narrated from her perspective. Her view of the gentleman would explain his exaggerated, idiosyncratic portrayal, but one more in keeping with Roderick Usher than Mr. Rochester. Her view of him is a construct gleaned from literature, like the typical hysteric. In the prologue, Douglas admits to the governess’ passion for the absent master of Bly; he also provides the context in which the young woman, despite the many prohibitive conditions imposed upon her (the provision that the uncle never be contacted, the isolation on the estate, the lack of opportunities for socialization besides with servants, who would necessarily occupy a lower social position and generally, the absence of any prospect for the fulfillment of romantic love while caring for her young charges), she accepts the position out of unrequited love and perhaps a misguided hope to see it fulfilled. The reasons why he should never wish to be contacted are less the focus of critical attention than the effects of endowing the governess with “supreme authority” at Bly have received; the relationship between the master and Quint, who is described as an uppity valet too arrogant for his station in life, given much too much attention by the master, might explain the governess’ fear about Miles’ corruption and the nature of the “bad thing” that led to his expulsion in school. The “homosexual panic” Eve Kosofky Sedgwick mentions might rationalize, for the governess, her rejection by the bachelor of her desire in terms which are easier to bear, as it would perhaps be more acceptable for a connection between an employee and an aristocrat not to materialize because of the latter’s homosexuality than due to mere class difference. Hints about the boy’s bad behavior being learnt from “before her time” at Bly are provided by Mrs. Grose, who tells her about Peter Quint’s connection with Miss Jessel, an affair that is frowned upon by the estate staff, as well as the valet’s free use of his master’s wardrobe and affections. His liberality with the bachelor’s clothes, as he wears his vests, can be perceived as just the defiance of a spoiled underling who abuses his superior’s trust. The governess might see in the appearance of Quint the projection of her own desire for his master, as he is perceived as his double by the wearing of his clothes, as her romantic musings as she takes her walk at dusk, when he first sees him, take place with the expectation of “meeting someone” – the obvious fantasy of her running into the actual object of her desire, the dashing London bachelor. In Poe, the fear of sexuality is expressed by the gothic consumption of the self by the mother, a return to the feminine which a regression into death; in the case of the governess, repression of her erotic drive gives birth to an exacerbation of aberrant sexuality in the children, whom she thinks were perverted by Jessel and 56

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Quint.47 The hypothesis of the ghosts being the mere creations of the young woman’s repression of sexual desire can also translate as the projection of homosexual desire between master and servant, as, presumably, the former governess’ corruption of Flora would also be homosexual in nature. Miles’ ambiguous statement that he merely “said things” “to those he liked” as the reason for his expulsion confirms the governess’ assumptions in the final scene, the one which is fatal to the little boy. Edmund Wilson’s 1934 psychoanalytic interpretation of “The Turn of The Screw”48 elicited a wave of controversy as violent as the first reactions to the story itself as “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature” (The Independent cf. Felman 96).49 While responses to the primary text dub story itself as “evil”, Felman points out that, as a work of fiction, its “danger” actually consists in the perversion reflected back by the readers’ minds: what is perceived as the most scandalous thing about this scandalous story is that we are forced to participate in the scandal, that the reader's innocence (my emphasis) cannot remain intact: there is no such thing as an innocent reader of this text. In other words, the scandal is not simply in the text, it resides in our relation to the text, in the text's effect on us, its readers: what is outrageous in the text is not simply that of which the text is speaking, but that which makes it speak to us. (Felman “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” 99)

In other words, corruption is in the eye of the beholder, as a work of fiction in itself is neither “evil” nor “innocuous” unless interpreted as such.50 Similarly, further such “scandal” ensued and expanded as secondary literature pertaining to the story developed against two lines: the psychoanalytic one purported by Wilson and his followers and their Her views might have been influenced by anti-onanist and birth-control literature of the first half of the nineteenth century; this, according to Philip Brett, would explain why the first thing that she thinks about upon reading the letter from school is “contamination” rather than theft. (Brett 6) 48 “The Ambiguity of Henry James”, in The Triple Thinkers. Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects. (Wilson). 49 Such strong rejections of literary works are not surprising in a late nineteenth century context (the story was published in January 1898), given that similar responses occurred quite late in twentieth century as the belief in the morality of art continued to blur difference between reality and fiction in the public mind. Symptomatic of such attitudes would be the responses to Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story The Lottery, mistaken for the account of a real event in rural America by certain readers, and the fact that the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted as late as 1961. 50 Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” would certainly point in the direction of casting off the over-intellectualisation of literary analysis rediscovering an “erotics of reading”. One could even argue that this is precisely the gothic text’s aim: to destabilize the coherent rational self, to unabashedly abandon oneself to the excesses of its forbidden pleasures. 47

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“metaphysical” opponents, champions of the governess’ innocence, sanity and nobility of purpose (Feldman 98). According to Felman, one of the psychoanalytical reading’s most vocal opponents, Robert Heilman (in “The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw”) as he “accuses Wilson of alleged "hysterical blindness"„ (Felman 100). Ironically, as Shoshana Felman points out, “it is the very critic who excludes the hypothesis of neurosis from the story, who is rediscovering neurosis in Wilson's critical interpretation of the story, an interpretation which he rejects precisely on the grounds that pathology as such cannot explain the text” (100). This glaring contradiction in Heilman’s criticism of the pshychoanalytical interpretation is nothing but an emphasis on the fact that if a story is not hysterical, then its reader must be. If Elaine Showalter’s assumption that the hysterical narrative of the Dora case is one subsumed, ordered and scientifically curated by Freud, this entails the conclusion that the hysterical narrative is nothing more than a patriarchal discursive construct legitimized by science. Psychoanalysis would be, in this case, a mean of incorporating, processing and restructuring a marginal, “diseased” discourse in terms that abide by the rules of the dominant ideology. Bearing the premises of both Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination and Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic in mind, Freud’s account of Dora’s rejection of his method allows only one, legitimate and socially acceptable variant of her story, that which belongs to the figure of authority, i.e. the psychoanalyst. Similarly, in James’s governess’ sprawling, topsy-turvy and unreliable narrative, gothic and hysterical/hysterical and gothic, the frame sets up the scene for the discourse’s absorption by a source that is “trustworthy”, incrementally so as several minds and hands “filter” the story before it reaches the audience: the governess’ frantic speech is first tamed and cast into the permanent mould of the written word; it is then kept by Douglas and read to the audience on the second day of Christmas; Douglas’ retelling is then refiltered by a third consciousness, that of the frame narrative “I” (James himself?) who provides his own account, despite the pretense that the words belong to the governess and to the governess alone. In her 1986 article on the similarities between the Dora case and “The Turn of the Screw”, Paula Marantz Cohen provides different names for the psychoanalytic and religious readings of the story, patriarchal and matriarchal, respectively (84), alleging that to prefer one is to automatically repress the other. Because Freud’s method allows the reader to psychoanalyze the hidden depths of the master’s discourse, the clinician’s reading of his case emerges as biased; assuming the role of curer of the girl’s hysteria and her restitution to society (as represented by the male figures of authority in her life, fer father and Herr K., who are also those who repress her), Freud is fine-tuning her sexuality to the prescriptive Victorian norms. 58

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When he remarks that, after stopping her therapeutic visits, she did manage to overcome her illness and lead a normal life, the Viennese therapist mentions her having gotten married as the ultimate proof of her sexual normalcy as defined to her “productive” role in society as wife and mother; he takes her from his father’s hands (who had already been his patient, receiving treatment for a sexually transmitted disease, and whose own point of view is unreliable) to her future husband’s. The ultimate goal of curing hysteria is the former patient’s integration into society; despite discontinuing her treatment with Freud, Dora manages to cure her Oedipus complex and cathect on a different male than her father of an extension of her father (Herr K) and lead a normal life. Cohen’s remark that he is enjoying the “extraordinarily powerful and privileged position of creating ‘normal’ women out of a sex which is inherently sick and abnormal” (77) places Freud in the category of discipliners and punishers of the medical profession, whose role is subordinated to the discursive regimes of power. The fact that his method was questioned and denounced as pseudo-science, or pseudo-knowledge, made the incentive of professionalizing psychoanalysis as a legitimate medical therapy all the more pressing and, according to Cohen, the gaps in the hysteric’s narrative, which are due to the untimely termination of their session, is actually an advantage for Freud’s authority over the case, as it allows him to supply the missing parts with pieces that confirm his diagnosis. It is in this gap-filling that authorizes the male narrator’s control of female’s perspective that Freud’s Dora case and James’s are similar. Thus, if psychoanalytic readings are patriarchal, it is because they give credence to thesis of the governess’ sexual repression, thus emulating Freud himself, whose attitude towards Dora is condescending; perhaps even without realizing and in keeping with the patriarchal standards of the day, he is joining Herr. K and her father in assuming that the girl is secretly in love with her suitor and, in fact, that her secret desire is the return of his advances, which she claims are unwanted. Assuming the psychoanalyst’s stance, critics of this faction also rob the female protagonist of her claim to veracity and impose their own biases and narrative. The matriarchal side, on the other hand, provides the “salutary reversal of patriarchal interpretation - as the rightful if violent return of the repressed in the assertion of the female perspective.” (84), by legitimizing the governess’ speech as the truthful one. Edwin Fussel, in The Ontology of the Turn of the Screw, attaches great importance to James’s governess, claiming that she “has gone to confound the house of James criticism” (118) focusing on the plural genesis of the story, among which the governess is only one: The manuscript, which we are told is physically present, which it is said we are to hear read aloud, which in a manner of speaking we do hear read aloud,

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Two narratives in the first person are thus articulated, James’ “I” of the Prologue and the “I” of the governess’ manuscript; the story is, in effect, co-told by James. Though the number of the manuscript’s drafts and rewritings is unknown, the governess’ raw style is quite apt in convincing the reader that the events at Bly are recorded in real time. This, however, does not match the stylistic requirements of a diary, whose daily entries would not be accompanied by the narrator’s self-reflexive comments and ultimately “fails to answer the question how a diary, etc., came to be so well written” (Fussel 121). Compared to the hysterical narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, for instance, and despite the impression that an account consigned to the page in the past tense coincides with the moment of writing, the governess’ text must surely be reined in and edited post-factum; it reaches the reader unfiltered; its medium is the intimate and transgressive page of the diary, instead of a canvas made public twice, first orally, then through publication. This is a hysterical narrative in the first person which has been edited to appear as such – one of its authors is not aware of the discourse’s hysterical tendencies, while the other James himself, allows them to shine as one of the text’s key attractions, as the second, and final editor of the manuscript, is James. The hysterical narrative in “The Turn of the Screw” becomes, thus, as self-reflexive construct of itself, an outsider’s view of what a hysterical woman’s narrative would sound like, delivered through careful editing of a man. Dora’s story is told by Freud in a forthright manner, while James indulges in the subterfuge of the manuscript to give his hysterical construct a higher claim of veracity and a “predictable air of naiveté” (Fussel 123). Quoting Searle, Foucault then discusses the question of the author’s name and the way in which it is an essential tool in defining the work, to such an extent that one defines the other: “Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description. When one says ‘Aristotle’, one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, of a series, of definite descriptions, such as “the author” of the Analytics,” “the founder of ontology”, and so forth.” (211) Similarly, Fussel argues, when one discusses “The Turn of the Screw”, one does not simply think of the narrative belonging to the governess, but to Henry James, placing it in the tradition of his established corpus as either aligning with or deviating from it. 60

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Fussel’s reading of James’ story is in complete resonance with the foucauldian analysis of writing. Concerned, as always, with power relations, in his 1969 essay What is an Author?, Foucault offers a useful perspective on power relations and the connections between author, narrator, and text. While positioning himself as an anti-structuralist and acknowledging the premise of the death of the author, Foucault is interested in taking the question of authorship even further to see the social impact the question of the author and his text(s) could have. Despite the author’s “death”, he argues, there are ways in which his presence endures. The game of writing [écriture] is essential for the articulation of the subject; the only thing the death of the author achieves to constantly hide its visibility instead of revealing it: “Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.” (206) Writing as a space into which the author disappears is an ideal alternative definition of Gothicism and hysteria, for both are entities which rely on hiding, on covering one’s tracks, just like the hysterics fights to preserve their integrity by prolonging the disease51; at the same time, it also encourages the doubling and plurality of the narrative “I”: ‘in a novel offered as a narrator’s account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. (Foucault 215). The self-effacement, or disappearance of the author, is however replaced with the work itself [oeuvre], Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing. (…) If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a “work”? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment. (“What is an Author?” 206-207)

From characters to narrators to the audience, none of the participants to the “sheer terror” of the tale are innocent – they actively engage in the pretense that the existence of the manuscript is, in fact, the ultimate William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force” from his collection of medically-inspired Doctor Stories centers around a young little girl who defends her right to be ill, physically fighting her examination that will reveal that she is, indeed, suffering from a contagious and deadly disease that would surely kill her if not treated. 51

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guarantee that this story will be more terrifying than the others because it is real. This assumption, of course, is not true – what matters is the story’s potential to achieve a certain effect. The previous paragraphs have shown how, instead of providing tangible proof of the story’s veracity, the manuscript is just a step in a tale crafted by several wordsmiths. Freud’s readers are presumed to go through his account of the Dora case out of scientific interest or perhaps a personal preoccupation with hysteria, as patients themselves; the readers of “The Turn of the Scre”“ deliberately engage with a tale whose effect they expect to be “terrifying”. What the scientific and the gothic discourse have in common is the expectation that the text transgress the limits of both language and believability; they are both supposed to challenge the status-quo of sanity and normalcy; the body of the text defends its illness from the doctor’s probing gaze or indiscreet questions just as Dora resists her psychoanalyst or the governess persuades herself that the children are in deadly danger of moral corruption. A scientific text is subversive by its very nature, as it can dislodge previously unchallenged world-views from their fossilized sites, while a gothic text is primarily concerned with violent revelations of the repressed. Thus, readers of both texts expect a particular kind of thrill: the harsh, perhaps shocking, exposure of truths – the more scandalous (“oh, how delicious!”), the better. It is perhaps fitting to make a note here of the fact that the story’s power to terrify hinges on the gothic story being centered around children – not one, but two. This is an additional “turn of the screw” precisely because it starts from the premise that innocence – perverted innocence, for the sake of precision, is most likely to arouse interest. Innocence is lost and spoiled for any reader of gothic romances and it is the very hope with which a gothic afficionado picks up the book; a reader of psychopathology would presumably be prompted by the thirst for new and exciting knowledge, and naturally expect the toppling of their old beliefs, of their former “innocence”. “The Turn of the Screw” begins, in fact, by questioning the very effect of literature on the audience, toying with that “innocence of the reader” that Shoshana Felman was identifying as the cause of the fervent interpretive dissent elicited by the story. Before the governess and the children are even introduced there is the frame narrative, and it is there that this presumed innocence is established and probed. It is clear that the role of the frame narrative is far from perfunctory: its characters (Douglas and the undisclosed narrative “I”) and conventions (the existence of a manuscript, the fact that it has to be sent for, thus prolonging the suspense, the doublings – not one narrator, but two false ones, until the voice of the governess emerges, as well as the story revolving around two children, not just one, the dialogue between Douglas and those present) which seem to wryly acknowledge the traditions 62

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and conventions of the ghost story as a sub-genre of the gothic story to the point of pushing it into the realms of pastiche.52 The chaotic premises of the hysterical narrative are laid in the Prologue, the plurality of voices and mirrorings present there anticipating the governess’ determination to keep chaos at bay by controlling the narrative, as well as the children. There is even an agglomeration of such characters and literary devices so as to plainly declare the story’s entrenchment in its chosen genre53, a genre known for its intrinsic reliance on creating an unsettling mood and on doubling, which are both present in the introduction. The drawing room setting is deliberately overcast by the previous story’s effect so as to foreshadow the manifold labyrinthic narrative and interpretive meanderings in the next tale, the governess’s. This is apparent in the state of only partly relieved tension the text opens with: “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.” (James 21) The tension is natural in the context of a required intermezzo in what is a marathon or contest of ghost stories (yet another literary reference to the gothic story’s not only illustrious past, but very origins, if we bear in mind that Frankenstein was written as a way to pass the time while literary celebrities lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary and Percy Shelley were kept indoors by bad weather). It is significant that James emphatically constructs his narrative around the semantics of the “story”, since is the narrative that grips (“had held us”), that fascinates (“sufficiently breathless”), not the narrator - the primary source of meaning. It is why the governess’ narrative must speak for itself, it must reach its public directly, eschewing any proxy – it is controlled by the governess, and the audience must appreciate whether she is skilled at “entrancing” them or not – whether by truth or deception is secondary. What takes precedence over the “correct interpretation” of the story is its effect on the public: a gothic story must, first and foremost, captivate and enthrall. Whether the governess herself has control over her narrative or whether a gothic story manages to overpower and subvert its narrator by projecting a false sense of control is another aspect that defines James’ story as quintessentially unstable and thus, truly In a way similar to Poe’s meanderings, doublings and overall excessiveness of perception and detail. 53 A genre which was imposed upon James by the editor: “The Turn of the Screw was James's response to an invitation from the editor of Collier’s Weekly, the illustrated magazine published in New York, to write a twelve-part ghost story by the end of 1897.” (Beidler 13) 52

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gothic,54 for narrative ambiguity is not only a staple Henry James’ style but also one of the main features of the genre. In the well-established literary tradition of the frame story (The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales), each story is supposed to trump its predecessor. A sense of dissatisfaction is already settling in after the previous child-and-ghost story’s first thrill of horror has passed, as the listeners are satisfied with the effect (“it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be”) and silent – either still recovering from its gruesomeness, or noticing a sense of lack in its technical flaws (“sufficiently breathless” instead of a stronger modifier, such as “utterly”, would suggest, as well as the fact that the silence is broken by the singular comment that “it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child”). That the involvement of a child is the story’s (essentially a technicality) only merit and that its only voiced praise is not proper praise, but a mere statement of generic accuracy (“it was gruesome”) is an open invitation to appease the listeners’ baroque sweet tooth with an exceptionally terrifying gothic delicacy. 55 Yet another story fails to provide the expected effect, thus delaying the public’s satisfaction, introducing a narrative “turn of the screw” in winding them up: “Some one (sic!) else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following.” (James 22). If Douglas is not following and our anonymous narrator is distracted enough to watch him, it means that at least two “sophisticated” 56 listeners have failed to be entranced by the ghost story. Douglas is waiting for the right time for his, better, tale, to fall on ripe ears: “This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.” (22) The two days that it takes for the mystery of Douglas’ secrecy to be revealed are recognized as the ploys (“quiet art”) of deliberate strategy: "I quite agree- in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not Gothic and hysterical are, yet again, interchangeable. The telling of ghost stories for Christmas is an old English tradition, still well in place in the Victorian era, partly due to the success of Charles Dickens’ A Christmans Carol, later on replaced by Halloween. For more, see Colin Dickey’s article “A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories”, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ plea-resurrect-christmas-tradition-telling-ghost-stories-180967553/. (Dickey) 56 In the preface to the 1908 edition, James draws a parallel between his story and Cinderella, Bluebeard in an analogy that is also appropriate here, as he deems the novella no more than an “anecdote”, an “amusette” meant to trap “those not easily caught”. (James 120) One could read Douglas’ “triumph” in a similar fashion, as he, too, wishes to subject his audience to a riddle that they are more than willing to risk getting trapped into. 54 55

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the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have been concerned with a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children-?" "We say of course," somebody exclaimed, "that two children give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them." I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at this converser with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This was naturally declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it." "For sheer terror?" I remember asking. He seemed to say it wasn't so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful- dreadfulness!" "Oh how delicious!" cried one of the women. He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain." (James 22)

The question of the story’s “deliciousness” is relevant because it assesses and interrogates the level of transgressiveness that the tale, in fact, possesses: how can hysterical/gothic discourse still be transgressive if it becomes entertaining, thus effectively entering the dominant ideology? The function of transitioning between the two types of discourses, subversive and mainstream, lies with the prologue, which offers a frame and a reading key for a story that is no more than a means mediating the 40 year-old words of a neurotic governess, who is no longer a threat, to a bored assembly on December 27th. Furthermore, besides the temporal distance, the governess’s hysterical narrative is safely sealed in its singularity: it cannot awaken qualms about the listeners’ own potential neuroses because they are in no way involved in her first-person narrative. Douglas is efficient in prepping the audience and heightening their senses. By establishing a connection with the story which opens the text and building on its singularity (it is an unusual ghost story because it involves a child), which also recalls its ordinariness (it was a “gruesome” story, but nothing more), Douglas, in true Scheherazade fashion, prepares his audience for his superior tale, for what will be his final “triumph”. In order to prolong narrative pleasure, each of his triumphs is a temporary one, further postponing the tale and enticing the willing victims. The story-teller’s bragging and audience’s eagerness for dread and horror are amply visible in the exaggerated, lush language of both. Douglas is categorical in his confidence in his story’s ability to delight by horrifying and makes a lavish display of negative pronouns and superlatives: “Nobody (my emphasis) but me, till now, had ever heard. It’s quite too (my emphasis) horrible”, “Nothing 65

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(my emphasis) at all that I know touches it.” The public mirrors this desire by expressing: “Then we want to hear about them.”, “Oh, how delicious (my emphasis)!”. Titillating questions (“For sheer terror?”) have the role of inflating it, of snow-balling the interest of both storyteller and audience.57

In fact, the air of breathless anticipation could a well be mistaken for the collective premonitory gasp of horror accompanying a ghost-summoning séance at a time when spiritism practices were all the rage. James’ familiarity with the practices through his father and brother are well documented. (Beidler 14) 57

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II. “Now Why Should That Man Have Fainted?” Hysterical Narrative, Woman, and Man in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

II.1. Hysterical Narrative in “The Yellow Wallpaper” Once the hypothesis of the “wandering uterus”58 firmly displaced in the mid-nineteenth century59, it becomes apparent for physicians that hysteria was a disease of the mind, not of the body, and thus applicable to both men and women, with the first cases of the condition in men being assigned to what is today termed “post-traumatic stress disorder”. An interesting idea, however, persisted – that the disease lends itself, somehow, more “naturally” to women, and to those women in particular who suffered “an excess of femininity”: “And consequently it held true that "simple hysteria is not a real illness, but rather, as Mr. Richet puts it so well, an expression, one of the modalities of the feminine character."30” (Link-Heer and Daniel 205). This statement suggests that, much like the “masculine” hypochondria, hysteria might be, in fact, an invented disease meant to draw the female subject’s attention to herself in a ritual more similar to that of seduction than the appropriate, professional relationships between doctor and patient.60 The stereotypical image of the “swooning” Posited by Plato. For an extensive analysis, see Mark J. Adair’s 1995 article (“Plato's 'Wandering Uterus”). However ancient the theory was by the fin-de-siècle, it still had an influence on late nineteenth-century medical practice. Gilman herself, before marrying her first husband, and then before and after giving birth to her daughter Katherine and prior to her second marriage, paid visits to the gynaecologist (events which she recorded in her diary), who sometimes recommended “a treatment to reposition her uterus” either as a cure for hysterical symptoms or to get pregnant. (Lefkowitz Horowitz 203) 59 Hysteria as a disease was removed from psychiatric nomenclature in 1952. (Gherovici) 60 In fact, Freud himself accuses Dora of being complicit in the exchange between Herr K’s wife and her father, her symptoms being proof of her inability to admit to her feelings for her father’s friend. Dora suspects that her own adulterous father wants to trade her as a lover to his mistress’s husband so that his affair might continue unimpeded. He also realizes 58

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lady who loses her consciousness and requires the assistance of a gallant man or of a score of such gentlemen, revived by the use of her “salts”, once again equates female suffering with misogynistic comments on “women’s ruse”61 and their inability to vouch for their own well-being. Such acts of performing femininity, to use Judith Butler’s terms, would point specifically to a definition of womanhood that plays up the patriarchal stereotype of feminine weakness only to succumb to another such cliché, that of women being manipulative and false. Indeed, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the physician husband often asserts that his wife is merely pretending to be unwell: “You see, he does not believe I am sick!” (141), refuses to acknowledge her lack of progress: “Really dear you are better!” (149), ignores her symptoms: “I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me” (147), is unsympathetic and insensitive: “I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper!” (144). If suffering due to inescapable patriarchal oppression is the norm for the heroine in marital Gothic (Massé 688-689), writing is the form of subversion that can potentially disrupt the doctor/husband’s doubly patriarchal controlling discourse. Writing is indeed the forbidden activity our protagonist engages in, but it is actual madness that the unexpected “betrayal” that the physician will be confronted with at the end of the story will consist in. In the following, I will argue that one of the particularities of the hysterical narrative in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that it reverses the doctor-patient dynamic by turning the representative of the hegemonic male discourse – John the physician – into a hysteric himself. The hysterical narrative thus proves its subversion and becomes “truly” hysterical, truly “feminine” by “infecting” the standard discourse in which woman is doubly belittled: first in her capacity as a wife, and second, in her capacity as a patient. As the protagonist’s disease progresses, her propensity towards self-effacement and people-pleasing are slowly replaced by liberating sprees of self-affirmation; her discourse, hitherto fragmentary and unstructured, is finally shaped by volition and intention. the interference of transference in the process, as Dora might associate him with either her father and Herr K. When Freud reaches the conclusion that she might, in fact, be harboring homosexual feelings towards Herr K’s wife, he is stumped and does not know how to react. For a discussion of the Dora case by Jacques Lacan, see his Seminar XX. 61 According to David Schuster, the many diseases that were included under the blanketterm of “hysteria” at the time were chronic fatigue sydrome, fibromyalgia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress-disorder, postpartum depression (Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia 696). Neurasthenia officially became a disease in 1869. (Lefkowitz Horowitz 119)

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The patriarchal script is re-written, the hysteric’s assuming the dominant role and John’s the passive, marginal, one, as he performs the masquerade62 of the swooning damsel in distress once he realizes the full-blown proportion of his wife’s madness: “Now why should that man have fainted?” (155). While Flaubert might have been masquerading his condition as hysteric for the sake of auctorial eccentricity, his allegiance to a marginalized gender (women), and furthermore, a marginalized sub-category of that gender (the hysteric), when performed by a privileged category (a white male writer) serves to masquerade another gender and class identity: that of the man writer as marginal instead of bourgeois. By queering his condition through hysterization, Flaubert achieves the opposite effect, reinforcing his class and gender privilege. The male writer as an innately effeminate profession, an anxiety which had emerged in the wake of the profusion of female writers as a result of the increase in literacy at the end of the nineteenth century63, is thus re-claimed by Flaubert with a spin. Hysteria as a woman’s imaginary illness is the result of the medical discourse’s insistence that the physician was the ultimate authority in diagnosing and prescribing a cure, thus allowing the man’s discursive practice to override the woman’s and even reject her claims to illness completely, dismissing her as just another woman clamoring for attention: At this crisis point in its history and before (or even while) it found a new home in psychoanalysis, the existence of hysteria seemed to depend entirely on the perspective of the doctor, who was able to privilege it as well as cause it to disappear. And yet in the hysteria that was disappearing-in that it was explained away as a semiological error, as a non-illness, because it only imitated or simulated illness-one saw, as Marianne Schuller has pointed out in greater detail,7 a character sketch of woman in which lying, pretense, the deception of man (the doctor), playacting, and theatricality were a matter of nature. A powerful cultural and literary tradition encouraged this identification of fictional and feminine suffering. (Link-Heer and Daniel 197)64

The above description of the woman who uses her disease as a seduction strategy is anti-sentimental, the opposite image of the prostrate, According to Joan Riviere’s 1929 definition (Womanliness as Masquerade). In the UK, the Free Education act was passed in 1891, fining parents that did not send their children to school for the compulsory interval of ages 5-10. In France, under the third Republic, in 1881. 64 The vague nature of the diagonisis made neurasthenia fertile ground for such ideological battles over the legitimacy of women’s complaints, leading to some physicians’ beliefs that some were merely pretending to be sick because it was “fashionable”, especially since it did not seem to have an obvious cause or a consistent symptomatology (Schuster 697). Marriane Schuller’s cited contribution to studies in hysteria was unavailable to me, as it is only published in German. 62 63

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raped body of Clarissa or of Lucy Westenra’s sedation and vampirization, which both occur during their sleep and are perpetrated by men who are powerful either via their knowledge (the doctor) or class (it’s Lovelace’s superior social standing that brings the innocent maiden within his grasp). The power-knowledge of medical men and artistic men (Flaubert, the writer) transcends the purely classist and force-propelled transgression of the male over the female in the sentimental novel because it is complicated and intersected by the underlying ideology of capitalism. If the doctor’s discursivity serves that of the Law, the regimen of power, by the policing of the woman’s body and her reproductive processes, the male writer uses it to advertise and sell his books. In defining himself as a hysteric, Flaubert elicits the curiosity, bourgeois outrage of his prospective readers; just like an authoress of bodice-rippers, he plants a titillating curiosity in his audience, capitalizing on the culture’s concomitant repulsion and fascination of turn of the century fear of degeneracy. This identification between fictional and feminine suffering leads to the creation of a new cultural product, the “hysterical woman”,65 via literature. The hysterical woman is thus a spectacle; for the doctor, she a body on whom science is built, where the general good transcending the individual and the cultural success in identifying a cure for the disease belongs to the glorified physician; the cult of the male is, again, present when the writer capitalizes on a pathology to spark and consolidate his literary glory. The “invention” or “production” of the hysteric is a process begun by the medical establishment, through the doctors that “discovered”, and then either confirm or refute these diagnoses, and then supported and exploited by the late nineteenth-century culture in various ways, including its fetishistic commodification of the pathologized female body through literature: what the hysteric Madame Bovary and Flaubert as hysteric share is a narcissistic desire to draw attention by self-pathologizing. As a doctor in charge of a hysteric, John needs to re-order her narrative in ways that makes sense to and are accepted by the patient, as in the case of Freud and Dora; Flaubert and Madame Bovary; of course, the plot-twist, here, is that it’s the anonymous woman who largely, despite the transgression implied by the very act of writing, is never truly the mistress of her own narrative (and of the house) until the very ending, which reverses the symbolic power balance between doctor and patient, husband and wife. Jane’s is a narrative that progresses from a being percolated by the dominant patriarchal ideology of John-the-doctor (the interminable and According to Mark Micale, in “Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations” and Chandak Sengoopta (“Otto Weininger, Sex, Science and Self in Imperial Vienna”). 65

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exasperating string of “John thinks”, “John says”, “John laughs at me because”) to the discourse of madness, empowering through its disruption of the hegemonic narrative. Since it does not suffice for a narrative to be told from a hysteric’s perspective for it to be hysterical, but it becomes so when the language of patriarchy has stopped being used altogether – our heroine emerges from her transgressive text of the page, which is marginal, forbidden, and would not be permitted to enter the cultural status-quo but liminally and derisively, as “women’s literature”. Jane’s manuscript is not meant to be seen by strangers’ eyes, just like the Henry James’s governess’ is not; it must find a way of emerging into a patriarchal society without being tainted by the phallogocentric biases of the dominant ideology. If, in the case of James, the governess’ narrative is mediated by several other male voices in the Prologue (that of Douglas and that of the narrator), and her story is already re-assessed through a male perspective when it reaches a wider audience through publication, the governess’ autonomy over the text is still mediated by its male curator. Since the governess is, like Gilman’s heroine, anonymous, the only way to identify it in relation to a different text, as I have done here several times already in this text, is by simply calling her “the governess” or, more specifically, “James’s governess”. Consequently and ironically, a text largely recognized for its merit of giving its female protagonist center stage constantly reaffirms its paternity, focusing on James’s name whilst leaving the character nameless. The governess’ hysteria manifests itself in the story’s plot, through the ambiguities of her speech and the logic behind her actions, and through the final, main “hysterical” act of Miles’ death. Hysterical narrative in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also epitomized through a symbolic death; that of the narrator’s anonymity and the emergence of her true identity. As Jane has become, by the end, completely and utterly mad, the traces of her former self, which were rooted in language and documented by her diary entries are left behind as her symbolic colonization of the social space begins as she is pitted on the threshold of the room she has been imprisoned in. The Other’s occupation of the oppressive ideology’s territory is enacted against the grain, in reverse, from inside-out; it starts as a part of the dominant ideology, in speech and in deed, as Jane obeys John and voices his opinions, it continues with the transgressive act of writing (“I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind”- 141, “he hates to have me write a word” 143, “I MUST [emphasis in the original] say what I feel and think, it is such a relief”, 145), begins opposing it (“It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.”148), is rejected and silenced (“of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long” 149). It is the seminal point of the invalidation of the legitimacy of her 71

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speech, as she’s lying in bed unable to sleep next to an oblivious John, that the “woman behind the pattern” appears (“I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, - that dim sub-pattern, - but now I am quite sure it is a woman.”150). Thus, in Derridean terms, the phonocentric language is rated as inferior by the phallogocentric. Gradually, the woman behind the wallpaper’s tortuous script will assert itself as the narrator, replacing the forbidden text of the diary with the larger space of the room itself. As dominant signifier, John writes himself over the spaces he dominates: he overwrites his wife’s discourse both in speech and in writing, which he forbids, and gives the impression doing the same to Jenny the servant, as well. The ghostliness of the female character in gothic narratives, noted by Mary Beard (“Women as Force in History” 77)66 and Diana Wallace (“‘The Haunting Idea’: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory” 26) as well as the trope of the haunted gothic mansion, portray the husband as landlord supreme67. Both women in John’s house take on the appearance of ghostliness: the woman who haunts the yellow room and the ever-present, ever-lurking Jane (similar to Madeline Usher’s lurking in “The Fall of the House of Usher”), who has internalized silence willingly: I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too, I caught Jennie with her hand on it once. She didn’t know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry - asked me why I should frighten her so! Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John’s, and she wished we would be more careful! Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself! (150)

The spying Jennie, caught in the act of touching the wallpaper, is in fact revealing her own ghostliness. Again, the roles are reversed, foreshadowing the ending in which the ultimate upheaval of John from the house’s hierarchical pyramid unfolds – before the master is toppled from his seat of power, his loyal servants – the master’s extensions, are first supplanted. By placing her hand on the wallpaper, which has now become the narrator’s According to Beard, “a ghostly creature too shadowy to be even that real.” (77) The “Bluebeard narrative” noticed of the marital gothic, a sub-genre of the female gothic and recently, interpreted as a metaphor of the homosexual closet in queer studies readings of gothic narratives. For an analysis of the “masculine house” and the metaphors of secret homosexuality, see Gero Bauer’s 2018 book (Houses, Secrets, and the Closet Locating Masculinities from the Gothic Novel to Henry James). 66 67

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extended script and is territorially marked by her (“I am determined that nobody shall find out but myself” – my emphasis), Jennie is committing a transgression. The furtiveness of her gesture (“she didn’t know I was in the room”), her irritation at having been seen in a private moment that was not meant for strange eyes (“looked quite angry- asked me why I should frighten her so” 150) recalls the ghostliness of the woman “haunting” the wallpaper, which Jane is now in the process of identifying with. As John’s sister and housekeeper, Jennie is, just like Jane, doubly bound to the master of the house, but also doubling the narrator: through the bond of family relationships and the hierarchical bond of John literally representing the master whose house she keeps. Jennie is John’s housekeeper in more ways than one: she takes care of his possessions in his absence by effectively taking on the role of jailer, for to “keep house” implies the protection, preservation and upkeep of all things inside - including that of the wife object, soon to be hysterical subject. The similarity of the names: John, Jennie, and Jane – cannot be overlooked, and is perhaps intentional, as these three characters seem to split forth from the common root of John as pillar of home and household. What differentiates the two women subordinate to John, however, is their conflicting attitude towards subservience: one is so deeply entrenched in the dominant discourse, non-resistant, that her ghostliness is invisible to her, while the other is in full rebellion process. The wallpaper’s infection of the phallogocentric narrative (“she said that the paper stained everything it touched that, she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John’s, and wished we had been more careful!” 150) is spreading to the main inhabitants of the house. There is a complete reversal in attitudes from the narrator’s obedient and hasty retreat in Jennie’s proximity that abruptly ends one of her diary entries (“Here sister comes”), suggesting a very active awareness of the consequences of the act of writing68 and of the sister’s policing of it, to the narrator herself assuming a menacing attitude (“I caught Jennie…” – my emphasis). To “catch” someone in the act starts from the assumption that they are doing something wrong (“she turned around as if she had been caught stealing”), which is exactly what our narrator is doing: clearly stating that this second, empowering narrative will not be taken from her, like her first, sane identity, had been (“I am determined that nobody shall find out but myself.” 150). It is the emerging Jane that is holding the reins of this yellow narrative-turned-blessing-in-disguise, Not only forbidden by Weir Mitchell in the autobiographical experience that inspired the story, reading was not encouraged in women as it was thought to impair their fertility. (“The Reading Habit and "The Yellow Wallpaper"” 92) 68

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fully coming into being as authoress of the larger script. She is now policing the behaviour of others, asking the questions (“then I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most retrained manner possible” 150), lurking in the shadows unseen to spy on what the others are up to, issuing hypotheses (“I know she was studying that pattern”150), revealing suspects and casting blame (“Did not that sound innocent?” 150). Besides seeming menacing, Jane’s “restrained manner” and her “quiet, very quiet voice” recall the ghostliness of the female character of gothic plots. The captivity narrative, a staple of the marital gothic which includes the Bluebeard husband, is centered on the female protagonist’s flight from the menacing male, aiming to subvert the mechanisms of entrapment. There is clearly a hierarchy between Jennie and Jane, just as there is between Jane, Jennie and John, and Jane is infiltrating it from the bottom. At the beginning of the text, the power dynamic trickles steadily from the top, with the isolated and silenced narrator completely dominated by John’s speech, which she resists in writing, but in the final scene it is reversed. By conquering Jennie, our initially anonymous narrator is one step closer to toppling her master and much closer to reclaiming an identity of her own. The calm manner in which she addresses Jennie also foreshadows her complete composure faced with John’s fainting spell. Much like in a manner of a detective, Jane appropriates the cool and sensible attributes of a man of Empire that the doctor and detective both embody. In his excellent 2001 article “Gilman’s Arabesque Wallpaper”, Marty Roth remarks that “haunted house fiction and detective fiction are roughly contemporary phenomena” and “there is a structural similarity and a remarkable semantic difference between them”, while also quoting Tzvetan Todorov’s statement that “detective stories have replaced ghost stories.” (156) Representatives of the law and order they both investigate, they observe the unobservable and detect nuances that are not mean to be seen by neophytes’ eyes, such as Jennie’s exaggerated reaction, as if “she had been caught stealing.” There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes. And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give. She said I slept a good deal in the daytime. John knows I don’t sleep very well at night, for all I’m so quiet! He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him! Still, I don’t wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months. It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it. (152-153)

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Jane is acting like a detective and turns her feminine and formerly bemoaned silence into a strategy. She now controls John and Jennie’s perception of her and acts the role of the obedient, malleable patient on the mend, built on the premise of pretense – in fact, she is mimicking her former self, anxious at John’s perception of her (“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” 141). Her discovery as a detective is the belief that the house has indeed begun to infect not only her, but also her husband and sister-in-law (“I don’t wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.”, “I feel sure John and Jennie are affected by it.”), John is finally recognized as a villain (“I don’t like the look in his eyes.”), portrayed as an agent of surveillance (“pretended to be loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!”). The gothic house’s alleged sentience beggars a parallel to the hysterical house of Usher, a similarity noticed and developed upon by Rae Beth Gordon, in “Decorations in Poe and Gilman,” where the wallpaper’s main achievement is the performance of a sort of psychological archaeology, as it teases out the real subconscious ghosts of the protagonist. Thus, the wallpaper reflects textual composition and production (the superimposition of the two narratives in the text). The clearly inscribed tale (narrative 1) is that of the woman as prisoner; the submerged tale (narrative 2) is that of ornament's power to guide subjective phantasy and even assault the Subject to the point of madness. This is in fact a reversal of the two patterns in the wallpaper, for there it is the top one that is immediately visible (the confusion of lines, shapes), and the bottom one (the woman) that is obscure, hidden. (96)

Jane’s yet unacknowledged awareness of her ghostliness is felt from the very beginning as she expresses a writer’s enthusiasm for the Romantic mansion she is about to inhabit (“A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity!” 141), reminding one of Catherine Morland’s eagerness at being cast into the Gothic setting she is familiar with from Anne Radcliffe’s novels when visiting her rich friend’s home, Northanger Abbey (“With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant” 143), Jane’s narrative is firmly placed in the tradition of gothic narratives of female entrapment of the late eighteenth century. Half-jokingly, she writes that the legal trouble that kept the house empty for years “spoils her ghostliness”, emphasizing the fact that the longing to haunt existed from the beginning: There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid (my emphasis); but I don’t care there is something strange about the house - I can feel it.

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Just like Catherine Morland expects to find elements of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho on the premises of Northanger Abbey, the narrator associates “a queerness” with the house from the outset. Though we only know that our patient is a writer, with no further information on the genre or genres she is conversant in, her comment on “ghostliness” is embedded in her reading and writing experience, in the English tradition of the late eighteenth-century, as Gilman is undoubtedly aware of the interconnectedness of gender and genre for the woman writer: to be a woman in her times socially equates to being a ghost, to not having a voice and a contribution outside the house; to be a woman writer is a transgressive act, imposing a female voice outside the space of domestic confinement. The narrator’s speech acts of opposition towards John bear the same significance of untowardness. As much as John is present in the narrator’s account, there are things that she censors deliberately as they would clearly simply be dismissed; when, despite these qualms, the wife does speak up, it is either on the bases of certainty or extreme discomfort: “I even [my emphasis] spoke to John about it once.” (142) – suggesting that only in extreme circumstances does one speak to John of things that might seem improper, no matter how pressing. In a manner typical of his profession, John simply refutes the validity of his spouse’s feelings, counteracting emotional uneasiness with facts: “he said what I felt was a draught [emphasis in the original], and shut the window.” The categorical gesture of the “shut window” comically puns to John shutting his wife’s mouth up; the narrator’s irritation, expressed in the italicization of “draught”, however, remains, mounts and expands. The “spoiling of ghostliness” is a despoiling of invisibility, a shedding off of an empty shell of identity, the beginnings of ontological affirmation through rebellion, it is a warning and a foreshadowing of what is to come. Jocularly disappointed that the house is empty not because it is haunted, but because of down-to-earth legal problems, the narrator herself will haunt it as a consequence of her oppression. In a literal transfiguration of the “return of the repressed,” the silenced woman will show John a draught or two when she becomes fully mad – the haunted mansion being of course, a metaphor for all American households in which women are trapped (“I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.”). Since she cannot speak of her medical condition – John is the only one who has the authority for it – she decides to cling to the fittingly feminine topic of house decoration: 76

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I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house. (my emphasis) The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people. There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden - large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now. (142)

The contemplation of the derelict garden and broken greenhouses is another signifier of the typically Gothic setting; presumably, the “English places that you read about” are found in Gothic romances, whose size and abundance of secret passageways, obscure alleys, labyrinthic displays, cabinets, locked/forbidden spaces that are further divided and separate from each other create the ideal environment for narratives of captivity: “for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.”; at the same time, it can indicate the female author’s desire to hide in order to reveal those parts of her identity censored by the master of the house, yet surreptitiously performed in it, such as writing. If the narrator hates the house, she can at least admire its garden which, in its structural messiness, would provide ample opportunity to abscond from the prying, forbidding eyes of the house, also scripted in the wallpaper (“two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”, “those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.” 145). While John Bak’s 1994 analysis of the wallpaper as a panopticon (Escaping the Jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.') focuses on the disciplinarian purpose of surveillance posited by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, the intricacies of power and knowledge, the space outside the house is replete with possibilities of escape, while for Rae Beth Gordon, the wallpaper is not merely “investing subjectivity into the décor”, but “reveals another psychological dynamic. If ‘dead paper’ and her thoughts are a text, then the wallpaper and her thoughts are a text under the bar of repression, the ‘ghost text’ or ‘haunted text’ of the ‘haunted” house’.” (“Interior Decoration in Poe and Gilman” 94). The suggestion of Gothic entrapment is merely formal; nature is, in fact, the space into which one escapes from John and Jennie’s constant surveillance; the “I” of the narrative and the “eye” of the wallpaper are merged in order to force the narrator’s identity into being: “In Gilman's tale, ornament is not simply the agent for uncovering the drive 77

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that lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ it is also the repository for the Subject's painful effort to uncover and resolve her identity behind the bars of repression/of the decorative paper.” (Gordon 95) This birthing of the self through madness is a necessary purging contrast to the restraint-free state of nature. The menacing nature of early Gothic narratives, contrasted with the palpable constraints of the house, is liberating for our heroine. Nature is mentioned again at the end of the story, as she peers outside, while she calmly instructs John to collect the key from under a plantain leaf, but it does not fill the same liberating need as before (“I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.” 155). The initial charm of escape into nature is beyond retrieval; the fantasy of the imagined gothic heroine has been supplanted by horrific reality. The wife no longer wishes to leave the site of her oppression because she has merged with it, the oppressive environment has become an accommodating medium for a new sort of species that, in Darwinian terms, is no longer adapted to the sane, green and wholesome vegetation outside (“outside you have to creep on the ground, where everything is green instead of yellow”). Chameleon-like and serpent-like, Jane has shed her old skin (“I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane!” 155) and absorbed the colour of the environment she has been exposed to for the past three months, merely descriptive of the “variation under nature” essential for the “struggle for existence” (i.e. natural selection) described in The Origin of Species: “Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to any individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring”. (Darwin, The Origin of Species 49) In other words, Jane’s new slithering identity is a superscript of the wallpaper’s arabesque as a symbol of John’s patriarchal script and her own, censored and marginal, script. Her identity as a writer, as a creator of meaning in the space of culture, has been thrown back into Nature. If madness is, in medical terms, an aberration from normalcy, a form of monstrosity (which Darwin also ranks among forms of variation), Jane’s disease means that, if she cannot create cultural meaning, she will disrupt it using the language of disease. By ripping off the wallpaper in order to escape from it and never be put back, Jane is exposing the premise of the possibility of the articulation of the female self in phallocentric language as false. Her contribution to the cultural 78

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space has been denied, so she will haunt/disease the space of the house, also controlled by the masculine, with her intrinsic belonging to the category of Nature. Her roundabout, ceaseless smooching on the room’s walls (yellow, as the wallpaper which triggered her disease; yellow, like the already stained clothes of her and John) is not just a mark, a trace of identity, but its unremitting reaffirmation; it is the equivalent of the sign in language, and Jane, who no longer calls herself that and revels in her previously forced anonymity, desires to be yet again stripped of a name, and unsurprisingly so, as her own is tainted by ensconcement in phallogocentricity. She is not an author in the sense described by Foucault, as she is nameless, but she creates, nonetheless, a space of significance, ripping one page and marking another. This becomes most apparent on Jane’s last day in the mansion of repressed horrors, when she can semantically re-assign the room as her own by taking advantage of its bareness. Her plan to completely expose the walls of the room, now freed of the obstacles of furniture, poses another problem, that of her own inability to reach as far as she would like in order to take it off: But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on! This bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. (154)

The goal of her “work” (“But I must get to work.” 154), which was used to refer to writing in the first part of the story (“[…] am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.”, “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.”141-42) is still writing; but under a different code altogether. Writing as a profession fit for women versus Jennie’s profession as a housekeeper land the first in the category of “unnatural jobs for women” in the late nineteenth century (Chambers 31); the more “natural” ones of housekeeping and interior decoration are mocked by Jane’s final gesture. The walls that she aspires to render blank, as a canvas she can inscribe herself upon following rules of her own making, are a both a page and a ravaged room in sore need of redecorating (“How those children did tear about here!” 154). Jane is re-affirming her stance as a writer by re-writing the room as “feminine”, and what a better way to do that except by redecorating. If writing is not a feminine profession, but interior design is, Jane merges the two; her parody of interior design is in a reinscription of the room with herself at its center as Subject, thereby essentially re-signifying the act of writing as feminine. Furthermore, John’s desperate cries for an axe with which to tear down the door are met with Jane’s ironic musing that 79

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“It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!” (155), as he was the one who, after all, had shown so much interest in preserving the house’s integrity at the cost of his wife’s sanity. As a dutiful spouse, the wife had internalized his tastes in interior decoration. Because Jane, who is deprived of her name while her husband’s is written so frequently it might as well be her own, is robbed of authorship (for that, one must have a name), she signs herself in nature’s hand all over the room, whose walls she has stripped of patriarchal signifiers. Reduced to a simple line in which her “shoulder fits in that long smooch around the wall”), the flamboyant, unreadable “debased Romanesque” becomes readable; its maddening intersections and intricacies (“florid arabesque”, “toadstool in joints”, “strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths”) is reduced to a simple line, the three-dimensional expression of a dot in motion. The explanation the author provides for her preference for this circular motion, “so I cannot lose my way” (154), can be read as a refusal to ever be derailed by extraneous deciding factors (such as Jennie and John) from her singularity of purpose again. Now that her identity has pierced through and settled in, it is imperative that it not lose itself again. Most of all, the protagonist’s identity is a stable one, constantly reinforced by repetition, as every turn she takes around the room refreshes the mark instead of erasing it; the yellow line etches her identity into the room; its imprint penetrates deeper. If Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion were to be used, the heroine’s gesture would stand for a psychological coping mechanism in the face of trauma: just as the child reassures itself that the mother will always come back by playing with the toy, which disappears only to magically reappear, the woman’s peace of mind is ensured by the unfailing presence of the guiding yellow trace. The peculiarity of the protagonist’s gesture of tying herself with a rope (to the bed, the only large piece of furniture remaining in the room, as it is nailed to the floor, so that Jennie does not remove her from the room) could also find its explanation in the need for stability, in the quest for a fixed point of reference one always comes back to, of a signifier that never loses its point of reference. Besides the refusal to leave the room, which she has now “colonized”, like a pathogen takes over the healthy body, the act of tying herself to a central object in the room is visually striking, as it recalls Foucault’s image of prisoners doing the rounds in the jail’s courtyard. The bed that is firmly at the center of her motion is relevant for her desire never to have a displaceable identity again. Given the insane asylum/nursery ambiguity articulated throughout the text, as well as the references to the “gnawed” bedstead, the protagonist re-appropriates the nursery narrative and explicitly turns it into an insane asylum one, whose 80

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sole tenant she becomes: “I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again. How those children did tear about here!” (144). This reappropriation is one of the text’s additional strippings – as a woman whose child has been taken away from her as she is in recovery, the child did symbolically “tear about’” her mind (and womb), as the consensus for her “neurasthenia” is post-partum depression. The bed is another of the elements that “center” the narrative. If John’s name is the semantic anchor of Jane’s narrative, as her own discourse constantly competes with his; the moment of her voluntarily relapse into semantic nothingness, as she dissociates from her former self (“In spite of you and Jane”- my emphasis) and associates with the woman behind the wallpaper. Similarly, the bed functions in the same way; in the absence of semantic signifiers, such as names, authorship is pinned on an object, constructed around it, rendered repetitive and meaningless. In a way, if we follow Foucault’s reasoning that the author was replaced by his/her work, it is indeed that very process that the-woman-formerly-known-as-Jane is enacting. By actively drawing the yellow line alongside the walls of the room, she is signing herself; her signature has become her “work”. A writer, perhaps, but never an author in the absence of a clearly articulated name, she renounces the convention altogether. The achievement consists in the consequences this has in her social construction as subject. According to Foucault, “if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity – whether as a consequence or an accident of the author’s explicit wish – the game becomes one of rediscovering the author” (213). Indeed, the protagonist’s textual journey has been one of expunging the intruding signifier of the patriarchal meta-narrative John, to denying the legitimacy of this discourse altogether and then creating a space of self-articulation without restriction. The social implications of this act are also explained by French epistemologist: “the author’s name, unlike any other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of his discourse within a society and culture.” (211) Just like in “The Turn of the Screw” the manuscript is authored by both James and the governess, Jane’s text has two authors. We could even go as far as to say that there are two texts with two separate authorships in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Jane’s, who, as yet, is anonymous, but whose speech is overwritten and repressed by John’s dominant one; that of the-womanformerly-known-as-Jane, who cannot, through her anonymity, “mark off the edges of the text”, but will create a symbolic page out of the room. 81

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The room/page is clearly marked as fully her own as she obtains the key, locks herself in, and only allows her husband to enter the room when the space is already marked by her and “defended” by her constant vigil. Passed out on the threshold of the room/page, John is forever exiled out of a visual and linguistic space that the woman has carved for herself. As a ghost revisits the place of trauma or returns to undertake “unfinished business”, the female writer is also a guardian of the territory she has just reclaimed, holding intruders at bay or pushing them out. A jealous defender of its newly won boundaries, the constant hovering over the margins of the room/page clearly delimitates the freshly demarcated, distinct, identity. As she carelessly steps over him that happened to fall “in her path”, she is “crossing him out”, cutting him off, marking him as mistake that does not belong in her text/space, an error to be expelled at the door and never allowed to enter. John is marked by her “yellow line”69, found faulty, and curtly rejected. Furthermore, in that rejection, he is also “marked” by her – in the reversal of power relations, she has claimed the superior seat by being the one who enjoys and makes use of her ability to brand others as her own. The yellow stain that the woman uses her shoulder to smudge all along the room effectively turns her whole body into a tool of inscription. If Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin their seminal study under the interrogation “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” (1), the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” proves otherwise: a pen can also be a woman’s body. According to Foucault, a text becomes transgressive only when it is marked by its author function, because only then does it generate and become part of a system of ownership, consequently making them as susceptible to punishment: Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralized and sacralizing figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture, discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act – an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in the circuit of ownership. (“What is an Author?” 211-212)

The distinct discourses of religion and capitalism do not compete with each other as the latter displaces the former, but with the rising importance of authors and authorship in capitalism, marking one’s text as one’s own surpasses the mere law of demand and order; it can incite to social unrest or it can lead to the whole creation of the “discursive practice”, as in the case of Using a deliberate anachronism, a modern reader could be reminded of the yellow tape used by police to seal off a crime scene. 69

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Marx and Freud, given as examples of “founders of discursivity’” (Foucault 217). The emphasis on discourse-as-act, reminding one of the Walter Benjamin’s theory of the art object’s aura from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the very crux of the woman’s reappropriation of the writing space as a room/page. Whether she is a founder of a female discursivity needs to be assessed according to the impact of her actions on a grander social scale; unfortunately, transgressive and revolutionary as her suppression of the male in language and body, her colonization of the room will probably not exceed the limits of the house. II.2. Woman as Nature in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Re-signifying Writing as an Act of Nature In the words of Camille Paglia, whose study on art and decadence is based on the readings on Freud, Nietzsche and Sade as the decisive thinkers of the West, as well as on the archetypal dichotomy between Nature and Culture in Western civilization, the man’s genital identity is concentrated in the penis, while a woman’s is diffused throughout her entire body (Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson 19). The pen/penis of John’s hegemonic masculinity is manifested in the maddening intricacies of the wallpaper, and in order to undo this supremacist act of language, the woman will occupy it with her entire body instead: “Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters. There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self. Space is claimed by being sat on, squatter’s rights.” (21) By “squatting” on the male territory, the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” appropriates it. This corresponds to Paglia’s claims that issue of sex is central to the development of the arts in the West, but while she mentions the influence of Darwin in shaping the male/culture, female/Nature dialectic, she does not recognize him as having starting a “discursive practice” (in Foucault’s terms) as significant as her three main sources of inspiration. Despite this, Paglia’s language is infused with Darwinian, rather than Freudian, imagery, especially when referring to the “woman problem” in sex and nature; for her, the very raison d’être of Western art is a means of controlling the irrational, fearsome and inchoate feminine. Critiquing feminism, but also reducing it to its simplest forms, Paglia’s analysis harps on the Woman/Nature kinship in relation to the male/Culture one accepts it as inevitable. It is fair to note that Paglia’s focus on woman-as-nature as main engenderer of the Western aesthetic and cultural framework, in spite of its lack of resistance to such dichotomies, provides an accurate overview of male attitudes towards the female corporeal’s cultural significance in patriarchal societies, which is why I will continue using these analyses in my discussion of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. 83

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The “woman as squatter” analogy quoted above, for example, applies perfectly to Jane’s act of deliberately haunting the man’s house and writing on the room’s walls using her entire body: “Woman’s eroticism is diffused throughout her body” (Paglia 19). If Jane is not accepted as Subject in a world that is culturally male, she will embrace her woman-as-nature status to hystericize the rational John, who faints. In Paglia’s terms, a woman’s sexuality represents a man’s worse fear: it is gross, Dionysian, it is fetid, bodily, it constantly reminds one of the murky, messy origins of the self, it is a “vagina dentata”, the male’s fear of being consumed by the female (Sexual Personae 13). Jane’s smooches across the wall, first noticed at the bottom at the wall, then clearly moving upwards, at the level of Jane’s shoulder, describe a page marked by the repulsive fluids of the feminine as she is writing herself in the Nature of her own female body. The Woman’s body as constantly oozing, shedding and morphing through the constant cycles of menstruation and birth is perceived as threatening because her powers of procreation are construed as horrific. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is similar to Paglia’s description in the following passage: As an ontological entity, she needs nothing and no one. I shall maintain that the pregnant woman, brooding for nine months upon her own creation, is the pattern of all solipsism, that the historical attribution of narcissism to women is another true myth. Male bonding and patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman’s power, her imperviousness, her archetypal confederacy with chthonian nature. Woman’s body is a labyrinth in which man is lost. It is a walled garden, the medieval hortus conclusus, in which nature works its daemonic sorcery. Woman is the primeval fabricator, the real First Mover. She turns a gob of refuse into a spreading web of sentient being, floating on the snaky umbilical by which she leashes every man. (12)

Paglia’s reference to the woman’s body as labyrinth is close to the wallpaper’s infuriating contortions. As Jane chooses to stop looking at the horrible pattern and admire the garden instead, the “archetypal confederacy with chtonian nature” that Paglia speaks of is manifested first in the character’s sense of longing and liberation when admiring the derelict, but sheltering recesses of the neglected garden and, secondly, as she brings the labyrinthine nature of the garden into the room by smudging the yellow stain70 – an act of purely “feminine” defilement, as the “ink” she uses to Didi-Huberman’s study of one of Charcot’s photographed hysterics at the Sâlpetrière, a rape victim called Augustine, lists abundant secretions among the symptoms of hysteria: “Landouzy’s incomparable statement is well known: “There are hysterics who cry in abundance; some of them urinate copiously at the same time; there are others, finally, who - how shall I put it? - cry through the vulva.”54” (271-272). The hysteric’s body is one of abjection. 70

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imprint her identity on the wall recalls the festering liquids of the body, and by doing so she reaffirms herself, in Paglia’s terms, as a complete “ontological entity.” The room, stripped of the offending paper, has become the “medieval hortus conclusus”, it is a female space, firmly delimited, resembling a page. Strict abeyance to an exclusively womanly space, however, echoes the separation of the spheres, as the walled garden of medieval romances is still a patriarchal trope connected to the cult of the worship of Virgin Mary. A garden designed solely for woman’s pleasure and woman’s delight, but under the safe supervision of a higher male authority is a domestication of nature that again, would deny the woman’s aspiration to embrace the cultural connotation of Nature-as-Other in a way that gives her precedence over the male. Compared to Jane’s aspiration of exploring the outside garden with its unknowable growths, the hortus conclusus of the room is but a travesty of freedom, a rationalized and aestheticized surrogate of that which Woman is never fully allowed to be. Similar to the walled garden/laboratory of Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, “The Yellow Wallpaper” brings together two types of discursivity: the scientific (medical, masculine) and creative (feminine, irrational). Interestingly enough, women as signifiers of creativity, irrationality and madness are not pitted against the male writer, but against men of science (John, Rappaccini). The tradition of writing as a masculine profession is a cultural construct is still being forged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while the most “manly professions” were still those of artist and scientist. Once the establishment of writing as an “act of manhood” takes root, however, writing as feminine profession is culturally re-signified prioritize the male, leading the strong high culture/low culture divides at the end of the nineteenth century epitomized with the stark distinctions of Modernism. Paglia’s comments on womanhood’s cycles also resonate with readings of Gilman’s story: “Nature’s cycles are woman’s cycles. Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns, beginning and ending at the same point. Woman’s centrality gives her a stability of identity. She does not have to become but only to be. Her centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks.” (Sexual Personae 9) Jane’s final gesture of tying herself to the bed and circling the room, occupying and signing its walls, is an assertion of her centrality. Throughout his examination of Gilman’s text, I refer to John’s “centering” of the narrative using Foucault’s concept of “author function” and the relations between authorship and name and I argue that deliberate anonymity and the displacement of the name with the yellow smooch is the tool by which patriarchal language is transgressed and replaced with that of nature. The same “centering” occurs when the female protagonist writes herself on the room’s walls, putting 85

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herself at the heart of her system of signification. Her circularity, frightening because it embodies the inescapability of the return to the ultimate mother, Mother Earth, through death, supplants the desire to become something other than nature. Jane has finally understood that she “simply has to be”, the anxiety-inducing process of becoming is left behind. In the first part of the story, John’s discourse dominates Jane’s as a result of the latter’s social and cultural domination; at the same time, filtered through Jane’s eyes, the text displays the woman’s anxieties about not being good enough (“It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!” 143, “he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more” 142, “I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim” 144) for or upsetting the revered figure of the husband/doctor, with masculine hegemony being read as an act of love: “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition. But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself, - before him, at least, - and that makes me very tired.” (142) The many acts of “self-control” that Jane resorts to repress her growing dissatisfaction with her marital and medical situation are also motivated by the desire to “be good”, obedient and pliable “before him, at least”, claiming the proven futility of outward resistance: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do?” (141). Similarly, when Jane remarks that he “is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (145) she is willfully constructing an image of control as “love and care”, for to barely allow someone to move about “without special direction” is behaviour bordering on abusive. Solving the contractions inherent in the competition of John’s narrative and the repression of her own by relieving her mind on “dead paper”, the narrator negotiates the relationship between “being” and “becoming” that is trapped by John’s constant denying of her reality (“You see, he does not believe I am sick!” 141), so she strives to constantly conform to his expectations of her, to “become” the wife and patient he expects her to be (“Really, dear, you are better!” 149). When Camille Paglia states that the woman’s “centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks”, she is describing, without meaning to, the final scene in Gilman’s story using the imperialistic trope of man-as-quest, woman-as-conquest. John’s fainting body is trapped between inside and outside, infringing on the female character’s territory, a territory that has just been recaptured and re-signified. Jane’s circularity, metaphor of her cyclical feminine nature, blocks what Paglia calls the man’s “quest for identity”. In the case of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, however, John’s 86

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identity is stable, dominant; it is reflected in his hegemonic discourse and in his control over the house and its tenants; from this it follows that his identity is entire dependent on his continual repression of his wife’s. The two discourses, male and female, continue to compete; in his attempt to regain what he considers to be his, the “master of the house”, who is also the “master of discourse”, reclaims the legitimacy of his admission into the room which has been their shared bedroom, but which we are accustomed to call as the narrator’s own as she is the only one to spend time in it in the cool light of day, too, as John is away on business most of the day: I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another. (144)

The reason why John prefers the upstairs room to the one on the ground floor, opening on the garden, seductively teasing one outwards with the “roses all over the window”, is not only its proximity to nature, but the ease of the prisoner’s escape. The “female malady” (to use Elaine Showalter’s phrase), hysteria, considered “an excess of femininity”, needs to be removed from all signifiers of the very thing that is an invitation to excess. Irrational nature creeping on the verge of the window, looking on the way to slide in, is not acceptable to John’s mind, as it would only exaggerate the very features that he wishes to eliminate in his wife in order to cure her, not taking into account that to “cure” a woman of her femininity is to annihilate her. In a manner similar to Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark”, Gilman’s physician, a real man of Culture, wishes to cut out any sides that reason cannot provide an explanation for, thus banishing Nature in all its forms (“John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures”141) The roses and the chintz curtains, feminine frills of decoration, are replaced with the bars and locks of the so-called former nursery, effectively a jail cell, removed from the ground into the upper, less earthy spheres of the house. Pretty roses and chintz curtains compete with an ugly room covered in scribbled paper; unlike the narrator’s diary, however, it is not “dead”, but replete with the signifiers of culture – ink on paper, writing on the wall. Jane is not only trapped in a room which, as a former nursery, is a reminder of her separation from her baby (“It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” 143), but also a reminder of the forbidden act of writing. 87

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John’s objection to the downstairs room, besides its feminine decoration, is the absence of a “near room for him if he took another”, implying rather a clinician’s proximity to a patient’s room for the purposes of surveillance rather than nurturing a close husband-wife relationship. Because the house is gendered masculine and Jane has no outlet for self-expression, her only option is to reverse the balance by infecting the house with the “excessive femininity” of hysteria. If the ground floor rooms are feminine through their proximity to nature, the upper rooms correspond to the masculine ideal of distancing oneself from the irrationality and chaos (suggested by the creeping roses are almost violating the clean-cut borders of the house by slithering in through the window). If the house is the body, the upper floors are its mind, and by going insane, Jane is infecting the house’s mind. Furthermore, the husband’s dismissal of the wife’s reasons for preferring different lodgings is based on selfishness, an affirmation of his reluctance to make even minor changes in his masculine, medicalized environment: “He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.” (144) The reader, of course, might find it odd that John does not remove the heavy bedstead (which is also gnawed, suggesting that the reason it is so heavy is that violent patients suffering from mental illnesses were tied to it so they wouldn’t hurt themselves), the barred windows, and the gate at the end of the stairs, which would be much more constrictive to an already anxious mind than chintz windows and roses. All of these gradual barriers are obstacles in the wife/patient’s potential escape, and the signifiers of a mental asylum/prison rather than the safety of a loving home. John’s prolonged absence during the day also beckons images of a busy medical professional who only does the rounds on his patients once a day for their daily check-up, while the nurse (Jennie) keeps an eye on them. John cannot be a physician during the day, husband during the night; his split between a doctor/spouse reflects two sides that cannot be neatly separated, just like in Stevenson’s iconic tale: if he believes that to be a good husband he must be a good doctor, he fails miserably at both. Jane, of course, is aware of this when she claims that his very status as “a physician of high standing” (141) prevents her from getting better. Such a theory is in keeping with Foucault’s analysis of the penal system and its relationship to power. With the erasure of the visibility of the punished body at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth with the disappearance of public executions, the enactment of the law takes place away from the public eye, which coincides with the birth of the prison, where the criminal’s body is disciplined by enforced abeyance through imposed rules and schedules. Coercion is no longer expressed 88

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through the extreme act of execution or public humiliation; justice is rendered more subtly, by taking away the individual’s freedom to dispose of his time as he pleases and where he pleases: “The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary; if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive an individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property” (Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison 11). The withholding of the individual’s right over their own body is, thus, the modern disciplining method of choice; it is no longer the fear of death or public opprobrium. The body belongs to the law, and the law disposes of it by withdrawing its social privileges. Applying Foucault’s thoughts on imprisonment to Gilman’s text, one reaches the conclusion that John and Jane’s dynamic matches that of jailer and prisoner, while the house itself represents the prison. The wallpaper’s “bulbous eyes” and Jenny embody the surveillance system of the panopticon when the jailer and law-enforcer supreme, John, is absent. The house conspicuously functions as a prison through clear limitations and its distinct compartmentalization of masculine and feminine spaces, such as the “feminine” downstairs and “masculine” upstairs. Within the floors themselves, the differences between male and female areas and their categorical separation are even stricter: the more masculine the territory, the more categorical its compartmentalizations and boundaries. The wife’s floor, for instance, is saturated with signifiers of imprisonment, for she is firmly placed in the masculine territory controlled by her husband’s medical knowledge: the barred windows and the locked stair gate, where Jennie (an additional obstacle) lurks, blocks Jane’s access to the overly feminine garden or to a hasty front door escape. This escape is either literal or metaphorical, as John also makes sure that Jane is deprived of the means of killing herself; constantly watched, she cannot leave in either body or spirit. The locked gate is placed at the head of the stairs, suggesting anxieties about a possible suicide attempt by throwing oneself down them; the heavy pieces of furniture, such as the bed that Jane painstakingly tries to move (“The bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame” 144), with limited success, is probably nailed to the floor to prevent being pushed against the door and lock oneself in. Jane’s privileges as an individual have thus been withdrawn; she is an imprisoned body, subject to the jailer’s strict schedule (“I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day” 143): From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim. As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner,

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The “much higher aim” Foucault is referring to is the distinguishing feature of the civilized man, who no longer punishes barbarically, by resorting to pain through torture and execution, but by erasing the traces of the individual’s social existence. For Gilman’s text, the ultimate act of Jane’s social erasure is her confinement to the impromptu insane asylum that John creates especially for her; her gothic house of entrapment is custom-made and decorated according to her personal physician’s taste. The “army of technicians” that stand in for the executioner are Jenny and John, who disguise their roles as conveyors of discipline and punishment of Jane’s unruly body through professionalization of their power-knowledge. It is still Foucault who argues in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception that medical science enters the realm of power relation through the emergence of the “medical gaze”, which distances the physician from the patient, regarding him not as subject, but as the object of his profession. John’s “medical gaze” in relation to his wife is expressed in her frustration with the inability to speak to him openly: “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so”. Jane’s objections are met with derision; ironically, John’s medical gaze blinds him to the truth: “The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you.” “I don’t weigh a bit more,” said I, “nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening, when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away.” “Bless her little heart!” said he with a big hug; “she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!” (149)

Vacillating between doctor-behaviour and husband-behaviour, John fails at both: he doesn’t listen, gaze or observe in either capacity. As a spouse, he is condescending, suggesting that his wife is grossly exaggerating her discomfort (“she shall be as sick as she pleases!”), cuts the conversation short without compromising (“talk about it in the morning”); as a doctor, his observations are simply inaccurate: “you are gaining flesh and colour”, “your appetite is better”. When his error of perception is exposed (Jane hasn’t put on weight, nor has her appetite improved), he patronizingly glosses over it 90

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and swiftly shifts to the husband-role, by lavishing affectionate, yet infantilizing terms on her and giving her “a big hug”. Foucault defines the “medical gaze” of the clinic (teaching hospital) as dehumanizing; John’s double role as a relative of the patient would be expected to bridge that gap by dint of the personal connection, but all it achieves is the contrary. The symbolism of the sun and moon in Gilman’s text reinforces the Woman as Nature/Man as Culture divide, as John’s medical discourse is grounded in the solar symbol of reason, and woman’s cyclicity and mystery are lunar. As previously stated, John is so frequently absent from the yellow wallpapered room, which is a more masculine space compared to the flowery one downstairs, that Jane resorts to different means of expressing her forbidden feminine identity. What she censors during the daytime is released at night, especially under the influence of the moon, when her “ghostliness” and “strange feeling” about the house are heightened: “That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid; but I don’t care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.” (142) Literally a “lunatic” rendered active by the light of the moon71, the narrator further articulates her inclusion in the symbolic realm of Nature by abiding by the cycles of the moon, another significant mark of women’s generic Otherness in Camille Paglia’s view: “Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since she is that cycle. Her sexual maturity means marriage to the moon, waxing and waning in lunar phases. Moon, month, menses: same word, same world.” (10): It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around, just as the sun does. I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another. John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out. (148)

The moonlight “creeps” just as the rose vines do in the downstairs window, just like people that she imagines she can see walking in the garden from her upstairs barred window; a symbol of her overactive imagination made more potent, the moon acts as the magical element that awakens Jane’s döppelganger, her ghostly double, the imprisoned woman of the In his article about male hysteria in Flaubert’s Salammbô, B.F. Bart states that the female protagonist of the title, also a hysteric, experiences symptoms which connect her disease to the moon: “She was caught up in a growing sexual obsession with the moon goddess, Tanit. Salammbô's fixation was so great that she waxed and waned with the phases of the moon and nearly died during a lunar eclipse (61)” (Bart 314). 71

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arabesque. Nature, observable from her window, is still referred to in Gothic terms which are pitted against John’s cold rationality72: Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try. (144)

The arbors, “deep-shaded” and “mysterious”, the flowers are “riotous and old-fashioned”, the tress are “gnarly” – these baroque intricacies of the landscape describe a lavishness of vegetation that is imbued with subjectivity. The nature she gazes at longingly is loud, gothicized, exaggerated, hystericized; the mystery entices to exploration and the possible discovery of unsavoury secrets, but this initial description is tempered by the much tamer view of the room’s other window: the lane is “beautiful”, shaded but unobscured, but labyrinthine (“numerous paths and arbors”). The hysterical narrative (according to Link-Heer and Daniel’s definition) is fittingly fragmentary. What Jane jots down is the repressed, highly censored version of her frustration with her husband (“I get so unreasonably angry with John sometimes” 142), mingled with attempts at distraction from the sore issue by focusing on more “feminine” topics: “So I will let it alone and talk about the house.” (142) This resolution is difficult to adhere to, as John’s incessant policing and the place that she was deliberately brought to in the quest for a cure are inextricably linked, as it becomes clear that the beginning of this narrative only perfunctorily belongs to the wife: it’s underlying “architecture” is shaped by John. Frustration breaks the surface of the protagonist’s attempts to control the narrative and make it her own, as in the middle of “feminine” gushing about the garden being “delicious” or immediately after noticing the mansion’s “ghostliness” the censoring voice of John, as a form of Superego73, is quick to eclipse and 72 According to Bart, Salammbô’s attraction to her male counterpart is based on his association

to the sun: “linking him with Moloch, god of the sun and husband of Tanit.” (Bart 314) 73 It has been argued that the mansion in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a typical gothic house that reflects the psychological make-up of the owner, much like in the case of “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In the many interpretations of Poe’s story, the “split” house mirrors its inhabitants, twins Madeline and Roderick; Madeline would represent the body, Roderick the mind; the house’s dissolution and decay are the expression of Roderick’s own deteriorating psyche; the “sentient” house has a vampiric effect on the master-of-the-house, depleting him of energy etc. See Rae Beth Gordon’s article “Interior Decoration in Poe and Gilman”.

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invalidate the woman’s experience: “he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window”). The piqued tone suggested by the capitalization of draught – the author’s own – would indicate that the struggle between John’s ideas and opinions and his wife’s is clear. Despite what could be read as affectionate doting on the wife’s part in the constant mention of what John does, thinks and says, the infringement of John’s narrative upon hers is met with resistance, resistance to a borrowed patriarchal discourse which she is mainly mimicking. With every mention of his name, the reader gets the feeling that “John” is merely a linguistic anchor that centers the narrative and does not allow it to stray from the permitted topics too much, a signified for “authority: the expression of the “good girl’s” duty: socially-oriented, yet devoid of personal meaning. Writing as a diagnosis, as meaning imparted by language, will be articulated in the chain of signification differently, the seat of authority moving from “John” as the signified of “language of authority” (i.e. medical language) to the hysteric’s authoritative language (the “winning” language of disease). As a linguistic sign, “John” exceeds the limits of the house, of the text, and conspicuously articulates itself socially as the embodiment of patriarchy, in contrast to the woman’s shrinking in her vibrantly wallpapered cell. John articulates symbolically throughout the entire house, a space semantically marked by him. Patriarchal by definition, John’s hegemonic discourse controls his wife’s narrative, doubly reined in by his authority as doctor and husband. While the husband’s mobility and agency are underscored (“John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” 143), she remains passive, a prisoner in a mansion that she does not even have the freedom to imagine according to her own desires. Heir to the Gothic tradition of Victorian houses (“It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock …” 141), the mansion is still, literally, John’s house, and it is by right of this tradition that he is the de facto master of the house and of all in it. The hysterical narrator’s journal entries are often interrupted in order to prevent detection by her vigilant caretakers that she at first takes great pains to portray as gentle and loving; gothic repression, of course, would indicate otherwise. Her sister-in-law, for example, though praised for being “a dear girl” who is “so careful of me”, seems a rather stern jailer than a particularly close relative offering the sympathy and companionship the lack of which she bemoans (“It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work” 4). Jennie, of course, would have little advice to offer on the matter, as their “professions” are as different as can be (“She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better 93

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profession. I verily believe she thinks it’s the writing that made me sick!”143) hovering creepily on the doorstep whenever the illicit act of writing takes place: “There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.” (144) The very same entry ends a few lines later abruptly with the sentence “There’s sister on the stairs!” (146), which suggests that our character’s journal updated was interrupted by the sister-in-law’s policing presence. Despite having reassured herself earlier that she cannot be “caught in the act of writing” because “I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.” (149), our hysterical narrator, absorbed in her writing, fails to detect her up to the very last moment. The secrecy of writing, the choice of having to lie to both John and Jennie about it (“I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a great deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” 142) recalls the Gothic heroine’s need to be “a good girl” by abiding by the rules of her husband and jailer or be punished. We could say, in a sense that a Gothic heroine is a failed romance heroine whose fate is decided by the ending – whether she accepts the merger of the father and husband as the main controlling force of her life in her “happily ever after” or she refuses and is made an example of: Culturally prohibited from speaking of passion, unable to move toward the object of desire, the heroine remains the passive center of the novel and of the female adolescent's erotic dream. The phantasmagoric horrors that bombard her are the natural companions of repression, the price she must pay for her transgression, desire, even when it is only obliquely acknowledged and represented. By being a perennially passive victim, she remains a "good girl," never entirely aware of her own sexual longings. (Massé 10)

The doctor/husband’s own discourse competes with the wife/patient’s first-person narrative in an indomitable manner: there is absolutely no way in which the anonymous heroine’s own opinions about her condition are ever going to be taken into account (“what is one to do?”) except by subverting language’s system of signification. Each spouse in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is attached to the signifier-signified system differently: for Jane, the wallpaper is the signifier of madness, while for John, it is merely an object, signifier of the reason that despoils all things of “fanciful flights of fancy”; the signified, in each case, is vastly different. In her survey of the literature relevant to the field of gender studies by 1990, which is the date when Gender Trouble was first published, Judith Butler offers a critique of the feminist implications of the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, reaching the now-famous conclusion that gender is a matter of performativity, an act. (XV) or Butler, 94

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“to enter the repetitive practices of this terrain of signification is not a choice, “for the “I” that might enter is always already inside: there is no possibility of agency or reality outside the discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have.” (202) Indeed, as I have argued before, the competing narratives of John and Jane are hierarchically imbalanced binary opposites in which the man’s text is dominant over the woman’s; for the entire duration of the story, with the exception of the final scene, which explodes the opposition altogether. The textual sexual politics endures for the better part of a story because, as Butler phrases it, Jane has no choice, “the “I” that might enter is already inside”; as a result, Jane’s strategy of subversion is to exit John’s system of signification altogether and to obliterate the word/sign, body/pen, signifier/signified distinctions completely. The act of writing, which is certainly performative, becomes tied to the performance of gender: in smudging the yellow smooch all over John’s room (his by virtue of him having imposed it on her), Jane resignifies both the room/world/society and the act of writing as feminine. To be a woman and to write is to use one whole’s body in the act, a body understood as the “natural” equivalent of the “cultural” sign; this is what Jane’s subversion of her otherness consists in. Butler’s theory is consistent with Foucault’s thoughts on discursivity in “What is an author?” that “In our culture, discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act – an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane.” (211-212) Hélène Cixous’ concept of écriture feminine (“The Laugh of the Medusa”) becomes highly relevant in this context, thoroughly descriptive of Jane’s strategy of identity-formation as subject in a masculine world: “Woman must write her self (sic!): must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.” (875) In Keith and Paula Cohen’s translation from the French, Cixous’s la femme doit écrire elle-même is rendered “woman must write her self”, where “her self” and “herself” inevitably pun on each-other. Cixous’s call for woman’s writing freed of the disparagement of male writers is meant to emphasize the need for women’s narratives to be written by and controlled by women themselves – in the beginning, Jane’s text, though written by her, is indirectly co-authored by her doctor/husband. The women for which Jane writes and the Cixous urges they form the audience are the many women that the narrator sees creeping everywhere once she sets herself free from behind the wallpaper; to liberate one woman from the patriarchal confines of speech is to free all. 95

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Heidi Scott writes that the already-present smooch places Jane in a circularity of others having undergone the same fate, it’s not “the act of a single woman but the instinctual behaviour induced by the room on any number of previous inhabitants. One by one, the narrator picks up these habits and continues the work of those mysterious predecessors when she begins stripping the wallpaper herself” (“Crazed Nature: Ecology in "The Yellow Wallpaper"” 202). Scott continues to explore the immersion into nature as Jane’s wish to completely merge with the environment that has engulfed her, thus rendering her invisible, “like a creature protecting her territory” (202). The many creeping women have now become unstoppable, in a Darwinian gothic fantasy of regression back to nature in which the parthenogenetic female (the counterpart to Flaubert’s parthenogenetic male) has given birth to myriads of copies of itself which are now taking over the house, like just as many small and venomous creepy-crawlies which pose a palpable threat of invasion. The protean female body has adopted the language of nature to describe itself, having renounced its anthropomorphic features to borrow those of plants and insects. Like a crawling rose tendril testing the boundaries of the window before it invades, them, Jane no longer walks, but “creeps”, her own unruly body has embraced and multiplied its disobedience by duplicating itself ad infinitum, the repletion of her circular motion in the room echoed by the parallel creeping of the many other women who are her copies. Another strategy of inducing horror in the gothic genre and of introducing the unsettling sense of uncanniness, doubling fully reaches its apex by multiplying itself to infinity. Like the vampire and zombie create copies of themselves and invade the orderly and civilized by sheer quantity, Jane resorts to a similar strategy of invasion through excessive multiplication. Flaubert’s fantasy of male birth, of his “brain-baby”, the novel, emerging from his head fully-formed, is here challenged by the woman’s own parthenogenic narrative. Jane can give birth to as many copies as herself as she wishes; they will be her “natural” babies for whom no paternity is required; they will create, as Heidi Scott puts it, “a synergetic intraspecies community” (202). Hidden and protected in her yellow ecosystem, Jane has also created an all-female discursive practice independent of the male. Her inscription into nature in the form of the room’s yellow habitat, to which she has now fully adapted, requires her decorporealization and cultural re-signification as a child of Nature, yet another association that hystericizes the narrative by favouring the proliferation of the natural into and over the cultural. John himself, the former representative of Culture, becomes a mere “landform” (Scott 202) to be traipsed over- not even an obstacle, but a slight elevation in the landscape of no consequence whatsoever to her newly conquered environment. 96

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II.3. Hysterical Woman, Hysterical Man in “The Yellow Wallpaper” The woman’s whole body as a pen used to inscribe oneself over a space and engender one’s authorship is another revolutionary act, given the female body’s long-standing acculturation as “Nature”, Culture’s other; it is Bakhtin-ially (sic!) grotesque, Kristevan-ly (sic!) abject and Butler-esquely (sic!)74 performative. Jane’s body is one that has given birth and also “worked” in a field that is not considered appropriate for a woman (writing), in fact, according to the medical opinions of the day, incompatible to a woman’s main calling,75 the ability to bear children. Consequently, if a penis is a metaphorical pen and viceversa, it is only fitting that the very thing that has expelled the woman from the realm of culture –her body, understood sexually - become its signifier. This act of transgression calls for a reading of the repeated use of “smooching” and “smooches” in a different key, as sexual imprints of a grotesque, oozing female body on a house coded by male signifiers. The colour yellow as the embodiment of malady, its association with fungus and, finally, its unpleasant smell: It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair. Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it - there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad - at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell. May the reader pardon an awkward attempt at a play-upon-names. Weir Mittchell, the doctor who unsuccessfuly treated Gilman for hysteria, believed that college girls should be checked for the disease, since it was more likely to develop in intelligent women with an appetite for learning. (Schuster 701-702) 74 75

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Ioana BACIU There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over. (151)

The hinted at, but not mentioned “old foul, bad yellow things” are infections rather than fungi, an infection emanating from the yellowwallpapered room and persisting throughout the whole house, spreading and announcing the male body’s disease. Owned by John and thus, gendered male, the house represents the social body, controlled by the male. The ghostly smell which “lurks” and “takes by surprise” takes on human attributes, contributing to the “sentient house” psychosis belonging to Roderick Usher. The pathogenic narrative supported by the “yellow-as-an-infection” metaphors is directly connected to John’s profession: “John is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” 141. Since John’s identity is doubly socially marked as a husband and physician, both statuses must be undermined. If “John” infects her discourse as a writer, she will undermine him both as a spouse, infecting the seat of domestic house, and in his profession, proving to him that he is an incompetent doctor by being “as sick as she pleases”. Madness, growing yellow in the patient’s room and subtly infiltrating the entire house, takes over her body (“It gets into my hair”) to the point to which it becomes obvious to the reader that she herself is the source of the imagined smell. Her subconscious association with the wallpaper and the woman behind it, who presumably rubbed (smooched) the lower part of the room’s walls, takes the woman back into her bodily form. Fungi are living things that attach themselves and consume vegetation but betray themselves easily, as they are visible; infections take root in bodies and can begin as hidden, similarly to the woman hiding behind the wallpaper. The smooching and the unpleasant smell echo fears of the Bakhtinian woman’s oozing, birthing body, a pregnant hag who constantly threatens to unleash its reproductive powers over the male. Authorship is tied to social status, since “an author’s name is not simply an element in discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function” (Foucault 210). This function, dubbed by Foucault “the author function”, has a very precise role, it “is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (211). Which discourse is John responsible for, then, as co-author of Jane’s narrative, through free indirect speech? Each time Jane writes “John thinks” or “John says”, she is allowing him to write her story. 98

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Cool as a cucumber, after haunting her sister-in-law with her prying (despite the fact that they are both ghosts pitted by the patriarchy to haunt each other and should be uniting against the common enemy), Jane haunts her husband by haunting his house, which she now never wants to leave: I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued. I don’t like to look out of the windows even - there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did? But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope - you don’t get me out in the road there! I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way. (154)

Suicide is not an option for Jane, despite the wallpaper’s suggestive “bulbous eyes” and “broken necks”, as she dreads the jumping out the window as an act that might be misconstrued as desire for self-annihilation. It becomes obvious that this couldn’t be further from the protagonist’s wishes, as she ties herself to the nailed bed with a rope so as not to be removed from the room (“you don’t get me out in the road there!”) and continue “smooching’” around in circles, rubbing against the wall (“I don’t want to go outside”, “here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the floor, and I can’t lose my way”). The prospect of going back behind the pattern at night, thus effectively making her part of John’s house, merging her with the wallpaper, brings to mind Victorian narratives of colonisation by the Other, be him Eastern or female (see Marty Roth’s article of Gilman’s arabesques for a reading of the wallpaper’s foreign script as threateningly Oriental). Having become Other through her madness but also having gained an empowered identity by it, Jane is supplanting the master, subverting his speech, stealing his peace of mind, haunting his psyche and his mind. She is a madwoman that will not leave, just like Bertha Manson’s madness disrupts Rochester’s plans of marrying Jane Eyre – she is a madwoman that will not be put away in a mental asylum, but dwells in his symbolic house. She will rather live on and haunt John than “do something desperate.” Her creeping 99

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over John offers a disdainful attitude towards him: “I had to creep over him every time.” John has become a simple inconvenience; his name has lost his status, he is an intruder in an alien, all-female, hystericized space, where the woman does not even stop to attend to his needs (“I went on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder” my emphasis 155). The “cold shoulder” attitude towards John, his referring to him as “that man” leads to his depersonalization as she fully gains her own name as Jane, which we only now find out “I got out, in spite of you and Jane!” (155). He becomes an obstacle in her way: “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” The manic, repetitive circling around the room has turned it into the living, pulsating, but sick organ that diseases the entire body of the house, infecting its others dwellers, “smooching” them with its sickly colour, but this repetition could also pin to “her repeated ordeals as peculiarly female pleasures.” It is at the end of the narrative that its engenderer ceases to resist it, by using John’s calm, “professional” doctor’s manner. II.4. The Medicalization of the Woman’s Body in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: From “Bodilessness” of the Cultural Body to the Hysteric’s Body Didi-Huberman’s study of Charcot’s hysterics dubs the condition the malum sine materia, the evil without matter or without a body (70), the most puzzling of diseases because it continued to elude the doctor’s grasp of a physiological cause, autopsies carried out on the bodies of patients revealing no palpable evidence of the disease’s embeddedness in the body. As a condition defined by an array of symptoms (catalepsy, tetanism, contractions, spasms, loss of consciousness etc.), “hysteria, essentially, is a great paradoxical blow dealt to medical intelligibility. It is not a problem of “seat” but of trajectory and multiple location; not a problem of “cause” but of dispersed quasi-causes” (Didi-Huberman 71). The same “dispersion in the body” mentioned by the author of the Charcot study is noted by Camille Paglia when she speaks of the woman’s sexuality as diffused throughout the body as opposed to the man’s, whose erotic flair is concentrated in the penis, as well as by Michel Foucault when he notes that the nature of the disease in itself is problematic, as not all bodies respond to the illness in the same way and not all illnesses manifest identically: For us, the human body defines, by natural right, the space of origin and of distribution of disease: a space whose lines, volumes, surfaces, and routes are laid down, in accordance with a now familiar geometry, by the anatomical atlas. But this

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order of the solid, visible body is only one way - in all likelihood neither the first, nor the most fundamental - in which one spatializes disease. There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness. When will we be able to define the structures that determine, in the secret volume of the body, the course of allergic reactions? Has anyone ever drawn up the specific geometry of a virus diffusion in the thin layer of a segment of tissue? Is the law governing the spatialization of these phenomena to be found in a Euclidean anatomy?” (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic 2)

A virus, for instance, would be distributed differently in an individual’s anatomy compared to the spatialization of a condition linked to a particular organ. The “lines, volumes, surfaces and routes” of the “anatomical atlas” mentioned by Foucault create an analogy between the scientific language of mathematics, geography and disease; the body literally becomes a map, created by the doctor himself, in possession of the tools to observe and translate the information gleaned by his medical gaze into facts and figures. The precise “Euclidean anatomy” of medical language is decried, however, by Foucault as a construct, an idealised utopian version of the clear-cut angles, lengths and weights of a patient’s physical geometry. Like the physician’s gaze, medical language ought to be precise, but it is not; its aim is to regulate, know and control, to charter and measure in easily understandable quantifiable units, but it is, in some cases, elusive of the doctor’s grasp. Any disease is the product of the medical gaze which appraises and issues informed acts of speech, i.e. diagnoses, but hysteria in particular enjoys the privilege of basing its measurability on symptoms only, without managing to detect and pinpoint their causes. What the physician manages, in the absence of exhaustive proof, is to supply the lacunae with educated guesses that fill the missing information and to create a map of reading that would accurately charter the diseased body, a map that might, if correctly conjectured, take him to his diagnosis. Freud’s own language as hysterical discourse as an obstacle-ridden meandering river, with deceiving shallows and unsuspecting depths; the apt navigator carefully makes his way in the hysterical narrative with the help of the accurate map of his diagnosis. Elusive like the wayward uterus, that refuses to stay in its assigned anatomical place, the woman’s body evades the precision of the doctor’s measure. The replacement of woman’s innate biology with the intellectualism of the upper bodily precincts corresponds to Kristeva’s definition of abjection; Jane, as a woman writer and thus antifeminine, is flawed (to the point that Jennie believes that it is the writing that made her sick); her hysteria eludes quantification, mapping and chartering because its very symbol, the womb, is defined by displacement. Hysteria is the definitory disease for a woman not because it references the female genitals, but because it encapsulates woman’s quintessential displacement: 101

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her unstable identity, her vacillation between the status of Subject and Object, her ontological precariousness, her uprootedness from her own body, her in-betweeness as she flees othering into Nature and attempts to negotiate a place for herself in Culture. In this sense, Julia Kristeva’s definition of woman as perpetually moving from Subject to Object, as abject, is accurate. The medicalization of the hysteric’s body is a form of identity erasure; in order to reclaim it from the discursivity imprinted on it by the discourses of the power regimes belonging to the medical establishment, she must elude the map and make its own journey, blaze its own trail. The woman is “bodiless” not only in the legal sense, as a femme couverte whose name is effaces by the husband’s, but in the medical one, as well. Once a patient, medical discourse covers her own. When she begins jotting down her journal entries, Jane is already a patient; her archeological work is to unearth the power-knowledge wielded by the medical discourse and to define a personal type of discursivity. Elizabeth’s Grosz’s study of corporeality (Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism) uses Foucault’s definition of the relationship between power and the body to reveal the latter as a politicized social construct that is constant battle grounds for cultural resignification. Like the deconstructed relationship between signifier and signified, the body’s meaning is constantly re-negotiated as the locus of the dominant ideology’s inscription. Following Foucault, Grosz notes that: the body is not outside history, for it is produced through and in history. Relations of force, of power, produce the body through the use of distinct techniques (the feeding, training, supervision and education of children in any given culture) and harness the energies and potential for subversion that power itself has constructed (regimes of order and control involved in modern disciplinary society need the creation of a docile, obedient subject whose body and movements parallel and correlate with the efficiency of a machine or a body whose desire is to confess all about its innermost subjectivity and sexuality to institutionally sanctioned authorities. (149)

Jane’s body has become anything but docile; it has transformed into a slithering yellow snake, perfectly camouflaged by the yellow environment; it has freed the other women, unruly copies of other unruly women, from behind the wallpaper; ultimately, it has renounced motherhood, the most unforgivable of transgressions. If the baby’s staying with Mary was a temporary solution until her complete and final recovery, which would mark her reintegration into the pre-established norms of femininity as defined by child-bearing and rearing. Jane’s disease itself is only permissible as an aberration that civilized society has devised a safe harbour for: the mental hospital, under the supervision of qualified personnel (the surveillance 102

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attributes of whom are taken over by Jon and Jennie in Gilman’s text). Once the limit is fully crossed into proper madness, however, and Jane is past cure, her body is irrecoverable to medical science and to society. Institutionalized medicine, whose purpose is to recover bodies fit for re-socialization and capital production, has failed to return Jane to her duties to John and their child; thus her reproductive function has been stopped. Unfit to be a mother due to her “slight hysterical tendency”, she could have easily rejoined the orderly ranks of the sane and continued to exercise her reproductive function; as a madwoman, however, her potential future progeny is tainted with the possible mark of degeneration. The professionalization of medicine is a response to nature’s cruelty of natural selection, which would have ordained the weak and the inept to perish, but which cares for them in specialized institutions such and the prison and asylum instead.76 Ironically, the machine-like movements that Grosz references when speaking of the obedient body’s characteristics, is transformed, by Jane, into a mockery of docility. The repetition compulsion that Allan Lloyd Smith recognizes as so prevalent in Gothic texts (137) is reprised in Jane’s circular movement; despite its apparent benignity, the woman’s colonisation of a male body translates to a diseasing of the symbolic masculine corporeal, the house. In her feigned domesticity, Jane assumes control of the narrative and becomes dominant, an “angel-in-the-house” turned “haunting-ghost-in-the-house”. When comparing the chills of gothic terror to the pleasurable, but forbidden thrills of sentimentality, Marianne Noble argues that sentimental literature itself, based on the identification and sympathy between reader and the victim-character, has masochism at its core, as the pain inflicted by the villain is felt and relished by the empathizing witness to this spectacle of suffering (164). The reader of gothic fiction, she claims, experiences terror along with the victim, while the reader of sentimental fiction is helplessly detached from it but forced to watch. Horror, or the witnessing of horrible acts, is thus replaced in the gothic with terror, the anticipation that leads to the horrific acts, but it is precisely this extreme emotional experience that renders the victim passive. What gothic and sentimental heroine have in common - the flight from the villain - is doubled by “traumatic destruction of female, the violent repression of multiple identifications and desires during the construction of ‘true womanhood’” (166). By “true womanhood”, Noble means the passive Victorian ideal of the angel in the house and the woman’s 76 See Darwin’s assertion from The Descent of Man: ”With savages, the weak in body or mind

are so eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.” (87)

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inability to fulfil an identity other than the available male-sanctioned ones: angel in the house, fallen woman, hysteric. In gothic fiction, the construction of the self takes place outside these societal impositions, subverting them through death or madness. It is precisely when the female subject wishes to articulate herself as such that the breech occurs; identity, as the narrator has known it up to a certain point, fluctuates, hence the stance of the unreliable diegetic point of view. In the case of Gilman’s protagonist, Jane further exemplifies the late nineteenth century “cruel ideal of female bodilessness” as revealed by the doctrine of the femme couverte77, the covert or hidden woman, which legally bound wives to their husbands by requiring them to renounce their identity (Noble 166). The female subject, thus, literally lives in the husband’s shadow, which explains Jane’s constant deferral to John’s opinion, her hiding behind his speech and authority. If the law requires the woman to be underpinned by her spouse’s name which she shares, it is significant that the first names of Gilman’s characters were chosen to exemplify this legal mirroring: John and Jane, as two pods in a linguistic pod, are reflections of each-other in language as signifiers of equal domesticity, they are the counterparts of marriage which form a whole in the family unit, while the outwards, social signifier of their last name is absent. This view of femininity, supported by the ideology of the time, is put forth by John Ruskin in his talks about what the “queenly” nature of woman should be. The two lectures, joined under the common title “Of Queens’ Gardens”, were published in Sesame and Lillies. Ruskin’s view of femininity, while highly conservative, received mixed responses in the press of the day, as some critics lamented the woman’s confinement to the domestic sphere and the preservation of gender stereotypes, while others read Ruskin’s essay as feminist, articulating the superiority of the female over the male (Peterson). In a survey of literature which includes Shakespeare, the author draws the conclusion that the downfall of the main character is the fault of the man and defines “queenly” womanhood as that which is inseparable from her male counterpart: “This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong - perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude” (Ruskin 38). Though the The “feme covert” dated back to the Middle Ages. The Married Women’s Property act allowed women to own property in their own right in 1870, in the U.K. In the U.S., such rights started being granted to women in 1839, the first state to do so being Mississippi. Even in the late nineteenth century, there were states that had not allowed married women to have a right to their earnings. 77

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quoted passage might be read in a feminist light, Ruskin bases his argument on the structural differences between the sexes. If the man is Dominus, she is Domina; while the men are innately inclined towards war, woman not only does not destroy in her path, but she should nurture, supporting him in doing so. It is for the purpose of being a better partner to man that women should be educated, without neglecting their religious education. Flowers and gardens are Ruskin’s metaphors for femininity; the marriage between man and woman is a union of complementary forces which constantly shape each-other. The petals strewn in front of the bride and groom on their wedding day are not the mere signifiers of a happily-ever-after; their scent masks the work that marriage requires. We do find out what the female narrator’s name is, however, at the very end, at which point she has already renounced it; Gilman’s narrative thus emphasizes the disparity between the social relevance of the woman’s name versus the man’s. The narrator is, indeed, anonymous because she has permitted John’s name by be the equivalent of hers not only in the eyes of the Law, but has been internalized into their domesticity, where his social, professional and personal personae have been fused as the ultimate concatenated signifier of authority. Jane’s “bodilessness” is reflected by the text’s erasure of her name; ironically, as a writer, thus Subject whose name is endowed with the Foucauldian “power-knowledge” of the author function, what one would expect her to do would be to write her body into the narrative just as the signifiers of her husband’s power have permeated the house. Instead of performing her author function as a persona of her identity as ontological Subject however, the narrator repeatedly mentions a different name, that of her legal guardian and representative in the eyes of the Law. The separation between the public and the domestic spheres allows the man to be the representative of the family, while the woman’s confinement into the domestic would allegedly allow her authority over a distinct territory. What Gilman’s text emphasizes, however, is that woman’s authority within the home is but a glass ceiling that masks her lack of freedom; Jane’s condition has altered her status from “angel of the house” to “asylum patient”, she has no authority over her child, over her room, over her own body. The woman’s invisibility in the eyes of the Law, which only detects the guardianship of the husband, is transferred to her erasure in the house, adequately summing up Jane’s feeling of “ghostliness” upon first assessing the charms of her Romantic colonial mansion-turned asylum, as she, in fact, is “no-body”. Elisabeth Bronfen’s 1992 Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (142) is an impressive and thorough exploration of the merger between the concepts of femininity and death in Anglo-American literature: woman is, of course, frightening Nature because associated with the 105

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ultimate Other, death. The image of the dead woman in particular, aestheticized by Poe as “the most poetic of topics” in “The Philosophy of Composition” becomes the projection of man’s desire even beyond death: reified in her lifetime, the feminine body as image does not escape the process even in the beyond. Woman’s intrinsic ambivalence, therefore, as propelling reproductive force that carries the race onwards and symbol of death – the root of femininity’s othering and the difficulty of subjectformation for female characters – is thus simplified by the image of the dead woman. No longer having to negotiate her claim as Subject in an environment that treats her as object, the woman’s dead body embraces its status as a canvas for the projection of male desire, continuing the same function it had in its lifetime in a more open way, socially sanctioned by the rituals of mourning and grieving. Sometimes, as Bronfen s demonstrates in her discussion of Richardson’s Clarissa, the corpse is displayed in a glorification of the predatory aspects of the male gaze, legitimized by the sentimental narrative of immortal love. Lovelace, Clarissa’s rapist, refuses to contend with his dispossession of her in life, where she refuses to meet him, and in death, by attempting to steal her body and prevent it from decomposing for as long as possible, and then preserve her heart in a jar, where it can always be in his sight. Richardson’s rake’s control and surveillance, epitomized in his rape and then transmuted to the intrusive, irreverent gaze is enlightening in observing the fetishistic connotations applied to metonymical “heart in a jar” that substitutes Clarissa’s body. Applied to Gilman’s text, the theoretical premises underlying Bronfen’s thesis resonate in connection to the specular pleasures afforded to certain characters and denied to others. Until now, the discussion of the story was centered around discursivity and the competing narratives of Jane and John; discourse, however, is articulated around ways of seeing and ways of reading: the doctor misreads the patient’s symptoms, which leads to his flawed diagnosis and the worsening of her condition; in turn, Jane interprets her situation quite well in noticing the futility of the prescribed “rest cure”, but attempts to persuade herself of the legitimacy of her physician’s diagnosis and treatment despite their obvious incongruity. The gaze in Gilman’s story fully belongs to the male; it is masculine, medical, and divests the woman of her aesthetic attributes as she becomes a canvas for scientific scrutiny. The observation of the patient’s body is radically different to the displayed corpse of the idealized beautiful woman in Poe or Richardson; even in the sentimental novel, the ideal of a perfect female body, one that has finally staid its unsettling processes of reproductive change, of menstruation and birth, is shadowed by the unsavory reality of death and decay, as Lovelace’s doctor warns him that Clarissa’s body will eventually rot and cannot indefinitely be 106

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preserved in its current state. The female patient as-a-canvas-for-maleprojection versus the dead female body-as-a-canvas-for-male projection recalls Foucault’s observations about the policing of the prisoners up to the disappearance of public executions in the first half of the nineteenth century – politicized bodies on display, exposed to the scrutiny of the mob, becoming spaces of collective projected punishment, where society as a whole re-asserts its laws over the convict’s corporeal frame. With the passage of the mechanisms of power regimens from the public into the private, the prisoner or the patient only offer their body to the gaze of the jailer or doctor, the representatives of the Law and Science, institutions by which Power is exercised by proxy outside of the public eye. That we never see Jane in the romanticized, sentimentalize guise of “sufferer”, subject to bourgeois heaving bosoms and passions of grief at her confinement, is the consequence of the narrative perspective belonging to a woman and to the story operating in a different genre than the sentimental. The “gothic core of sentimental fiction” noticed by Marianne Noble in the masochistic identification between reader and victim is replaced, in the gothic proper, with a lack of idealization of the feminine through the gaze of the male. When Jane imposes certain standards of behavior onto herself, they are those coined by John; we never get an “imago” of the woman, however, as a medicalized body subject to the doctor’s scrutiny and aestheticized in the process. The narrator’s “ghostliness” or “bodilessness”, reflected in her anonymity, is her defining feature at the beginning of the narrative; her coming into full madness by the end of the story, however, is an evolution towards and an embrace of the bodily. The doctor’s confinement of the hysteric is an effacement; Jane’s assertion of her hysteria is a movement from self-policed, self-silenced sufferer towards the visible and audible body. Similar to the cool demeanour of Poe’s mad narrators, who are acutely aware of the composure with which they can narrate horrific acts (“how healthily - how calmly I can tell you the whole story”, begins the storyteller of “The Tell-Tale Heart” 267), Jane has recovered her body and her voice and is empowered by the same mechanism of apparent sanity: “in the gentlest voice”, “then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see” (155). Charcot, credited by Freud with the interest he took in hysteria, had ample opportunity to study his female patients and to document their symptoms photographically. The hysterics of late nineteenth century Paris were immortalized for clinical purposes, the interpretation of their photographic performance interpreted in Georges Didi-Huberman’s 1982 study (Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière), in which he portrays the French medical pioneer as the 107

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“inventor of hysteria”, a phrase by which he understands the deployment of image to the effect of socially constructing the disease. As a disease that resists diagnosis, being so difficult to assign to a physical cause, hysteria is constructed as originating in the body by the photographic capture of its symptoms. These, however, are stages by Charcot himself, in a process that at the same time allows the hysteric to contribute the representation of her own body, to challenge or revel in her depersonalization as “patient” or to follow the instructions of the clinician. Didi-Huberman reads these photographs of hysterics as an array of: poses, attacks, cries, “attitudes passionnelles,” “crucifixions,” “ecstasy,” and all the postures of delirium. If everything seems to be in these images, it is because photography was in the ideal position to crystallize the link between the fantasy of hysteria and the fantasy of knowledge. A reciprocity of charm was instituted between physicians, with their insatiable desire for images of Hysteria, and hysterics, who willingly participated and actually raised the stakes through their increasingly theatricalized bodies. In this way, hysteria in the clinic became the spectacle, the invention of hysteria. Indeed, hysteria was covertly identified with something like an art, close to theater or painting. (xi)

This description of the photographic evidence found at the Salpêtrière refers to the representation of illness as means of staging science; despite the fact that it is the hysterical patient that faces the camera’s lens, the focus is still, indirectly, on the medical practitioner who orchestrates the postures of his patients’ bodies to advertise a certain ideological standpoint, as the nature of the illness itself is read according to a personalized cultural pattern. Susan Sontag, for instance, reads the cultural significance of tuberculosis and cancer in the modern world as pervaded by metaphors of creativity (in the case of the former) and repression (in the case of the latter) (Illness as Metaphor), metaphors which rank diseases according to their respectability: by rendering the body transparent, tuberculosis spiritualizes, removing the patient from the shameful bondage to the flesh and to character-forming poverty (13); cancer, on the other hand, is slower, progresses in stages, it is contracted in affluent, middle-class milieus (15-16), a disease of the body that consumes rather than of the flesh that is consumed. TB affects the young and innocent, the poor and the marginal, saving them through a quick and painless death from a world which is clearly too harsh, while painful cancer disciplines and punishes the comfortable middle-classes. In her 1977 book (On Photography), Sontag describes the photographic immortalization of reality as political, since the active consciousness behind the lens has a choice between capturing the evidence of an injustice on film and disrupting the process to prevent it; in this case, images of atrocities bear the ambivalent ethical burden of 108

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documenting immoral acts while bearing testament to their own non-interference, becoming complicit in silence. Photography as a tool assisting the journalist’s effort in unveiling truth is what Foucault would call an “archeology of knowledge”; when it becomes an instrument of unearthing the truth of the diseased body, it is another guise of visual anatomy. The knowledge trapped in the woman’s physical form is brought to the surface by the camera, which becomes an extension of the objective medical gaze. The said objectivity is called into question, however, when the photograph is artfully staged; in the case of Charcot’s photos of hysterics, in the early stages of photography, the prolonged exposure time meant that spontaneous symptoms of the disease had to be re-created afterwards. Peering into the mysterious female body, a male fantasy shared by Freud, who uses the “key” metaphor to refer to his probing the secrets of the hysteric’s mind, is made easier by the photograph. The immortalization of the symptom on film means the gaze continues to fixate its object long before the symptom has vanished; it allows the medical act to continue beyond the interaction between physician and patient. Freud and Charcot are thus reversed, male Pandoras whose curiosity is legitimate by dint of medical knowledge-power; they fashion a key (a scientific method, such as psychoanalysis) to open treasure photograph boxes and thus reveal truths that are scary and unpleasant, yet contribute to the curing of the patient’s mind. Man’s curiosity is a sign of progress, woman’s is a cautionary tale. The visual exploration of illness is replaced with that of death as Elizabeth Bronfen78 reveals the de facto objectification of woman in the attempt to capture her elusive nature. The reification of the female body in art as a testament to the artist’s genius to the point he falls in love with her is an age-old myth; the man is attracted to the woman to the extent he can see himself gloriously reflected in her. Bronfen argues that the body of the dead woman is so frequently depicted in art because this male narcissism is expressed indirectly as the production of knowledge; the feminine is an instrument for male investigation, for the accretion of science; it is the sublimation of the drive towards mere specular pleasure that prompted Lovelace to preserve Clarissa’s body for as long as possible. Having become an imago and thus reified, “The feminine corpse inspires the surviving man to write, to deny or to acknowledge death, while at the same time the corpse is the site at which he can articulate this knowledge” (Bronfen 13). Over Her Dead Body begins with an analysis of Gabriel von Max’s painting Der Anatom, which depicts a physician unveiling a young woman’s dead body in preparation for a necropsy (4). According to Didi Huberman, hysterics’ bodies were also opened up after death to see if the disease could be traced within the body, with physicians reaching the puzzling conclusion that hysteria is the malum sine materia. 78

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Thus, psychoanalysis as a discursive practice is prompted by hysteria, which, in turn, is prompted by the aberrant female body. In the case of Charcot, the images of hysterics that he produces are imbricated in the knowledge. It is difficult to discern, however, if it is science, the woman’s body, or both that are fetishized. Dead woman as the producer of knowledge assists man in the process and contributes to his professional glory. The “crucifixions” and ecstasies of pain that Didi-Huberman uses to describe Charcot’s subjects borrows the religious language of ecstasy and redemption, depicting the doctor as unseen, gazing but silent, a distant witness to the women’s martyrdom. A sort of Deus absconsus, Charcot was rarely79 vocal in elucidating the conclusions he had drawn for his prolonged gaze: he would have the patients enter the consulting room, strip, be silent, ask a few questions, and then be silent some more, without enlightening the assisting staff as to the conclusions of his observations. The term used by this observer of his technique is “artist”, as his science is based on the gaze, the gaze itself constructing the illness from the spectacle, or performance of the ill body, which can become the ambivalent site of a performance, as the hysteric contributes her share in the articulation of the disease and the clinician stages it. According to Susan Sontag’s On Photography, the photographer is a spectator and a voyeur; the doctor shares in the artist’s characteristics by contemplating the object of his art, which has been transmuted into science. The artist’s narcissism, as he is enraptured by the result of his own genius, is echoed by the physician’s fascination with his patients, to the point that he keeps visual mementoes of them. His gaze amplified by his silence, he is the brooding, but brilliant scholar who does not share the mysterious mechanisms by which knowledge is attained, but whose gaze sculpts the body into its anatomical and scientific truth, the issuer of diagnoses emerging from the evidence of the body. Its hidden ailments are revealed to the medical gaze, as an impressed observer of the master’s method recounts: “This minute observation, primarily visual, is the source of all of Charcot’s discoveries. The artist who, in his case, goes hand in hand with the doctor, is not extraneous to his discoveries.” (23) The “ecstasies” and “crucifixions” of Huberman’s language add another layer to the artist-doctor, that of religion. The magic by which medicine is “The intern reads the ‘observation,’ while the Master listens attentively. Then there is a long silence during which he gazes; he gazes at the patient and drums his fingers on the table. The assistants are standing, crowded together, anxiously awaiting a word that will shed some light. Charcot remains silent. Then he instructs the patient to move in a certain way, makes her speak, asks for her reflexes to be measured, for her sensitivity to be examined. And again he falls silent, Charcot’s mysterious silence. Finally he brings in a second patient, examines her like the first, calls for a third, and, still without a word, compares them.” (Didi-Huberman 22) 79

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perpetrated via the gaze, engendering an increase of knowledge, reminds of Rabelais’ image of the Virgin who “gives birth through the ear” (49); in a parallel to the scientific impossibility of immaculate birth which is the religious miracle, medicine displaces religion, as the doctor may or may not implant his patients with hysteria through his discerning gaze. Though the physical representation of physical and mental anguish in religious art is monopolized by the male, reaching an epitome in depictions of the passion of the Christ, there examples of feminine suffering are also present. According to Marina Warner (Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and The Cult of the Virgin Mary ), images of women’s pain circulated in Western culture belong mainly to Catholic iconography, focusing on the martyrdom of female saints, often depicted in the midst of ecstasy in baroque art and the Virgin, whose suffering avatar emerges in the Mater Dolorosa, as the grieving mother holding the body of Christ. She is never, however, excessive or hysterical in her grief, hers is an attitude of dignified composure; it is rather the penitent Magdalene whose grief is more strongly expressed. In the depictions of female sainthood, mystic ecstasy, achieved through the punishment of the body through fasting and isolation, is a combination of beatific elation and pain, very close to the erotic. Depictions of martyrdom and pain in Western art, however, are depictions of beautiful female bodies; aestheticized female forms in which the highest of moral attributes are embodied in adequately wholesome bodies. Scenes of Greek mythology provide an excuse to display the beauty of female form; in religious painting, it is the body of Eve or of certain martyrs that is exposed, while beauty, mingled with either serenity or pain, is focused on the depiction of the face. Charcot’s hysterics are sometimes clad and at other times naked, and not all possess the advantages of young age and beauty; when choosing “representative” subjects for his portraits, it is the beautiful Augustine, with her respectable appearance, depicted both in “normal” and crisis states, that fascinates the most. The turn of the century fear of the degenerate is assuaged by the emergence of the pseudo-sciences of phrenology and physiognomy, which assert that one can determine an individual’s proclivity to criminality by studying the features of their face; the ability for one person to appear wholly “normal” at one moment and violent the other is a societal nightmare well summed up in the pages of Jekyll and Hyde. The women at the Salpêtrière were hysterics and prostitutes, two types of “excessive femininity” policed by the medical establishment, marginal from the point of view of class, as the bourgeois patients were treated separately, in one-to-one sessions. If anything, Charcot’s method is significant for the building of knowledge-power and the reinforcement of a middle-class ideology by further pathologizing those social bodies perceived as less prestigious. 111

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The “fantasy of hysteria” as “fantasy of knowledge” is vastly supported by the photographic image, which becomes an instrument of what Marx called “commodity fetishism”. As Susan Sontag showed, each disease carries its own cultural label; hysteria, on the one hand, bespeaks the repression of women and, on the other, of the efforts invested by nineteenth century science to cure them. In noting the “thirst for images of hysteria”, DidiHuberman draws attention to the fact that the disease had already become a cultural staple; it was the yardstick by which womanhood was measured; it had penetrated the collective consciousness to the point where it had less to do with science than with its representation as “female malady” and a tool of politically manipulating women’s body as vulnerable and weak by nature and the work done by physicians as civilization rescuing and caring for its marginal citizens. According to Roland Barthes, the old mythologies have only been displaced by the new – medical myths such as hysteria, which is currently disproven, was one of them. The issue of the bodilessness of the female in the nineteenth century is, therefore, variegated. Legally, the doctrine of the femme couverte still stands until the end of the century, as she is not allowed to own property in her own name; medically, her body is important as long as she can perform the disease that had turned femininity into a symbol of excess in the first place. Didi-Huberman’s assertion that the hysterics of the Salpêtrière contributed to their own hysterization by actively and willingly posing for these images allows for the thesis that the sufferer’s body is somewhat empowered, as it is involved in the visual coda of its depiction. This depends, however, on how aware the patient is in her own complicity in her exploitation. If her point of view is systematically infected by the man’s, whose gaze she has internalized, the medical act continues to be exploitative. Self-hysterization via photography can only be empowering when it is the woman’s choice. To the collection of hysterics with authority we can add Jacques Lacan, who also defines himself as one and proclaims, following his analysis of the hysteric as non-Subject, that Woman, too, is an ontological impossibility, since she is defined by opposition with the phallic male: “Woman does not exist” (Lacan, “Presentation on Transference”). Following Otto Weininger's sexist and anti-semitic turn of the century remarks from Sex and Character (Weininger), Slavoj Žižek (“Otto Weininger, or 'Woman Does not Exist'”) constructs a compelling parallel between the former and Freud’s French disciple. The syntagm “woman does not exist” posited by Lacan is essentially the same as Weininger’s in determining her lack of subjectivity, which heads to hysteria, as a result of femininity merely being a screen for man’s reflected desire. Weininger uses the well-known binaries between male and female (active/passive) to construe a view of woman as eminently sexual; her 112

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identity is thus defined by the urge to merge with the male, while the latter is superior because able to create meaning outside of sexual enjoyment; he organizes his goals into two separate spheres, out of which the erotic is perceived as secondary and inferior to the higher aim of ideas and ethical responsibility. For Lacan, femininity is a series of masks; woman can assert herself as Subject not by opposing the phallic in the Symbolic order, but by finding her own jouissance, separate from the phallic (Žižek 140). This movement from the phallocentrism of Freud, critiqued by feminist criticism for his sexism (one of the most famous myths that were debunked was the one of penis-envy as propelling career women to imitate and compete with the male). The male-female binary is subverted by Lacan, in Žižek’s views, because the existence of one does not determine/requires/define the other: “‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are not two positive substantial entities, but two different modalities of one and the same entity: in order to “feminize” a masculine discourse, it suffices to change, sometimes in a barely perceptive way, its specific ‘tonality’” (145); “‘Male’ and ‘female’ are not two complementary parts of the whole, they are two (failed) attempts to symbolize this whole.” (146). II.5. The Medicalization of Space in “The Yellow Wallpaper” Elizabeth Langland’s contribution on the class-bound rules of Victorian domesticity (“Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology and MiddleClass Women in the Victorian Novel”) is enlightening not only for the deconstruction of the “unnarratability of the servant-master marriage” (290)80 towards the end of the nineteenth century, thus dismantling fantasies of governesses marrying brooding Byronic masters and subverting clear-cut notions of insurmountable class difference, but also because it reveals the many restrictions imposed on the female body by the age’s notions of respectability. The lady was not supposed to be seen working except to direct the servants and to “keep house” by instructing the hired staff, while the spaces of the domestic quarters itself were gendered: Spaces were coded as masculine or feminine. Drawing rooms, for example, were regarded as feminine and usually decorated with "spindly gilt or rosewood, and silk or chintz," while the dining rooms, considered masculine, required "massive oak or mahogany and Turkey carpets" ( Life 292). The male domain expanded into smoking rooms, billiard rooms, and bachelor suites, a result of a "remember-there-are-ladies present- sir" attitude (Victorian 34). 80 See Terry Eagleton’s analysis of class relations in the work of the Brontë sisters for a more

ample discussion of this early nineteenth century plot (Myths of Power. A Marxist Study of the Brontës).

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The “chintz” of the above description is also mentioned in Gilman narrator’s description of the downstairs room which allows us to identify it as a drawing room, which she would much prefer to the horrid yellow upstairs ward/cell John insists that she occupy. Choosing the downstairs chamber with its feminine “chintz hangings” would probably lead to a semantic reconfiguration of the space, as Jane is now a patient and no longer the Victorian “angel in the house” who is allowed to rightfully inhabit the drawing room and to be displayed as the husband’s possession. As a room specifically designed for the intersection between the public and the domestic, the lady of the house, among whose functions is that of being a hostess, embodying the dual social function of entertaining and reciprocating social calls it is also the space in which she shows herself to the world as her husband’s extension. If the drawing room’s function is annulled, then so is the corresponding feature of the wife: hysterical, she is no longer fit for participating the ritualized rites of public display; her body, which is now that of a patient, not “lady of the house”, serves a different function and must be screened by the doctor/husband and further hidden away in the uppermost recesses of the house. Jane is not allowed to inhabit a female space as her disease has planted a flaw in her femininity: hysteria, as the disease of “feminine excess”, challenges the norms of propriety and respectability. Her body is not forbidden from the downstairs room because it is merely “feminine”, but because the strict codes which define the outer manifestations of her gender have been found aberrant, just as Bertha Manson social persona is unfit for the consumption of strangers’ eyes: the erasure of the “feminine room”, the drawing room, from John’s house coincides with the social erasure of Jane as his wife. The exile into a masculine space is obvious when the upstairs room’s main feature emerges as the massive, unmovable bed that Jane has so much trouble trying to budge in her efforts to strip off the wallpaper. While the furniture of the drawing room is not described, its air of delicacy is sufficiently rendered by the delicate roses and curtains. Comparatively, the “massive mahogany” furniture characteristic of the masculine rooms of the house is echoed in the oppressive size of the bed in the yellow wallpaper room. As a piece of furniture that is nailed to the floor, it carries a double symbolic function: it genders the room masculine and it medicalizes it. The hystericization of the male space by Jane, however, will require the semantic re-inscription of the great, immovable bed as a signifier of male oppression into one of female resistance – Jane’s revolutionary act of tying 114

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herself to it so that Jennie cannot easily force her to leave the ward whose prisoner she has been for so long. If the smoking or the billiards room of the typically middle-class Victorian home bear the scents of the eminently masculine tobacco or the vapours of alcohol, the scents of John’s house are replaced with the “yellow smell” of disease which originates in the patient’s quarters. Ambiguous as signifier of both disease and the “phosphates and phosphites” that constitute the cure, the unpleasant odour that creeps everywhere echo the masculine/feminine duality of the John/Jane names and the subsequent reversal of their gender imbalance. In a previous subchapter I refer to the husband’s name as the element that “centers” the woman’s narrative; here, this anchoring process is emulated as the female writer takes over the author function by literally putting herself in the middle of the circular text/space she has carved out for herself. Resembling the circular motion of the arms on a clock, Jane’s equal distance to the centre articulates her resistance to oppression in both space and time. A neglected aspect in discussions of the short story’s engagement with interior design is the doctor’s vetting of an unmistakably horrible chamber for either ward or bedroom and its much-too obvious resemblance to a dungeon, naturally indicative of the violence perpetrated on women’s bodies by members of the medical profession. The room’s hideousness, appalling for the reader in its splintered floor, barred windows, nailed furniture and torn walls is not supposedly masculine, which contradicts Victorian constructions of the male; to reject the frilly gilt rosewood for the smoking room is appropriate, but to prefer gouged floors for your bedroom is also decidedly anti-aesthetic and in contradiction with middle-class ideals of respectability. As a member of the medical profession, it is understandable why John would prefer the demarcations that restrict his patient’s access to the outside world, but not the chaotic ugliness of the room, certainly unsettling for any number of doctors and patients. Camille Paglia’s views of the relationship between literature and the aesthetic are built around the assumption that the entirety of Western art is the sublimation of chtonic pulsations, as man transforms his deep-seated angst of the unknowable feminine in culture’s uppermost accomplishment, its ideal of beauty. Aesthetization, for Paglia, is the device by which the inchoate feminine is regulated and controlled, for in nature it is the feminine which is ugly and the man that is significantly superior aesthetically (15). This “natural order” is reversed by the norms of Western culture, which turns these rituals of animal courtship, where the male is the beautiful one, on their head, because it activates desire, making woman the canvas of man’s projection of her through the objectifying gaze: “Beauty, the ecstasy of the eye, drugs us and allows us to act.” (16) – thus, the woman’s beauty 115

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temporary blinds the male to her deadly nature. If specular pleasure ensures the desirability of the woman/object by the male Subject, John’s anti-aesthetic gothic mansion is articulated as such not only through the patient’s eyes, which denounce the wallpaper as an abomination, but through John’s gaze, as well. The physician does not care about the aesthetic qualities of the mansion he has temporarily turned into a hospital81 for his hysterical wife because it is only his official domestic headquarters that are relevant; isolated and hidden from the madding crowd, his house and his wife’s appearance are inconsequential; as a representative of medical power-knowledge, his role is to discipline and punish, not aestheticize; medical and aesthetic discourse have nothing in common. In his wide-ranging 2015 survey of the cultural history of madness in Western Europe (Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. From the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine), Andrew Scull pins the connection between the madhouse and the gothic tale on the de-humanizing treatment of patients in such establishments. The nineteenth century asylum, he argues, was, in a comparison that Foucault would be proud of, a more respectable prison where the materially comfortable hid their relatives in order to protect themselves, and not the actual patients, from social stigma: To be certified as mad was to lose one’s control over one’s civil rights and one’s liberty. But for the families, one of the key benefits madhouses could potentially offer was the capacity to draw a veil of silence over the existence of a mad relation in their midst. That was a major reason why England’s growing prosperity in the eighteenth century had given birth to such establishments, allowing the families to rid themselves of the insufferable and impossible people who put their lives, their property, their piece of mind and their reputations at risk. But this shutting up of the mad in what purported to be a therapeutic isolation could easily be cast in a more sinister light. Many patients likened the experience to being confined in a living tomb, a cemetery for the still breathing. Madhouses at this time, moreover, with their barred windows, high perimeter walls, isolation from the community and enforced secrecy, invited gothic imaginings among the public at large about what might transpire hidden from view. (238)

Jane’s first impression of the queer atmosphere of the “ancestral halls” her medical treatment at the hands of John takes place is, thus, in keeping with Scull’s remarks about the inherent Gothicism of asylums. As the house literally 81 The clinic allowed the accretion of medical knowledge by observing the bodies of individuals

who had little say in the dehumanizing pratices of the hospital. (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic 49) The members of the middle-classes would resort to committing members of their family to the clinic only they were considered incurable. (Didi-Huberman xi)

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might have been such a place in the past and effectively becomes one, again, by having as hysteric under a doctor’s observation as its tenants, it also confirms its function as a surrogate hiding place for the “madwoman in the attic”. According to Foucault, the medical gaze is dehumanizing for the patient; medical speech is a closed, self-referential linguistic space which forbids the intrusion of neophytes and preserves its power privileges; instead of being patient-focused, it is doctor-focused, being interested in the increase of its own knowledge capital through observation and diagnosis. If John’s “medical sentence” has turned Jane into the mere object of his professional scrutiny, he has consequently stripped her of her aesthetic attributes and her status as the object of her desire; a medical subject cannot be, at the same time, both desirable and the object of pathological inquiry. The hysterization of women’s bodies, which Foucault lists among the four mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex alongside the pedagogization of children’s sex, the socialization of procreative behavior and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure, was: a threefold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed – qualified and disqualified - as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality; whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the family space (of which it had to be a substantial and functional element) and the life of children (which it produced and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biological-moral responsibility lasting through the entire period of the children’s education): the Mother, with her negative image of "nervous woman", constituted the most visible form of this hysterization. (The Will to Knowledge 104)

The threatening sexuality of the female body leads to its social erasure in the hospital made to the measure of John’s hysterical wife; self-professed nervous woman, Jane is, according to Foucault, the opposite version of the fit and proper mother and thus, of the lady of the house, in charge of the master’s possessions and children, and is therefore denied its claims to aestheticization; it is no longer a desirable body, but a covert, private pathologized body screened away from the world by her husband’s public identity. As an extension of the spouse, the wife is displaced from the official household to a hidden clinical surrogate, but not even in this deliberate isolation is she permitted to give her unruly feminine fantasy free rein. If John medicalizes the mansion through diagnosis and interior design, Jane’s competing narrative is to gothicize it: her Romantic revelries of decaying English places inspired from Radcliffean escape narratives are the écriture feminine’s response to John’s écriture masculine, a type of 117

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professionalized speech that has nothing in common with literary writing but with which it competes so as to show its comparative prestige. In a narrative replete with, policed and colonized by the unrelenting embededness of John’s name, Jane’s account begins with an observation that is sincerely and purely hers, the unrestricted expression of her own desire: her enthusiasm that “mere ordinary people like me and John can secure ancestral halls for the summer” (141) is already an interpretation of the house and its significance in a gothic key. Our female author would like the authority of authorship to shape her narrative according to the canon of female writing she identifies with, the polar opposite of John’s medical discourse, but as we have seen before, her claim to the author function is denied. Since she is not allowed to give full shape to her writer’s fantasies, she resorts to the literal gothicization of the narrative through hysterization. The sublimation of Nature through art, which Paglia defined as the exclusively male practice of the literary Western tradition, is a no-entry alley due to social restrictions regarding a writer’s gender as male; in a world that excludes her as subject, but in which she refuses to be an object, Jane resists reification by rejecting sublimation through the complete embrace of Nature through madness. In her 2006 book Managing the Monstrous Feminine, Jane M. Ussher addresses the very issues that have propagated the sexist imbalances of medical discourse and thus contributed to the patriarchal control of women’s bodies noticed by Foucault. In the chapter dedicated to the grotesque, the author engages with the negative consequences of the medical establishment’s monopoly over the woman’s body especially when it comes to the political stakes of her reproductive system. The pathologization of conditions connected to menstruation and birth, such as pre-menstrual pain and post-partum depression, is still handled poorly by not allowing women to participate in the diagnosis. The three stories that Gilman wrote after the publication of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which she allows her female characters this very privilege, the co-authoring of the “medical sentence”, a reality yet to come into being in present-day discursive practices. The main criticism that Ussher brings to such attitudes towards women’s diseases has to do with the patient’s stance as passive sufferer. As Jane’s disease has already been identified as a case of post-partum depression, Usher’s views on its management by the hegemonic regime of knowledge is enlightening, especially when suggestions for improvement are made: Thus, rather than providing objective medical theories to explain women’s ‘state’ post-natally, we could argue that the regimes of objectified knowledge produced by medical or psychological experts on the ‘problem’ of distress during the post-natal period provide a framework within which women come to understand and categorise their own experience as ‘pathology’ - as was the

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case with PMS. Through a process of subjectification women take up the position of ‘post-natal depression sufferer’ (or are positioned as such), where the abject reproductive body is positioned as to blame for distress or deviation from hegemonic representations of idealised femininity: the calm, controlled, coping woman whose spectre also haunts women premenstrually. Through a process of self-surveillance and self-policing women enact self-discipline and punishment - the self-castigation that is common in women who fail to live up to idealised notions of motherhood - and maintain self-silencing practices for fear of being found out; for fear of being positioned as a ‘bad mother’, as we have previously seen. (112)

Medical discourse’s reinforcement of patriarchal stereotypes about the female body as Bakhtinially monstrous stems from the very nature of pathologization as a process dedicated to the Othering of bodies not considered to be socially useful from the bourgeois capitalist point of view through the alleged unbiased assessment of science; in other words, the male anxieties and repulsion about the female body, pregnancy and menstruation are the same, parading under the changed guise of specialized names by a medical plutocracy jealous of its discourse and intent in building up its prestige to further shame and control. Using Foucault’s terms to refer to women’s internalization of the inferiority complexes instilled by medical discursivity (self-discipline, self-punishment), Ussher draws attention to the cleft between the notions of idealized femininity – as represented by a body that does not admit its subjection to mechanisms connected to the reproductive and is shamed by them - and the realities of pathologization as a collective shaming of conditions accompanying menstruation and birth. Though not explicitly menstrual, the yellow smooch of Jane’s bodily imprint is more than Heidi Scott calls “crazed nature”, the absorption of the female body into nature through a regression to non-antropomorphic creatures that creep, likes reptile and insects which are able to merge with the environment and go undetected; it is a decidedly female emanation of the body specifically made to replace the cultural black-and-white ink-on-paper boundaries between the gender binary, between nature and culture; it is meant to repulse and destabilize by referencing the improper, unladylike femininity meant to be hidden in the first place. Like Jane, a mother who suffers from post-partum depression is automatically a bad mother, who admits herself into the care of specialized medical staff (to whom Foucault grants the same role in the power-formation processes as the jailer and judge), thus admitting her shameful failure to exercise control over her own body, not to mention the social taboo that would have prevented a lady to refer to her body to anyone other than her physician or her husband (luckily or not, John embodies both). A component of Jane’s ghostliness is also her silence, also mentioned by Ussher in the cited 119

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passage as a reason for women’s reluctance to speak of the unruliness of their own bodies so as not to be pathologized. When talking to Jennie, so as not to be dubbed “hysterical”, Jane uses “a very quiet voice” and a calm manner, she hides her true opinions in her diary, censors the extent of the information she offers to John and only allows herself to cry only when she is alone. It would be interesting to compare her journal entries with John’s notes in her medical record to get a full picture of the discrepancies between the doctor’s and the patient’s discourse. In the absence of a corresponding pathologization discursive practice around men’s reproductive systems, it appears that there is an empirical bias, an overwhelming piling of attention on women’s bodies as central to larger discussions of their importance in the shaping of society in general, an idealisation that robs their corporeality of realistic expectations and dehumanizes them, leading to reification. The connection between woman and the biological, which, to this day, seems to be inescapable, mires femininity into the sticky mud of a forever insurmountable, never fulfilled, aspiration towards Culture. In asserting the woman’s ghostliness or bodilessness from a legal point of view, Jane’s corporeality is still politicized; her ghostliness is but a metaphor as her social invisibility from the medical establishment’s point of view. Once pathologized, the hysteric ceases to function in relation to the other roles of femininity, which it can no longer perform. In and of herself, the hysteric is marginal and either cured and reintegrated into the discursive regimes of power, or forever haunts its fringes. Genevieve Lloyd’s discussion of Rousseau’s contribution to current views of woman-as-nature is also the starting point of Camille Paglia’s placement of the Western Nature/Culture dichotomy’s beginnings in Romanticism, more specifically in the French philosopher’s system of thought. As an exponent of the Enlightenment, Rousseau operates within the Reason/Nature binary, in which the former will later exclusively be associated with the male: Reason emerges from Nature and closeness to Nature is the mark of its authenticity. In this version of the progress of Reason (which was to be further developed by Hegel), Nature lies both in the past, as an object of Reason's backward-looking nostalgia, and in the future, as the goal of Reason's fulfilment. This enabled a new resolution of the ambivalence of the feminine to enter western thought. The feminine was construed as an immature stage of consciousness, left behind by advancing Reason, but also as an object of adulation, as the exemplar for Reason's aspirations to a future return to Nature. (Lloyd 58)

At the same time repudiated and idealized, Nature is kept at a distance, as it rightly befits the Other. Despite reason’s kinship to nature, whose 120

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daughter (son?) it is, it inhabits the forever elusive space of desire. Similar to the ceaseless motion of meaning in the chain of signification, desire acts according to the same principle; once having inhabited a sign, it leaves it to dwell in another. The vacillation between nostalgia and the dream of a future return in its unadulterated midst renders Nature perpetually out of reach and exposes is artificiality as a man-made term with a given ideological purpose. Nature as a construct, the counterpart of Reason-as-Construct, constitutes itself as part of a system of binaries which reinforce the so-called “natural” sex-based dichotomies between masculine and feminine. The signifier’s “presence-absence” as illustrated by Deconstruction is thus consistent with the contradictions and paradoxes of desire and its role in subject-formation. As John pursues his own desire in attempting to cure his wife’s hystericized body by pathologizing it, Jane’s own articulation of desire occurs in parallel. A recent study tracing the history of the medicalization of bodies in contemporary society, Brett Dean Robbins’ 2018 The Medicalized Body and Anaesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery of Lived Experience is useful in outlining the continuity of thought within the medical culture of the nineteenth century and the present one. The following statement is as applicable to John the physician as it is for today’s practitioners: “The contemporary physician finds him or herself in a precarious position as a cultural hero who not only serves medicinal functions, but also is often expected to answer questions of deep moral and spiritual import. Physicians, in this latter sense, function like secular priests.” (10) Robbins’s analogy between practitioners of medicine and those mediating the relationship between people and God emphasizes the former’s susceptibility to superiority complexes that might entail negative repercussions for the patients’ care. The doctor’s status as “cultural hero”, entrusted with the delicate handling of life-and-death situations, echoes the social role played by the doctor in the mechanisms of power-knowledge; to exert his influence over the pathologized bodies of women is to perpetrate a political act by enforcing their erasure from the social body, alongside the other “marginal bodies” of the degenerate, addict and criminal. Robbins’ phrasing endows the physician with the superhuman qualities of a national saviour, using science to preserve his culture from extinction through degeneration or disease; the “deep moral and spiritual import” of his diagnoses is thus revealed as contributing to the formation of larger, national or transnational, narratives of race and extinction. The alliance between science and ideology is not new; the manipulation of medical discourse to favour certain policies (such as the ill-fated marriage of eugenics and the Nazis) emerges in Gothic narratives to warn of the shadow aspect of the excessive power-knowledge 121

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the doctor is bequeathed. Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde reveal fears pertaining not only to Darwinianinspired theories of regression back into primitive nature, but also a distrust of the medical man’s use of his knowledge privileges. Robbins notices the double dehumanization of women in medical discourse, as they are objectified first as nature (through their menstruating, lactating and birthing bodies), and then as cultural signifiers of death and taboo. Much as the alleged objectivity of science would have it, the marks of woman’s cultural othering coexist with its otherings in the field of medicine. The doctor’s social position as cultural Messiah, of the heightened religion of medicine achieved by its professionalization, is perfectly encapsulated when the taboo of menstruation is brought up by high-ranking member of the clergy themselves, the pope himself quoting a miracle performed by the son of God recounted in Mark 5:25–34, “which describes a woman suffering from menstrual haemorrhaging, who is healed by Jesus after she touches him” (169). The use of the words “suffering” and “healed” by Robbins reveals a perverse bias of language that betrays even the most well-meaning of discourses, as the terms are laden with ideology, medicalizing a condition that should merely be a process inherent to the reproductive cycles of woman, a sign of fertility and not a pathology; upon quoting the cited Biblical passage, however, it appears that the woman was indeed suffering from an “excess of femininity”, as her flow had continued uninterrupted for twelve years: 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. 30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” 32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”82

Like Jesus, whose miraculous touch “cures” the female of the shameful symptom of her gender, the doctor’s treatment plan exercises a similar 82

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+5%3A25-34&version=NIV

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function: come to me, hysteric as you are, John seems to say, and I shall cure thee. The Messiah-as-healer and the doctor-as-miracle-worker correspondence emphasizes the cult of the medical man and his omnipotence in modern society. The “miracle of science”, which works in inscrutable ways for neophytes, is reserved to a closed caste that speaks a language of its own (Foucault remarks, in The Birth of The Clinic, the exclusive use of Latin for doctors in Molière’s time, which naturally raises a boundary between this profession and the rest of the population). The man of reason would re-arrange the space and medicalize it by erasing the traces of the room’s previous violence, shaping it to be orderly, neat, clean; in resisting bringing any changes whatsoever to the room, John is more attuned to the cruel experimentations of Dr. Moreau than the sane Victorian doctor who serves the dominant ideology by “disciplining and punishing” the unruly hysterical body by caring for it in the private haven of the asylum, as he himself bases his refusal to prettify the room as it is merely a three month’s rental and the investments are directed towards their permanent house, which is undergoing repairs. It would appear that John deliberately creates a double of the house so that he can accurately separate the professional from the domestic; the rented colonial mansion is unworthy of aesthetic attention because, for him, it simply does not fulfil that function; it is temporary shelter for a more shielded enactment of his “master’s rights” with less scrutiny. The truly public space that John has created for his family is his owned property, into which he wishes to return victoriously, as a medical and paternal success, bringing his cured wife and his baby; this is the space that he reserved for the outward scrutiny of his public persona. In the rented house, John has created a duplicate which he can easily renounce after its role as makeshift hospital for a private patient expires. When the patient is his own wife, the doctor finds it natural to change the rules of propriety and respectability in enforcing a conspicuously ugly, and thus non-bourgeois environment, onto his wife, thus proving his own mental sanity over that of the hyper-sensitive woman. Ironically, John is the artisan of his own gothic house and contributes to the gothicization of his own narrative as retold by Jane. By making her the instrument of his projected narrative of medical success (since he is convinced that he is going to cure her), he is defeated with his own weapons. For Victorian norms of bourgeois design, beauty, cleanliness and order equal respectability and are the mark of the financially comfortable middle-class: “The angel in the house is a middle- class ideal built explicitly on a class system in which political and economic differences were rewritten as differences of nature. Social ideology inscribed the lower classes as inherently less moral, less delicate, more physical, and more capable of 123

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strenuous labor.” (Langland 295). As John Neubauer argues (“Nature as Construct”), the late eighteenth century split between Nature and Science and the urge for unifying these two opposites leads to the construction of scientific discourse as a means to explain and justify the ways of nature according to the scientist’s pre-determined biases. Quoting Novalis, for instance, who, when speaking of the latter, asserts that “The greater the magician, the more arbitrary his method, his utterances, his means. Everybody performs miracles in his own way.” (qtd in Neuabauer 131),it appears that “science is in the eye of the beholder” and that nature itself is a construct dialectically articulated according to the needs of the dominant discourse, the medical one. The doctor/magician analogy favours the doctor’s “will to power” and, instead of encouraging the latter’s pursuit of knowledge, justifies the arbitrariness of his methods. In other words, John, because he is endowed with medical authority, has all the tools of reinforcing his hegemony; the observations of his wife are flawed as he is blinded by his own need to “perform miracles”. He believes himself the ultimate “magician”, administering his pharmakon, his diagnosis as a panacea because he is convinced that his genius is so great he might as well dispose of the conventional tool for the acquisition of knowledge, denying the accuracy of the patient’s own observations. “The Laugh of the Medusa” traces the need for écriture feminine as the inevitable consequence of the expulsion of women’s bodies from writing – Jane’s discursive act is an act of women’s writing because it wrenches the narrative from the dominant male discourse and it literally brings the body back into writing; there is no better way of Jane “putting herself into the text” than using her whole body to write it, since the use of her name with an “author function” is denied. The erotic qualities of the word “smooch” become more apparent in this context; woman’s threatening marriage to the body, a reminder of the biological, of the primordial miasmic soup, of bodily refuse and transformations inherent in the feminine’s inherent cyclicity (Paglia 10-11) is hinted at in the usage of a semantically sexual choice. A smudge of the hand, thumb or shoulder is utilitarian, neutral “work”83, while a “smooch” is metonymical for the sexual body, for the sticky, organic imprint of the mouth and genitals. It is, again, Camille Paglia who describes In any case, a Victorian “lady of the house” would not be permitted to work, her duties would be confined to child-rearing, entertaining guests and managing the household by efficiently instructing the servants. That she refers to writing as such denotes the inherent un-respectability of the writing profession for a woman. For details on the evolution of attitudes toward the woman writer, see Mary Poovey’s 1984 book (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen), as well as Nancy Armstrong (Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel). 83

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woman’s bodily otherness in vividly visual terms, identifying the connection between menstruation (the mark of woman’s biological difference) in not the blood per se, but “the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placenta jellyfish of the female sea”, “the chthonic sea from which we rose” (Sexual Personae 11). Though the smooch is yellow, not blood-red, its organicity persists; it is the mark of Jane’s illness and otherness, of a being that does not want to creep outside anymore, “where things are green instead of yellow”. When using the word “movement”, Cixous is referring to the history of women’s movements and the feminism of the écriture feminine movement in literature; Jane’s circular movement in the room places womanhood out of history altogether, as the absolute other which has renounced the masculine logic of history as forward movement. The “fatal goal” mentioned by the French feminist author – the exclusion of woman from culture and language is to be counteracted by a competing discourse of self-affirmation with the male, “into the world and into history”. This view of history, however, if it is to be perceived as male, is constructed on the basis of forward movement, a line of never-ending progress that propels civilization forward. A proponent of the male and female’s common inescapability from the chthonic, Paglia argues that the “Western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future, a progressive or Providential design climaxing in the Second Coming, is a male formulation. No woman, I submit, could have coined such an idea, since it is a strategy of evasion of woman’s own cyclic nature, in which man dreads being caught.” (10) To put woman into history would be to conscript her to another masculine discursive practice as she has just subverted its textual one. It is in cyclicity, as Paglia argues, that womanhood’s true essence resides; the male coinage of history as a forward moving arrow is a merely a patriarchal construct emerging as a strategy of resisting the chtonic pull of the feminine, but a poorly designed one. Since the all-consuming, bubbling marsh of the earthly bowels is inescapable, one might as well embrace it. II.6. Hysterical Narrative: Wandering Meaning, Wandering Uterus The hysteric’s text is gothic because layered, its underbelly upturned on the surface in the story’s twists and turns. The basement that John professes he could live in, for Jane’s sake, “and have whitewashed into the bargain” (144), the visual opposite of the rational “intellectual heights” of the upstairs room, denotes his desire to preen and clean the subconscious, to sanitize the unsanitizable. Woman’s inescapability of her own body need not be a reduction to it through man-made and man-reinforced binaries in which woman and natured are fused and Othered, but a means of expansion of the 125

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feminine. Cixous recognizes this potential when she writes that “Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 876). The wallpaper’s structural unreadability, in a way, its frustrating arabesque inflorescences are understandably maddening for a Subject whose structure is defined by a “stream of phantasms”. Again, Cixous’ language echoes the tactile, slathering the “smooch” that becomes woman’s signature on the room/page’s walls. The readability of women’s texts is a crucial aspect of their writing; Annette Kolodny’s observation that not only the practices of writing, but those of reading, are gendered and coded differently according to the receiver’s experience stands unchallenged. In her 1980 article “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts”, the strategies of engendering meaning are discussed in relation to the reader’s ability to decipher them according to pre-inscribed gender codes. Kolodny puts Gilman’s story side by side with Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”, where the woman is acquitted of the husband’s murder because the male investigators are unable to read the crime scene correctly; the women who accompany them however, put the clues to gather to reach an understanding of the psychology behind Minnie Foster’s murder of her husband and hide the evidence to obstruct the inquiry. The conclusion that Kolodny reaches for both texts, would justify Jane’s exit from the realm of masculine signification altogether; since John misreads her even when the language is common, her discursive practice requires a complete reinvention: “lacking familiarity with the women's imaginative universe, that universe within which their acts are signs,23 the men in these stories can neither read nor comprehend the meanings of the women closest to them-and this in spite of the apparent sharing of a common language.” (463) Critiquing Harold Bloom’s assertion that the community of readers is able to trace meaning from one text to the other, Kolodny claims that the issue of the “common meaning” is dependent on that of gender. As female writer offering an account of madness from a woman’s point of view, Gilman’s text had difficulty in making itself understood as a socially and culturally determined account of hysteria as a result of the sexual politics of the age. The American gothic story of the volatile psyche told by an unreliable narrator whose repressed madness breaks through by the end is a tradition instituted by Poe. Changing the narrator’s gender apparently made the story unrecognizable as a “Gothic tale of madness” to the American readers, prompting posterity to reject it. As Kolodny wryly comments while alluding to the House of Usher, the reading strategies by which cracks in ancestral walls and suggestions of unchecked masculine willfulness were immediately noted as both symbolically

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and semantically relevant did not, for some reason, necessarily carry over to "the nursery at the top of the house" with its windows barred, nor even less to the forced submission of the woman who must "take great pains to control myself before" her physician husband. (455)

To the modern reader, also probably familiar with Poe’s text first and only later acquainted with Gilman’s, the connections are obvious, the mansion is immediately recognized as a standard “gothic house”, the narrator’s unreliability becomes apparent in her misinterpretation of other’s behavior (John and Jennie become suspect). Proving, yet again, the reading biases existing in a phallogocentric world, Kolodny concludes that, for readers at the turn of the century, Gilman’s story was interpreted as separate from Poe’s due to the public’s perception of the madness being read along strong masculine codes; in other words, there was no public accustomed to the idea of women’s madness because the concept had not penetrated socially – hence, a literature on the topic fell on blind eyes and deaf ears. Mirroring the theory of separate spheres coined in the nineteenth century, the texts of men and women kept to their assigned territories when it came to writing, too: that "meaning" which "is always wandering around between texts" had as yet failed to find connective pathways linking the fanciers of Poe to the devotees of popular women's fiction, or the shortcut between Gilman's short story and the myriad published feminist analyses of the ills of society (some of them written by Gilman herself). Without such connective contexts, Poe continued as a well-traveled road, while Gilman's story, lacking the possibility of further influence, became a literary dead-end. (456)

Gilman’s text, then, might as well have been anonymous, just like her narrator’s. Recalling Foucault’s statement that “if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity […] the game [of reading- edit mine] becomes one of rediscovering the author’” (“What is an Author?” 213), it appears that narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper” has three originators: Jane, John, and anonymous woman-formerly-known-as-Jane, whose signature is a sign, the yellow “smooch.” We, as readers, can assign signification to the narrator’s signature, which she herself defines as such in her text, but the “smooch” becomes unutterable and unreadable once removed from the “dead paper’s” system of signification; it is merely a sign that does not have a name, just as Jane has renounced hers, it is a sign outside of language. John will not understand its meaning, just as he was unable to read the signs of his wife’s illness, but empathetic readers will condone Jane’s subversion strategy just like the women in “A Jury of her Peers”; in a Foucauldian manner, we will discover the anonymous text’s author through its stages of enforced anonymity, rebellion, disclosure of identity and willful return to anonymity. Jane has successfully replaced the masculine script that 127

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is unreadable to her, which is the wallpaper, with a feminine script unreadable to the man, a metaphor of his structural refusal to integrate her into his cultural and linguistic system of significance. Where he once rejected her, denying her nature through exile to the “upper floor”, she assumes control by banishing him at the threshold of her experience. Bloom’s “wandering meaning” critiqued by Kolodny in Maps of Misreading recalls Plato’s “wandering uterus”, the ancient cause of hysteria; indeed, we could read the text’s now feminine mansion as a “gothic house with a uterus”, and a diseased one, at that. If we associate the narrator’s movement from downstairs to upstairs and her confinement there with the aberrant wanderings of the womb though the organism, the result is a hysterical body, which also marks Gilman’s textual body as hysterical. The narrator’s anonymous text, in Foucault’s terms, is based on a game, that of retracing the author; according to Freud, the stakes of Dora’s narrative is to find the key to her core; the hysterical governess of “The Turn of the Screw” co-writes the text with James himself. Accordingly, hysterical narratives appear as coded ones that only a group of initiated readers have access to can crack. The gothic and the detective story are thus bound by this transgressive game of following the wandering meaning/wandering uterus to its place of origin, i.e, following the logic of écriture féminine, to the symbolic room of the feminine. The gothic house of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also split into male and female areas, but horizontally, unlike the vertical fissure of the Usher household, but its “wandering uterus” is forced from its natural environment of roses, chintz hangings and piazza views 84 from the ground floor, whose ultimate consequence hystericizes the entire body. Though no mention of the colour of the hangings and roses is made, the downstairs room preferred by Jane bears the uterine connotations of pink; it is a plush, warm room whose walls are covered in ample fabric (chintz hangings) suggestive of the thickly lined uterine walls, while the continual shedding of the roses outsides echoes woman’s monthly cycles. To force the woman/womb from her natural environment is to cause it to wander, to become sick, hysterical, and to alter the entire body/text’s meaning. In her 1985 article which includes and analysis of Gilman’s story (Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism) Gayatri Spivak includes a reading of Frankenstein as crucial to the paternity and, respectively, the maternity of texts. The man-made monster, she argues, is If the traditionally masculine gothic house has now become feminine through hystericization, the ornate, frilly, pink atmosphere of the ground floor would correspond to the lower entry of the female body. Paired with the thorny roses spilling into it from the unkempt outside garden, it might well suggest a dreaded vagina dentata – the man’s terror of being destroyed by woman’s sexuality come true. 84

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symptomatic of the male’s competition for the privilege of female birth, which explains the scientist’s destruction of the female counterpart he creates for his wretched creature. Retracing the logic of Freud’s phallic mother phantasy that the child has before his Oedipus complex, when he believes the all-powerful mother is endowed, like him, with a penis, Spivak asserts that it would be possible for the equivalent fantasy, of giving the father a womb, to occur. This “masculine womb”85 would level the field between Victor Frankenstein, maker of men, and woman, the maker of babies: “The icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head” (Spivak 255), which recalls Flaubert’s parthogenetic birth of Madame Bovary as a novel that springs forth (or ejaculates, in fittingly masculine fashion) from his temple, a fully-fledged adult, like Athena from the head of Zeus. In Gilman’s case, the “box in the head” is the “upstairs room” of John’s house, which unsuccessfully compete with each other as one is Nature and the other, Culture. This reversal of gender roles has, of course, monstrous effects; the womb’s mis-placement into the space of the head has the effect of poisoning the mind, it has effectively become hysteria. In his book Aesthetic Headaches. Women and Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, Leland Person argues that man’s fear of the sexuality represented by woman translates, in the case of Hawthorne’s, as well as Poe’s, male characters, to their symbolic petrification: the Medusa’s castrating influence renders the man passive, tortured by suspicion, fear and hatred, unable to act, the man being “objectified” – turned to marble- by his thoughts of a woman. (119) The “aesthetic headaches” of the title are a reference to Henry James’ character in The American, Christopher Newman, whose migraine is the result of the prolonged contemplation of art. This is a fitting analogy with Poe, Melville and Hawthorne since their men, too, are troubled by the sheer, frightening reality of women, which they fight by turning them into objects of art. The Medusa’s influence can be read into the ending of Gilman’s story as another symbolic castration, especially since part of John’s body is inside the room, periodically cut by the woman’s movement as she “creeps” over him. The act of “creeping”, continuous and fluid, uninterrupted, suggests one smooth, sweeping motion, akin to the precise, yet delicate swoop of a surgeon’s scalpel; the masculine is cut and expelled out of the woman’s room. The fainting in itself is a petrifying act; a hysterical act with no empirical basis. Mirroring John’s dismissal of her symptoms from the first part of the story (“John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” 143), our female narrator innocently wonders as the wanders in her uterus-like room: “Now why should that man The fantasy of male birth in nineteenth century texts is also discussed by Galia Benziman in the works of Hawthorne, Stevenson, Welles. 85

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have fainted?” (155) She has now become the sentence-issuing Subject who has failed to provide the patient with an authoritative diagnosis, as the petrified fainting man’s hysteria remains undiagnosed. The structuralist approach to literature which borrows from Saussurian semiotics the view of the text as a system of signs gives way to the critiques by the Deconstruction, even more useful if the elusive nature of Gilman’s “wandering meaning” in her hysterical narrative is to be tracked in this game of ever-shifting signification. Reminding one of Jane’s “ghostliness”, the concepts of trace and ghost are merged by Jacques Derrida in his discussion of the nature of writing in opposition to speech in his essay from Dissemination entitled “Plato’s Pharmacy”. In it, Derrida creates a parallel to Egyptian mythology, resorting to the myths of Osiris, Isis and Thoth, to describe the filiation relationships between writing, speech and language. Since the resurrection of Egyptian deities is consistent with the meaning’s constant substitution, replacement and resurfacing inside a text, these filiations between Thoth, the god of writing, and his father, are based on false oppositions, as one cannot fully exist in complete contrast to a sign one is constantly referring back to, but is “a floating signifier” in a game of substitution and play, a mere appearance, and not a platonic essence for a meaning it at once “supplements and supplants” (93). The thing that betters the speech by putting it in writing is the pharmakon, poison and remedy at once, as it courses through the organism of the text. The story’s meaning, encapsulated by the metaphor of the “wandering uterus”, is also continually travelling along the page, from one narrator to another, from the page to the walls of the house, and is ultimately expressed by the yellow smudge that is continuously on the move, circularly re-inscribing itself while displacing itself. Deconstruction remains, however, the critical tradition that regards the text as a system based on différance in which meaning is based on the referential relationships to the other signs. Meaning, just like the poison/ medicine of the pharmakon, is never stable, it is forever on the move, it cannot be identified and pinned to a certain locus: all it leaves are traces while remaining, by definition, untraceable. When interpreting Gilman’s text, we may assert that hysterical textual body of the narrative participates in a deconstructionist quest for an ever-unstable meaning as a form of rebellion for the binaries inherent in oppositions such as male text/female text, men’s writing/women’s writing, Culture and Nature. The “meaning” of Gilman’s text constantly wanders in the gothic house, leaving behind the signs which were formerly inhabited by it, until it becomes “the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control.” (Derrida 89) – that is, the yellow smooch, the trace that woman inhabits in her journey between Subject and Object. 130

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The foundational assumption Derrida starts from is that the written word’s nature as intrinsically hidden, thus creating a gothic relationship of kinship between readers and any text: “A text is not a text unless it hides from the first corner, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.” (63) The semantic versatility of pharmakon in the ancient Greek language, which allows it to be translated as medicine, drug, physic or philter, bringing together both positive and negative connotations for Western culture, further Gothicizes this game of “hide and seek” involved in the (re)tracing of meaning, allowing us to read John’s medical narrative, superimposed on Jane’s, as the “poison” that masquarades as cure, perpetually chasing the sickness of the house/body, trapping it into a corner and ultimately infecting the entire establishment. As a medical narrative told from the point of views of John’s medical gaze, the semantic duality of the Greek pharmakon is that present in the English “drug”: both medicine and poison. It is interesting to note that Derrida also remarks on the “unnaturalness” of the drug and the “naturalness” of the disease; seducing, as it is, the pharmakon ultimately tampers with the body’s integration of the disease. If Foucault identified the stakes of the reader’s incursion into an anonymous text the re-tracing of its author and Derrida is concerned with the traces left by meaning in the body of the text, Gilman’s game of writing follows the mutable signifier of “writer”, gendered masculine, and shifts its meaning into the feminine represented by the smooch. The smooch perfectly encapsulates the drug/medicine dichotomy, through its repulsive connotations to the unpleasantness of the medical act and of the hospital, with its distinctly antiseptic odours (which the reader might associate with the phosphites and phosphates86 that Jane takes) and its anticipation of pain. In a pre-clinical Foucauldian logic, punishment in the civilized world is administered without pain, while the clinic, allowing for the professionalization of the medical act, is defined by the dehumanizing of the medical gaze; Some of the oldest remedies for the condition were smells. At the time of Ambroise Paré, in the sixteenth century, the “wandering uterus” was “repositioned”, that is, brought back to its proper place in the lower abdomen, through the use of repellent odours in the upper body, where it had inadvertently travelled, and pleasant smells near the vagina, which were supposed to “persuade” it to descend: “the womb, out of a natural instinct and a peculiar faculty, recoils from things that stink and enjoys the fragrant.” (qtd in Didi-Huberman 70). Here is an example of such a treatment: “The therapy deduced from this was to have the women inhale the most horrid smells through their nose: bitumen, sulfur and petroleum oils, woodcock feathers, hairs of men and billy goats, nails, animal horns, gunpowder, old sheets—all burned! This forces the womb to “descend” (repulsion, toward the bottom). Inversely, it was advised to “maintain the neck of the womb open with a spring” and then, with the help of an instrument made specially for the purpose, fumigate the vagina with sweet smells (attraction, toward the bottom).” (70) 86

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thus, medicine can become a form of punishment and discipline by producing “docile bodies” through various pharmaka. In this case, John’s house is both clinic and prison: it is permeated by the unpleasant, sulphurous “yellow smell”, which could ambivalently refer to both that of the disease and of the drug. Furthermore, the un-corporeality of the smell its ghostliness, the fact that evades the medical gaze through its very disembodiment – foreshadows Jane’s symbolic rejection of medical and male authority. The yellow smooch might have only stained the clothes of Jane and John, but the smell penetrates everywhere; persistent, yet unseen; the absence/presence in the game of perpetual substitutions of meaning. “Plato’s Pharmacy” further aligns itself with the text-as-body/ house-as-body metaphors of Gilman’s test through its “logos as zoon” language as an animal - analogy. For Derrida, the text is like an animal, a living being; because of its inherent structure, constituent of body-parts which need to cohere, to have a “head” and “tail” (79), a beginning and an end. In the game of substitutions, the interplay between masculine and feminine reinforces the nature/culture distinctions observed by Paglia as Derrida makes use of sun and moon metaphors in further explaining the game of signification in his Egyptian mythology analogy: This type of substitution thus puts Thoth in Ra's place as the moon takes the place of the sun. The god of writing thus supplies the place of Ra, supplementing him and supplanting him in his absence and essential disappearance. Such is the origin of the moon as supplement to the sun, of night light as supplement to daylight. And writing as the supplement of speech.[...]This process of substitution, which thus functions as a pure play of traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order of the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control; this substitution, which could be judged "mad" since it can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of substitutes, of substitutes for substitutes; this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence.” (89)

The game of substitutions and replacements is as repetitive as the cyclical deaths and resurrections is highly descriptive of the claims of Deconstruction, echoing the displacement of feminine identity previously retraced in my interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The wandering motif and its connections to Gilman’s text can be connected to Paula A. Treichler’s thoughts on medical discourse in her article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper"”, in which she highlights the connections between language and patriarchy as embodied by the system of signification created by John’s diagnosis, a “metaphor for the voice of medicine or science that speaks to define women's condition.” (65) “Escaping the sentence” is, therefore, the heroine’s goal as language itself is 132

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a male-coined diagnosis and a pun on both the categorical lawfulness of medical diagnosis and on the creation of meaning in language. To escape the sentence is to escape the diagnosis, but this entails the necessity of exiting the confines of language itself, which is inherently patriarchal, phallogocentric. This escape is another form of “wandering”, the signifier’s destination forever deferred, and its violence supreme is, in the case of Gilman’s text, the hystericization of both Jane and John.87 Perhaps without realizing, Treichler is referencing, in her title, the Foucauldian concept of power-knowledge, where the clinician asserts his medical authority and makes use of the performative function of legal language as expressed by the binding sentence uttered in a court of law: medical language is legal language, because its “sentences”/diagnoses determine the exclusion of a certain pathology from society on the grounds of it being degenerate, dangerous or in any other way menacing to the social body. The hospital and the doctor have the same relationship with the patient like the Law and prison to the inmate – they control the individual’s freedom to use their own body; their purpose is to cleanse society (capitalist society, to be more precise) of those elements which contribute nothing to the accretion of capital. The first chapter of The History of Sexuality links the appearance of repression with the advent of capitalism as “an integral part of the bourgeois order” (5): “if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative”. (Foucault 6) Through its impact on the capitalist economy, sex also becomes political and a form of power. Speaking about sex is in itself a transgression, but it is still possible by coining a specialized language through its pathologization. Within this logic, however, only one of the two sides involved in the medical act enjoys the privileges of legitimate speech – the doctor. Jane censors her public speech and censors herself even when writing in her secret diary; her interactions with her clinician/husband are denials of her narrative, where her own version of events is negated. Martha Cutter notes that Gilman creates and alternative method of diagnosing female patients in three other short stories involving doctors: “The Vintage”, “The Crux” and “Dr. Clair’s Place”, written between 1911 and 1916. These are remarkable for the concept of co-authored diagnosis between patient and physician and Gilman’s non-stereotypical portrayal of medical professionals of both genders: she creates a woman doctor who is brilliant, but sorely lacking in an adequate bed-side manner, and a male doctor who is sympathetic and kind. (“The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourse in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction” 173) Gilman herself had consulted a woman doctor for advice on married life before her first marriage. Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesser known collection of short stories The Doctors of Hoyland also includes a story about a country doctor who is surprised to make the acquaintance of a fellow colleague who is both eminent and (gasp!) a woman. He falls in love with her but she rejects him because she has dedicated her life to science. 87

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Let us compare and contrast John’s medical speech to that of Freud, in the Dora case. The Viennese clinician begins his account by solidifying his own authority over both those of his patient’s relatives and other medical professionals88: “To offer a complete, fully rounded case history from the start would amount to providing the reader with conditions very different from those of the medical observer. What the relatives of the patient – in this case the father of the eighteen-year-old girl –say usually gives an unrecognizable picture of the course of that illness.” (12) Besides building up the accuracy of his own discourse over his patient’s and her close relations in a way similar to John’s reliance on the legitimacy of his medical power/knowledge, Freud’s language gains authority by its reliance on “observing”. The doctor and the doctor only is in possession of the power-knowledge required to assess the patient’s condition and issue a diagnosis. Next, Freud states that he will disregard the father’s opinion of the patient’s symptoms and form his own, by asking the girl to talk to him directly and by asking questions, but this initial account is hardly enough: That first narrative may be compared to an unnavigable river with its bed sometimes obstructed by rocks, sometimes divided into shallows by sandbanks. I can only wonder how the smooth, precise case histories of hysterics given by some others have come into being. In reality, patients are unable to give such accounts themselves. They can certainly provide the doctor with an adequate and coherent account of this or that period in their lives, but there comes another period in which what they can say does not go deep, leaving gaps and riddles behind, and then one keeps coming upon yet other periods that are entirely in the dark, unilluminated by any useful account of them. (12)

The sailing metaphors used in the above passage recall Flora’s gesture of sticking a twig (mast) into a piece of driftwood to make a ship, interpreted as phallic and a clear sign of the girl’s corruption by the governess in the famous lake scene of “The Turn of the Screw.” As Shoshana Felman brilliantly shows, this is a decisive episode as it pushes the narrative forward, thus “tightening the screw”, adding to the story’s suspense and bringing it closer to its tragic resolution (“"The grasp with which I recovered him": A Child is Killed in The Turn of the Screw” 200). To the astute observation on the pun between the story’s title and the lake scene I would add that there is another aspect that connects the latter to the Prologue, an additional “tightening”: there is a clear parallel here between the “frame” that the governess herself has created for the story - that the ghosts exist and are leading Miles and Flora to certain It must be borne in mind that psychoanalysis was a new pratice with more detractors than followers and that it was met with rejection by the medical community. See Anthea Bell’s Introduction to the referenced Oxford Classics edition of the case. 88

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damnation- and the “frame” of her manuscript. Convinced, as she is, that the children were corrupted by Jessel and Quint and continue their unwholesome communion from the beyond, she is looking for proof to validate her own assumptions. In a sense, the governess is performing the same “filling of the gap” as Flora – the mast/phallus supplies the missing evidence that confirms her already formed opinions, the frame of her ghost-story logic. The governess’ story is framed by the introduction Douglas makes of her, planting certain biases in the auditors’ minds and casting her in the role of unreliable narrator; she becomes Douglas’ double by also “framing” the children with evil intentions of her own design. Less phallic in intention, Freud’s sailing imagery in the quoted passage is that of obstruction and retrieval, burial and discovery. Parallels can certainly be drawn between Freud’s strategy and that of the governess herself, who plays the role of the detective in a murder story of her own making. The unrequited love for the master spurs her to take possession of his house and wards in a subconscious attempt to recreate a Freudian family romance; she too, looks for evidence to fit in the frame of her own assumptions; she even fabricates the corpse of the murder, being, at the same time, detective and perpetrator. If she is able to hallucinate ghosts in order to justify the repression of her own sexual desire, the governess is certainly able to interpret any scene, not just the lake one, as the missing piece of the puzzle that leads to an already anticipated conclusion. Likened to a detective (Felman 204), she produces the proof/corpse of a murder (that of Miles) that was solved even before it was committed. The meandering course of the hysteric’s narrative as described by Freud, with its gaps and riddles (ripples?), depths and shallows, reasserts the clinician’s view that his own medicalized language has the authority of sifting the essential from the superfluous. Purged through medicalization, women’s bodies are considered valuable as long as they are useful; their worth is determined by their ability to bear and care for children. Jane, as a hysteric, is unable to do either: though she has given birth, it is Mary, the hired nurse, who takes care of the baby; her contribution to raising it will probably be nullified as it becomes clear that no “cure” can restore her to her “duty” towards both John and their offspring. Jane is now outside the confines of language, but not outside those of the law; despite her temporary triumph and displacement of the sentence through sign, she will be probably be put away in a standard asylum for women – all she has achieved is trading one, smaller prison, for a bigger one. To free her from these places of social shame would be make good of Foucault’s advice to “at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king.” (The Will to Knowledge 91) or, in Jane’s case, to conceive of it without both the doctor and the husband. 135

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Medical knowledge is power through due to the interconnectedness of knowledge and law. Despite also being her husband, John’s language still bears the normative and prescriptive characteristics; his gaze is not that of the lover, but of the physician, as he interrogates Jennie on his wife’s behavior: “And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.” (153) We can infer that the “professional” questions owe their distinctiveness to medical terminology particular to John and Jennie, who is euphemistically referred to as a “housekeeper” but in fact operates under the dual Foucauldian function of jailer/nurse, she is an instrument of power-knowledge helping build and maintain the doctor’s authority. The “report” the nurse offers is clearly a medical one, phrased in the specialized terminology that Jane recognizes as belonging to the medical environment, but does not have direct access to, as an outsider on the other side of the power-knowledge barrier - she lacks the latter because she is forbidden access to the former. The doctor’s decisions concerning the patient’s welfare, the specialized language of symptomatology constitute a discursive practice with political stakes: the diagnosis literally has the power of influencing decisions regarding the patient’s body through the articulated specialized language of diagnosis, cure and disease. Like hysteria, the disease of excessive feminity, the gothic “signifies a writing of excess.” (Botting 1), a writing of disease which is brought back into the confines of Reason through the ordering and framing of the male narrative, be it medical or otherwise. It is precisely its verbosity, however, that permits the gothic Subject to survive by fully occuppying the space of absolute otherness, absolute nothingness represented by madness and death. Woman is already othered as irrational, chaotic Naure, but it renounces the masquerade of being tolerated by the Man of Culture in the world created by him. The gothic narratives of escape are also narratives of survival, but not on the terms of a self-serving patriarchal system. Madness and death allow the heroine to forge her own terms. As she articulates herself as Subject in the fabric of language, she must subvert its phallocentricity. Gilman’s anonymous writer renounces her name and pins her a identity on a sign entirely of her own creation, the yellow smooch that she writes on the wall by using her entire body, transforming sema into soma. She is the “wandering uterus”/wandering meaning; pure, floating signifier; absence/presence of the hysterical house; because she cannot be a phallic mother, a woman with a pen, she will, in turn, gothicize and hystericize the house by creating a feminine father, a man with a womb. Her symbolic castration of John establishes her as Nature incarnate, as she has wrested the symbols of his power from him: his pen (of both diagnosis and discourse), his house, his wife. Her final question, “why should that man 136

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have fainted?” might as well translate as “why has that man become a hysteric?” or even “why is this man now a woman?”. Gilman’s story is indeed a parable of women’s unstable status in society due to the mutable meaning of the gothic house, which changes its function throughout the narrative, moving from the genre’s tradition of the late eighteenth century narratives of female entrapment and escape from a “haunted mansion” (which Jane astutely perceives from the beginning) to a more recent tradition of female gothic. At first, John’s house was the classic symbol of the master, of Bluebeard’s castle; by the end of the narrative, it is clearly an accurate reflection of Jane-the-hysteric. Changing the status of the gothic house from an embodiment of masculine hegemony to one of feminine empowerment is no small feat; it is an articulation of female assertion that only someone with an interest in signs and symbols – a writer, like Jane – could do.

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III. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic: Marriage is a Lottery

In Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, “The Lottery”, the decorum with which an entire community becomes accessory to murder – not the kind of murder to which they could plead ignorance to, since the event at hand was a public, consented by all, affair, sent waves of shock through the reading American public. In the story, the choice of victim is left to chance, as there is no legal or social infringement that might justify the collective act of punishment. Murder – random and gratuitous – is viewed as entertainment. The social taboo of ending another person’s life is no longer atoned by the social and legal urge to right a wrong by responding to transgression with transgression. The horror of the plot in the story resides in the preservation of the appearance of sanity when the unspeakable not only occurs as a result of exterior factors, but when the unspeakable, premeditated – becomes the norm. As critics like Harold Bloom have argued (9), the story outlines the instances of mass cruelty allowed to happen in contemporary times in allegedly civilized communities which pride themselves on having surmounted the barbaric urge to gratuitous violence long ago. The story is also noted for its puritanical flavour, as one the contemporary acts of collective violence upon an outnumbered, innocent victim (such as the Holocaust) are the inheritors of an older tradition, as the founding of the first English-speaking settlement on American soil by the puritans is tainted by the memory of the Salem witch trials and the systematic erasure of the Native peoples.89 The hysterical religious fundamentalism with which the women accused of witchcraft were met with is a collective rebellion against the individual freedom, much as Hawthorne’s adulteress from The Scarlet Interestingly enough, Shirley Jackson is also the author of a children’s book that is meant to explain the history of the Salem witch trials to young readers, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956). 89

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Letter is a social outcast for having freely disposed of her body. Besides the horror stories, it is Jackson’s novels that are a decisive part of the gothic tradition, and especially that of the American gothic – The Road Through the Wall (1948), The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Most certainly, Jackson’s best-known story is not necessarily in the tradition of the “female”, but rather “domestic”, gothic, which is more obvious in the collection of short stories that relay domestic experience to the physical and psychological confinement of the house in a way that echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s turn of the century view of the hysteric as a product of social and cultural imprisonment. As Gilman’s hysterical yellow wallpaper reflects the stringency of the young mother’s distress as a result of the age’s inability to see beyond women’s biological dimension (post-partum depression being unaccounted for at the time, since mothers were supposed to transition from the Angel of the house to the loving nurturer role seamlessly), Jackson’s posthumous collection of short stories (Just an Ordinary Day) paints the portrait of the very same cultural and social imprisonment, but with subtler psychological tell-tale signs. As the collection’s editor’s notes, “Most of her short fiction was written for publication in the popular magazines of her day (Charm, Look, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Companion, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion, etc.).”, which is ironic if we take into account Betty Friedan’s view of the ideology displayed in such magazines (The Feminine Mystique ranks Jackson among the “New Housewife Writers” 40). Subversively enough, Jackson’s stories in this collection are a display of undisguised criticism towards the burden of home life. The story that opens the volume, “All I Can Remember”, pictures a 16-year-old writer of stories (Jackson herself) in the midst of a quiet, school-free afternoon that she spends with her family, working on her writing, proudly showing it off, when finished, to her parents and brother to find it easily dismissed with a rather disengaged “It’s very nice, dear” while the brother teases and the conversation between the adults continues on a different and trivial topic. It is at this point that the aspiring writer decides that “I was never going to be married and certainly would never have any children. It may have been about that time that I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.” (5) Jackson would indeed carry out the work of a private detective in the sense that she would unveil the hidden burden of domesticity, sometimes with humour, as in the short stories published in women’s magazines, and at other times, closing in on the 60s, in full-blown gothic horror. 140

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As John G. Parks point out in his article (“Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson's Use of the Gothic” 16) on Jackson’s use of the gothic, the trope of female madness often paired with the genre in the contemporary moves from hysteria to schizophrenia, as the latter is thought to be “the defining Characteristic of Western culture - it is a culture which polarizes and compartmentalizes reality, fragments experience into opposites, thus repressing the possibilities of unity between self and world.” He makes a survey of the critical literature on women and madness, drawing on the work of several authors (Phyllis Chesler, R.D. Laing, Alfred Kazin, John Vernon) in concluding that Jackson’s purpose is “to explore the depths and contours of female violation in the modern world.” (26). In her article on Jackson as a housewife writer/a writer of housewives’ issues, Jessamyn Neuhaus (117) acknowledges Friedan’s influence on Jackson’s fiction while maintaining Nancy Walker’s on the humorous content of the stories: Postwar domestic humor, in historian Nancy Walker’s words, “expressed a hostility toward rigid role definition that prefigure[d] the issues of the women’s movement” and laid the groundwork for more overt resistance to sexism by beginning to create a sense of shared oppression among women. 3 Zita Dresner has asserted that postwar domestic humor not only fostered a new sense of solidarity among housewives isolated by life in suburbia, but also helped women “recognize and laugh at the incongruities between the ideal ‘norm’ and the realities of the average woman’s life,” which is “the first step a reader will take toward permitting herself and others like her, some flexibility in deviating from the impossible cultural standards.” (117)

The “cultural standards”, then, require a complete confinement to the realm of the house, but the asymmetry in the gender roles between the members of the couple finds an outlet, in Jackson’s fiction, in one of the close members of the household – either the children themselves, who become embodiments of an evil lurking presence, haunted houses that stand for a twisted relationship between mother and daughter (like in The Haunting of Hill House, where the spinsterish protagonist is consumed with mixed feelings of guilt for having wasted her youth caring for a possessive, vampiric bed-ridden mother). By shifting the seat of the gothic to the child, Jackson emphasizes the toxicity of nature/culture divide within the nuclear family90 and demythologizes both Madonna and babe, toppling them from According to Kimberly Jackson, the depiction of nuclear family in horror films of the twenty-first century is post-patriarchal and post-feminist, in the sense that patriarchy “is no longer a functional model for describing social relations, yet it is so deeply entrenched we cannot envision an alternative” (1). Shirley Jackson’s stories, thus, could be called “postpatriarchal” if we bear in mind that she only partly manages to dismantle the tenets of patriarchy. 90

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the suburban pedestal: in the case of the over-anxious mother, the child’s innate penchant towards cruelty, the violence 91of its manifestation stomps parent’s ability to confront it, while Jackson’s “bad mothers” either drain their children, infantilizing them in their adult age and refusing to let go, or reject motherhood altogether, going against the social norm. In the highly regulated word of the 1950s, even the mother who willingly accepts the role of housewife is confronted with fixed gender roles’ inability to account for the child’s disruptive potential. The danger that Jackson warns of is that even if society does follow the path of separate spheres by confining women to the household and sending men off to work, marriage is (still) a lottery whose outcome – the production of healthy children who can be raised to be well-behaved and productive members of society – cannot be set. III.1. From Princess to Housewife: Walt Disney’s Snow White and Domestic Gothic What do fairy stories and gothic tales have in common? The first answer is simple – the fantastic (Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 35); the second is a tad more complicated: if we look at the fairy tale as the main enforcer of dominant ideology, also infused into the wildly popular Disney animations which dominated the American cultural scene from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards (a genre which fascinated children and adults alike, with equal enchantment), the gothic emerges as the dark underbelly of the “fantasy of domestic bliss” proposed by the stories’ happily-ever-after: suburban housewife gothic, such as Shirley Jackson’s, goes beyond the “marriage as a young girl’s ultimate goal” prerogative toted by the animation giant; the road to finding the perfect match, ridden with obstacles as it is, ending in triumph, might be followed by the gothic experience of raising a family. In the present chapter I will undertake a short analysis of one of the most popular Disney productions which supports fixed gender roles and introduces the myth of the perfect housewife in order to clarify the standards of femininity imposed upon Jackson’s protagonists as a backdrop and foil to the dismantlement of the housewife myth in her fiction. The 1950s myth of the housewife as a product of an entire economic and ideological system supported by the media, a system that reinterpretations of fairy tales were used as tools for presenting marriage as the ultimate fantasy for womanhood. As Jack Zipes (Breaking the Magic Spell: 91See

Patrick Shileds’ article on sanctioned violence in Jackson’s most famous short story (“Arbitrary Condemnation and Sanctioned Violence in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery’’”).

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Politics and The Fairy Tale), Maria Tatar (The Classic Fairy Tales ) and Marina Warner (Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers) have shown, fairy tales are constructs infused with the dominant ideology of their day and age. The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Sage, Greer and Showalter) goes as far as defining the fairy tale as a “misnomer” due to its treatment of female characters. The “double edged sword” (231) of depictions of femininity in fairy tales boils down to their perpetuation of fixed gender roles, especially in Walt Disney productions. The famous studio’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, some fifteen years ahead of Jackson’s depictions of mid-twentieth century housewifery, is an ode to the modest, submissive virgin who prepares for married life by acquiring a particular set of skills (cleaning, cooking and tending to the children, the dwarves being a substitute for both husband and children, as they both require a similar type of care from the wife) while the man works to support the family, reveling in domestic comfort after a long day at work in ways which support the capitalist logic of the man-as-breadwinner/woman as home-maker. Just as iconic as the visual is the soundtrack, comprised of songs which have become hits in their own right. The dwarves’ Heigh-Ho (“Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho/It’s home from work we go” is a familiar image of groups of workers leaving the factory at the end of their shift) is a match for Snow White’s “Whistle While you Work”92, as they are both the expression of gendered labor performed with glee, both outside and inside the home. In this fantasy of capitalist efficiency, the men are happy to fully invest themselves into work, which they fetishize in their fixation with gems (“A thousand rubies, sometimes more/But we don't know what we dig 'em for”). Working from morning till night, digging “everything in sight” becomes a manifestation of repetition compulsion, of strenuous work for the sake of work perceived as fulfilling (“To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig is what we really like to do”), to the point where labour itself surpasses the mere purpose of ensuring material comfort: it is a habit performed out of pure pleasure, spawned from intrinsic motivation. Despite having enough gems (“It ain't no trick to get rich quick”) to last a life-time, the fantasy of getting rich is no longer the reason why the dwarves go into the mine every morning – the fetish is not the biggest, shiniest, or most valuable of diamonds, but work itself. There is “no trick” to achieve material comfort suddenly and effortlessly, the discipline of labour performed consistently, day-in, day-out, is what ensures the family unit’s stability and success. Disney’s 1937 animated version of Snow White features a scene in which the heroine is depicted happily cleaning the dwarfs’ home while singing “Whistle While you Work”. She is assisted in her chores by the helpful forest critters who sweep, wash and scrub alongside her. 92

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Similarly, Snow White’s own fantasy is ideologically constructed around the home, in which she performs unremunerated labour not necessarily to please the absent masters, but because the house’s state of untidiness is unacceptable to her own standards – again, she is prompted to clean, dust, wash and scrub because she derives satisfaction from the work, as her usefulness and sense of identity of a woman is pinned on her ability to serve. Domestic chores are performed in dance and song with the involvement of animal helpers and the house is spick and span in no-time. Making work fun by singing or whistling makes it pleasurable and distracts from the fact that it is time-consuming – the dwarves might toil in the mine from morning till dawn, but their representation of work only last for the duration of the song; similarly, the house is spick-and-span by the time one has finished humming the refrain. The perfect balance of work performed inside the house by women and outside of it by men in the workplace completes the circle of fixed gendered roles in the capitalist economy of the twentieth century, where male and female contribute complementary and equal shares to the achievement of domestic bliss. If work itself becomes the fetish for the toiling dwarves, forthright in confessing they do not know why they dig anymore, Snow White’s enthusiasm for home labour is complicated by romantic longing. There is always such a song of erotic yearning on the part of the heroine in Disney films, right before she meets her Prince Charming (in Sleeping Beauty, for instance, released in 1959, it’s “Once Upon A Dream”) – her fantasy is fulfilled right after she voices it. 93 Snow White’s is inserted in the lyrics which accompany her tune: “And as you sweep the room/Imagine that the broom is someone that you love”. Domestic work becomes pleasurable, as if by magic, because it is associated to a different spell, that of love: it suffices to bear in mind the person all the labour done for to make the effort worth it. In this case, however, Snow White does not know who the house belongs to so she is without a partner per se; she is merely rehearsing the role of the housewife where femininity is associated with the compulsion to clean. She is a housewife without an “object of desire”, the Lacanian objet petit a, but the longing to create it is already embedded in her performance of keeping house. The setting (the dwarves’ home) exists, the role (that of housewife) Briar Rose finds herself in the woods at the same time as her Prince Charming, whose clothes are stolen by the wild animals, who naturally respond to the princess’ irresistible charm. As she sings about her imagined lover, whose perfection she is already subconsciously familiar with (she has already met him in her dreams: “I know you, I met with you once upon a dream”), the birds create a make-shift prince from his clothes, a blank space for the projection of her desire that can serve as the substitute of the thing itself before the phantasm is fulfilled. 93

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is performed in high spirits (she is happy to take care of the house because she associates it with someone that she loves) – the only absence is the target of her desire, the romantic partner. The “broom-as-groom” substitution is the equivalent of the workers’ fetish, who replace the quest for diamonds with that of intensive labour itself. Snow White’s desire for erotic fulfillment as materialized in childish role-acting where a household item becomes a substitute for a partner a typical teenage fantasy - is fused with the act of cleaning. In the housewife fantasy, to love and to express love is to make the home a comfortable nook for the family. Freud’s theory concerning penis envy posited that a woman’s frustration for not having a penis is cured by the latter’s displacement with a baby;94 it would seem that in Disney’s Snow White, the broom is both the tool that transforms a mere girl into a wife and the signifier for the perfect husband of fantasy, a blank space for the projection of the ever-moving object of desire. In an ironic twist that further casts ambiguity of the witch/princess variants of femininity present in fairy tales, it also becomes the phallic object one associates with the yet-missing, but desired, husband. The broom, typically invested with notions of the witch’s wayward femaleness, is symbolically recovered as a tool of internalized patriarchy – not only does the young girl not feel oppressed by housework, but empowered by it, as the tools of her labour remind her of the one that she loves, as yet abstractly. If the broom empowers the witch, who becomes a “phallic mother” a perfect, complete subject who is not defined by a lack, it also completes the girl, who thus graduates to the stage of fulfilled womanhood in the guise of housewife. Labour is presented as the path to romantic fulfillment to both sexes – for men, this happens in the workplace, allowing them to support a family and makes them desirable as husbands, while in women, it is unpaid work in the home. In the context of the recent recovery from the Great Depression, which had ended in 1933, just four years before the film’s release, the iconography used in the depiction of masculinity still bears the imprint of the factory worker, reworked in order to put a positive spin on the revived economy. The iconic images of out-of-work men crowding the gates of companies looking for a job during the Great Depression is displaced, in Disney’s production, with the imagery of group of men happily employed, leaving the factory together heading directly home. “It’s home from work we go”. A desirable spouse comes straight home from work - an allusion to alcoholism95 and potential In On the Sexual Theories of Children (1909). The perception of the relationship between the consumption of alcohol and social class varied over time, with the disparagement of the lower classes as more prone to addiction at financially unstable stages in history. For the rich, drinking was a celebration of their 94 95

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stops at the pub, squandering the family’s hard-earned wages, harsh reality that had plunged significant portions of the working-age population into depression and addiction during the economic crisis. These complementary visuals of the separate work of men and women and their interdependence in creating the ideal home place certain romantic biases on the woman which are absent in the male: the dwarves’ only, and obsessive, preoccupation seems to be work, while in Snow-White’s fantasy labour and romantic longing are fused. The one condition to qualify as an eligible husband would be stable employment and the investment of earnings into the household. For a man, starting a family is a practical matter with a tangible solution, i.e. financial security, while the woman romanticizes her future partner. For the 1950s housewife, the prototype established by Snow-White’s home-making is improved by heavily advertised appliances – away with the primitive broom, in with shiny refrigerators, washing machines, miracle detergents and stain removers. To the joy of housework is added the enchantment of advertising, which turns the tedious and banal into the spectacular. A certain product can turn dish-washing into a privilege, following a logic identical to the “work as pleasure” paradigm used in Disney’s Snow White. The animal helpers in the house are now replaced by the just-as-wondrous cleaning products. The house-bound woman’s life is one of technologized labour and leisure; her motto might very well be “Whistle While You Work”. A house that turns into a home under a woman’s magic touch would be nothing without a dose of commodity fetishism 96and product-placement: the car and TV are marketed at the man as essential symbols as the division of time between work and leisure, while 1950s ads depicting impeccably well-groomed and well-dressed women revolve around shiny chrome-plated, well-stocked domestic territory. The “kitchen access to leisure, while the lower classes drank to forget. The purpose of the American Prohibition, which overlapped with the Great Depression, was to keep the economy going by eliminating all possible temptations from the working class: “The evolution of American Prohibition was seemingly centered on the elimination of alcohol in American life, but in actuality, the agenda of the drivers of the establishing legislation were a group of moral entrepreneurs who had two foci. The first was the survival of the lower class American family, the absolutely essential fulcrum for the capitalist capture of the combined rural and immigrant workforce to sustain its initially promising opportunity for productivity. The second was for the restriction of potentially uncontrolled drinking by some of these workers in light of the uncontrolled alcohol production and distribution system of the second half of the nineteenth century.” (Roman 52) 96 A phrase belonging to Karl Marx, in his “Commodities and Money” (1867): “a commodity is therefore a mysterious thing simply because in it the social character of man’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.” (43), which explains its fetishization.

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glamour” of the ad industry matches the Disney iconography of Snow White in that home labour does nothing to diminish the princess’ status – she can feel royal and still work in the house, whose de facto mistress she is. In discussing the cultural shifts in the importation of the royal characters from European fairy-tales to America, Jack Zipes notes that Disney takes an ideological stand towards monarchy by often ridiculing aristocrats as anachronistic and incompetent. The princess, instead of being depicted as a privileged spoiled brat, demonstrates the ability of becoming a useful member of society – it is, instead, the step-mother who marries for money, instead of love, that bears the brunt of the story’s moral indictment. The domestic fairy-tale for a mid-century American woman was that of a well-groomed princess easily and effortlessly managing the glamorous domain of home – the prevalent iconography of the 1950s housewifetargeted ads. III.2. American Myth and Gothic Princesses in Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil”97 First published in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1968, “The Possibility of Evil” is the story of a senior spinster who terrorizes the small town she lives in due to delusions of grandeur that are part aristocratic early-settlement Americana, part purely Puritan in their obsession with the preemptive sanctioning of “possible evil” from the minds and hearts of fellow townspeople. Diane Hoeveler calls it worthy of Poe himself, or of a “Flannery O’Connor in an angry mood” (“Life Lessons in Shirley Jackson's Late Fiction: Ethics, Cosmology, Eschatology” 274), reading the story as autobiographical and the protagonist as a double as the writer herself. The seventy-one year old Adela Strangeworth, the descendant of the first family to settle in small community -“My grandfather built the first house on Pleasant Street” (377) - has constructed an aristocratic persona of irreproachable respectability which serves as a façade for her covert meddling in the townspeople’s lives. With the dignified demeanor fit for small town royalty, Miss Strangeworth impersonates a caricatural version of a petulant princess crossed with a spiteful stepmother, intent on keeping a watchful, controlling eye on the members of the community she feels she

This chapter was also published as an independent article in The Bulletin of the Polytechnic Institute of Iași, Socio-Humanistic Sciences Section, Vol. 67 (71), no. 1-2/2021, "Writing is Masculine, Gossip is Feminine: American Myths in Shirley Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil”", pp. 39-52. 97

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has a responsibility over as the last descendant of family that effectively founded the town. Miss Strangeworth asserts her controlling tendencies by sending anonymous letters to the families she gathers information about while performing the innocuous task of shopping at the local grocery store. By observing and manipulating the details she gleans from gossip, she knows exactly what to write in her letters to maximize their effect to devastating proportions: she targets a first-time mother’s insecurity about her new-born child, interferes in the relationships between teenagers, plunges an already vulnerable acquaintance deeper into alcoholism, preys on a neighbour’s anxiety about an impending surgery, insinuating that it might deliberately fail as her nephew might have an interest in inheriting her fortune, plants the seeds of imagined infidelity in an unsuspecting wife’s mind. After sowing her kernels of distrust (“Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion” 381), she simply waits for them to bear fruit, as one insinuation inevitably leads to drama, which in turn generated further familial rifts that Miss Adela is more than willing to capitalize upon. Like an angered goddess of Fortune, she carries on the tradition of the most important person in town by literally making or breaking the happiness of every family in the community. The story, which can simply be read as an elderly woman’s struggle to regain her visibility or of evil lurking right beneath the surface of suburban middle-class respectability, can also be interpreted as a parable of fixed sexual and familial roles exploding under societal pressure, especially as it revolves around a stock-character of gothic femininity – the aging unmarried woman. The spinster, pitied, derided or marginalized and the driving force of the plot in gothic Southern fiction, is a woman whose value is pinned on her sexual desirability and ability to secure a husband. Stripped of the additional complications particular to the deep South setting of, say, William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams, whose Minnie Cooper (“Dry September”), Emily Grierson (“A Rose for Emily”) or Blanche (A Streetcar Named Desire) are unmarried aging white women who turn against the society which marginalized them, Adela Strangeworth lacks the redeeming quality of mitigating circumstances, shaping her into a purer embodiment of evil for evil’s sake. Unlike Minnie, Emily or Blanche, who allow themselves to be defined by their relationships with men or lack thereof, Miss Strangeworth is no victim, no vulnerable or socially unstable drifter of uncertain mental health. Jackson’s character is the embodiment of privilege: she enjoys financial affluence, social status and is long past the age of diffused sexual yearnings. Her manner is neat, exact, elegant (“Miss Strangeworth’s hats 148

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were proverbial in town; people believed she had inherited them from her mother and grandmother” 383), put-together (“Miss Strangeworth noticed that Miss Chandler had not taken much trouble with her hair that morning, and sighed. Miss Strangeworth hated sloppiness.” 380) and predictable (she always buys her tea on the same day, and gently and pointlessly chides the grocer when he forgets to remind her, even though she herself has not forgotten). The spinster’s transformation into a monster, sublimating her frustration with an unhappy life, is the result of social expectation which reward the nuclear family. Her actions do not stem from exclusion, trauma, or pain, but from uninterrupted privilege and a sense of entitlement. We might as well think that Miss Strangeworth never married out of a sense of duty, replacing the longing for a partner with the town itself: her demon lover98 is small-town America, whom she punishes and shapes according to her own fantasy. Miss Adela’s nemesis, then, is the domestic bliss of the married couple with children and any relationship that could lead to that, as her victims can be very young, such as teenagers Linda Steward and “the Harris boy”, the young Crane couple, who have just had their first child, or the librarian, Miss Chandler, who is courted by a widower Adela invents malicious gossip about. This spinster’s actions are paradoxical: she is methodically undermining the American dream from within, destroying its very foundation – the average middle-class family – because of an untenable ideal of “purity” that her own family is the standard of. Related, as a “monstrous spinster”, to her Southern literary sisters in Faulkner and Williams, she however never becomes pathological or grotesque; her calculated, precise timing and pace of sending the anonymous notes is the key to her craft and all the more terrible, as the emotional damage done by her letters is what she will use to write in her next. At the crux of her behavior are narcissism and the belief that she is sparing the community future conflicting by accelerating the timing of events that would have happened anyway: Mr. Lewis would never have imagined for a minute that his grandson might be lifting petty cash from the store register if he had not had one of Miss Strangeworth’s letters. Miss Chandler, the librarian, and Linda Stewart’s parents would have gone unsuspectingly ahead with their lives, never aware of possible evil lurking nearby, if Miss Strangeworth had not sent letters to open their eyes. Miss Strangeworth would have been genuinely shocked if there had been anything between Linda Stewart and the Harris boy but, as long as evil existed unchecked in the world, it was Miss Strangeworth’s duty to keep her town alert 98 See Wyatt Bonikowsky’s article (‘'Only one antagonist' : The Demon Lover and the Feminine

Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackso”), in which feminine subjectivity is defined as “passivity in the face of demonic repetition.” (67) and writing is a form of witchcraft (76).

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The “duty” of the singular Miss Strangeworth, Goddess of Fortune, of Justice, or simply another descendant of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, is to only apparently preserve the façade of perfection, since she effectively wreaks havoc, carrying the problematic relationship between man and sinfulness which preoccupied the people of Salem village well into the mid-century. Her goal is not to shape all houses in town to the model of her own, but to keep all others subordinate to the unequalled beauty of her own witch’s chateau, thus turning the inhabitants of the town into her subjects, as she grants herself, like an absolute ruler, the right of liberally dispensing misery around her. Miss Strangeworth thrives on her singularity and is jealous of any type of competition, even from an infant: Don and Helen Crane were really the two most infatuated young parents she had every known, she thought indulgently, looking at the delicately embroidered baby cap and the lace-edged carriage cover. “That little girl is going to grow up expecting luxury all her life,” she said to Helen Crane. Helen laughed. “That’s the way we want her to feel,” she said. “Like a princess.” “A princess can be a lot of trouble sometimes,” Miss Strangeworth said dryly. (379)

The unmistakable irony in her final comment about spoiled princesses and the headache they can be to their community is that it can apply to both Miss Strangeworth and the Crane baby, with the former posing the actual, deliberate threat to the town as its most spoiled-princess turned-despoticruler, in the reinterpretation of the fairy-tale myth of the inevitable monstrosity of the single woman with access to power. The classic fairy-tale stepmother marries for status and privilege, fostering her own offspring who are in competition with all children from the king’s previous marriages; her power over the kingdom is asserted when the male is emasculated, either by magic, because he is absent in battle or because the Queen uses her powers of seduction to manipulate him, and each time it is to overrule the stepdaughter’s claim to inheritance. The right to rule is lawfully hers not only when she becomes of age, but when her maturity, both physical and psychological, is proven by her successful union with Prince Charming. The step-daughter, thus, never has access to power alone; she must demonstrate her sanity – the first condition of her eligibility as a leader – through vetting from a male third-party, i.e. her husband. Portrayals of single femininity in fairy tales are, with the exception of the fairy god-mother 150

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who is actually a surrogate for the dead biological mother, evil: the stepmother or the witch, who are sometimes one and the same. The jealous fairy who is not invited to Princess Aurora’s christening and casts her spell bears a striking resemblance to Miss Strangeworth in the above-quoted scene, whose attention is fixed on the luxurious embroidered cap and lace carriage-cover. Her preoccupation with luxury (“That little girl is going to grow up expecting luxury all her life”) is as good as a promise that the expected Crane family fairy-tale is going to fall short of its happily-ever-after because Miss Strangeworth is going to take the necessary measures to prevent it. The letter she pens at home and mails to the mother who worries that the little girl’s development is a little slow is brutal: “Didn’t you every see an idiot child before? Some people just shouldn’t have children, should they?” (381, emphasis in the original). Adela Strangeworth’s fixation on children might also be read as a mirroring of her own self-hatred, based on infantile behaviour: childish, spiteful and spoiled herself, this elderly woman is essentially an overindulged brat who derives satisfaction from destroying her neighbours’ personal lives. Furthermore, the insinuation that the child might be mentally disabled is the kind of criticism that bounces back to the parents as the progenitors of an aberrant, degenerate creature. The identification of a flaw which touches upon the entire family’s integrity helps Miss Strangeworth indirectly articulate the sense of her own superiority along the lines of social class, whose boundaries she wishes to preserve. By distinguishing between two types of genesis - a legitimate, genuinely aristocratic one that she herself belongs to as the last descendant of the founders of Pleasant street, and a false, degenerate one – that of the Crane family and their baby, whose aspirations to a life of luxury unsettles Miss Strangeworth’s view of her own social position as unchallengeable, Adela emphasizes her wish to be recognized as the last and only aristocrat in town. Consequently, she cannot tolerate any competition from any other prospective princesses on her turf, especially since their legitimacy to the title is questionable by virtue of inexistant peerage. On the other hand, the binary of oppositions suggested by concluding question (“Some people just shouldn’t have children… implies that there are others who should) symmetrically refers back to Miss Strangeworth and her own childlessness. Ironically, if there are some families who meet the spiteful spinster’s criteria for procreation, those with the best pedigree in town would be the Strangeworths themselves - the very ones whose family name will die with their last scion, Adela. When telling tourists about the town’s beginnings and her family’s involvement in its settlement a hundred years before, Miss Strangeworth remembers that the townspeople “wanted to put up a statue of Ethan Allen” (377), a revolutionary war hero from Vermont (where the 151

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story is likely set), instead of a statue of her grandfather, whose lumber mill was the center of the community’s prosperity. The desire to be “put up on the pedestal” and its derived entitlement is Adela’s inherited due, as she feels her ancestry is on a par with that of the recognized historical champions of 1777. As a progeny of the nation’s founding fathers, this American princess feels that the town should worship her in the same way that they revere the statue of Ethan Allen – as this does not happen, her sweet graces turn sour. Merely hinted at with Jackson’s characteristic attention to detail, the relationship between Miss Adela and the grocer, Mr. Lewis, seems to have begun under circumstances different from mere friendship many moons before, in their long-gone youth: The Lewis family had been in the town almost as long as the Strangeworths; but the day young Lewis left high school and went to work in the grocery, Miss Strangeworth had stopped calling him Tommy and he stopped calling her Addie and started calling her Miss Strangeworth. They had gone to picnic together, and to high school dances and basketball games; but now Mr. Lewis was behind the counter in the grocery, and Miss Strangeworth was living alone in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street. (378)

What might have been a teenage romance between Tommy Lewis and Addie Strangeworth, as suggested by the picnics, dances and basketball games, effectively ends when the man takes a job in his father’s business, putting a definite obstacle (the counter?) in the class difference between the two. A rich man’s daughter who never had to work, Adela could not marry the son of a commoner, despite his family having been in town “almost as long as the Strangeworths.” The reason why she never took a husband is unknown, but one might conjecture that Addie’s rejection of Tommie Lewis, despite their having kept company in their youth, might have something to do with her desire to reign over the kingdom by herself, in full control of her own decisions, without having to defer to male opinion. To live alone “in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street” might have been Adela’s dream all along, blessing and curse, fairy and gothic tale at the same time; compared to the much drabber prospect of becoming Mrs. Lewis, the local grocer’s wife, Miss Strangeworth preserves her independence, her name, and her kingdom (etymologically, “Adela” comes from the Germanic word for “noble”). This, however, triggers the familiar string of consequences – continuing on the gothic fairy-tale train of thought, the undertaken course of action outright transforms the princess of the castle into the wicked stepmother/witch. Adela’s targeting of fifteen-year-old Linda and Dave Harris might be a projection of her own failed romance, especially since the most effective way 152

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to keep the couple apart is to infuriate the girl’s father. Linda’s incessant crying due to the horrible things in Miss Strangeworth’s letters could very well be another mirroring of the old woman’s stages from little town darling, spurned young woman to local vigilante. If the Crane girl is a reflection of herself as baby, spoiled and lovingly clad in embroidered trousseaus and Linda is a portrayal of her teenage self, the reader is able to trace Miss Strangeworth’s own progression towards her current position. By meddling in the families’ personal lives, Adela effectively takes on the role of her father and grandfather, the local patriarchs of both the nuclear family and town. The only statue in town is Ethan Allen’s; while men’s violence is recognized as nation-founding or character forming (Mr. Lewis does not have a problem threatening the Harris boy with horse-whipping if he visits again), women are forced to assert their power in covert, anonymous ways, like the method chosen by this particular daughter of the American revolution herself. In Adela Strangeworth, Jackson effectively exposes the myth of the biological programming of woman as nurturer by virtue of her sex and the repercussions of denying women political, public power. Instead of the nurturing matriarch greeted by everyone in town, who always has a kind word and a piece of advice for a fellow in need (“Walking down Main Street on a summer morning, Miss Strangeworth had to stop every minute or so to say good morning to someone or to ask after someone’s health.” 378), Adela’s copies the uncompromising methods of the patriarch. Her understanding and use of power is only gentle, passive, or traditionally feminine in its covertness, but not in its impact – her vicious slander causes just as much damage as physical violence would, since the social construction of power as solely masculine power excludes the member of her sex. Miss Strangeworth reads the symbols of power displayed around town and around her house correctly, accurately assessing that her gender belongs to rug-making, furniture polishing, and the planting of roses, while men are the makers of revolutions and the writers of history. The use and justification of violence is gendered, i.e. the expression of the masculine rise to power. For Miss Strangeworth or any other member of her gender, to have access to power99 is to become a “bad woman”, a stepmother or a witch, to seek to imitate the male or to suffer from penis-envy, as the desire for power in a woman is viewed as aberrant in itself. Violence, however, is culturally enforced as the man’s dominion, and its justification under the guise of “history” is a tactic inherited from Adela’s male predecessors, her father, The establishment and preservation of female power is a theme discussed by Lynette Carpenter in relation to Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where the two sisters maiantain their autonomy by exposing the male suitor as a self-interested fraud looking to partake of the family’s alleged fortune by marrying Merricat’s older sibling.. 99

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grandfather and the participants in the revolution. History as the written record of justified male violence spurs Miss Strangeworth to vindicate her own impulses in a similar way. If she cannot access power directly, she will merely mimic the social role of nurturer and respected, kind (but ultimately disempowered) perfunctory matriarch, but secretly seize and derive a sense of forbidden power by anonymously allotting gratuitous cruelty. The elderly woman’s duality between mature respectability and acute childish selfishness is reflected in her surroundings, simultaneously puerile and royal. The penchant for playing, alternating between the utmost seriousness and a child’s black-and-white sense of justice, as well as the adult drive to be in charge of the rules of the game, are reflected in the princess’s royal apartments. “Strangeworth House”, as the custom-made cream stationery boldly states, is a gingerbread gothic mansion, the fairy tale’s castle’s evil twin. The pastel colours make it look good enough to eat: “Miss Strangeworth stopped at her own front gate, as she always did, and looked with deep pleasure at her house, with the red and pink and white roses massed along the narrow lawn, and the rambler going up along the porch; and the neat, unbelievably trim lines of the house itself, with its slimness and its washed white look….” (380) The fairy-tale atmosphere is doubled by the conspicuous artificiality which permeates the narrative from the first pages through the overuse of the same simplistic epithets, whose banality becomes glaring by force of repetition. The conventionality of “fresh”, “clear”, “bright”, “washed” of the story’s first paragraph is reiterated by the “washed white” glaze of the house. This visual aggression by triteness is a red flag for the underlying lack of substance of something too good to be true. Perfection bordering on the uncanny is a form of “white-washing” over the distasteful reality of Miss Strangeworth’s meddling: her desire to purge evil from her community is another form of symbolic cleansing. Furthermore, the “bright sunlight” of the “lovely” summer day (another overused word, especially in the grocery shop) suggests a glaring blindness to the community’s simmering grievances, just as the roses’ strong scent might distract from Miss Strangeworths actual occupation – the sending of letters meant to “open their eyes” (381). The stationery used to send the letters, the colored pad of blue, pink, green and yellow, is non-incriminating because everyone in town uses it for jotting down transient, inconsequential daily notes, such as shopping lists or chore mementoes. The letters, written in pencil and “a childish block print” (381) are the exact opposite of the heavy “Strangeworth House” engraving paper completing the official-looking set of trimmed quilled pen, inherited from her grandfather, and gold-frosted pen, having belonged to her father, which are the centerpieces of Adela’s desk. The writing of letters in 154

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particular and writing in general is framed here as a masculine legacy that Miss Strangeworth has appropriated and subverted, continuing the forefathers’ legacy by policing the community’s life in subtler, womanly ways. “Feminine” gossip lacking the endurance of the written word, women are thereby excluded from the important decision-making processes immortalized in writing. The things accomplished for the community by the male heirs of “Strangeworth house” are lost to the family’s only daughter, whose name will only endure as long as she does not marry. According to Diane Long Hoeveler’s reading, the protagonist is a double of Jackson herself, who oscillated between the gothic and the comic in her fiction, often portraying herself as torn between the draining duties of family life and the more personal responsibility to herself, that of fulfilling a private longing, that of being a writer: “Miss Strangeworth is a masochistic self-portrait, an indictment of a creative self who does not find any artistic or cathartic redemption, only destruction and rejection. It is an extremely dark tale to leave as a legacy to oneself, and it could only have been written by a woman who understood herself as possessing a “strange” “worth” to her community.” (274) The woman who writes, as in the case of Gilman’s turn of the century story, is still subversive in the American mid-century; feminine writing is a subversive act of witchcraft, the transgressive appropriation of a male act by the “female of the species”. In contrast to the phallic, masculine pens and quills left behind by the founding men of “Strangeworth House” and what Adela would have no objection to calling “Strangeworth town” (“sometimes she found herself thinking that the town belonged to her” 377), the objects inherited from the feminine side of the family are all embedded in the fabric of every day domesticity: “the light, lovely sitting room, which still glowed from the hands of her mother and her grandmother, who had covered the chairs with bright chintz and hung the curtains. All the furniture was spare and shining, and the round hooked rugs had been the work of Miss Strangeworth’s grandmother and her mother.” (380-381).The other significant detail belonging to the family’s feminine side are the roses, as old as the house itself, going two generations back. Adela tends them, but she never shares them, not with tourists, not even for church offerings –they are only picked to adorn the inside the rooms of her home. The duality of the rose as a sweet-smelling flower which can cause unsuspecting harm fits Miss Strangeworth’s split between her private and her public persona, while at the same time echoing the inexpugnable chateau of fairy-tale’s Briar Rose. The scent that attracts tourists to Pleasant street is similar to the gingerbread house trap – one can look, but must not go in, making the roses a strategy of defense for the dictator-princess who wishes to preserve her autonomy. Ironically, while 155

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Mrs. Strangeworth’s house seems so predictable to the public that anyone can be lured into believing the place is a museum, a building freely open to anyone, it is in fact the most opaque of places, while the closed homes of the other townspeople, who feel are revealing little, to nothing, about themselves, that are almost transparent to Adela’s unfailing gaze. The legend about the one tourist who had mistaken Strangeworth house for the town’s museum and wandered in, exploring the house none the wiser about his error, is not only in keeping with the overall air of artificiality in the Strangeworth house, but a testament to its sole heiress’ resistance to change. The place must be preserved as inherited, ink-stand desk and all, and Adela’s reticence to personalize it is ambiguous: on the one hand, it can be read as its inhabitant’s dehumanization in her relationships to others, her transformation into an automaton that cruelly dispenses life-altering sentences from her elegant desk, whose life is entirely dedicated to the preservation of a glorious, identity-shaping past, rather than an empathetic being of flesh and bones; on the other it is this very obsession with father’s house and mother’s roses, symbolic surrogates of her parents and grandparents, the only significant emotional connections in her life that makes human. Adela is already used to living vicariously through the memories of relatives long dead; her current writing of letters is a different way of vampirizing others’ lives. Family is history and history is family100 for Miss Strangeworth; she is herself a kind of a living museum in the sense that Faulkner’s Emily Grierson was a “fallen monument”, a human document attesting the existence of an age long gone. More than an elderly spinster’s dwelling, the house is a symbol; its authenticity and genuine historical connection to the early American settlements make it so. The trimmed quill and on the living room’s desk might seem a deliberate display of the American Revolution, for which the written document – the Constitution – is a fundamental image of the founding of the America nation. To have a quill and desk display as the main living-room attraction is to intentionally court analogies between the imagery of the Revolution, particularly the portraits of the founding fathers and the ultimate symbol of their historical contribution – and Strangeworth Diane Long Hoeveler turns to Judy Oppneheimer’s biography of the author (Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson) to further link the story with Shirley Jackson’s ancestor Edward Henchall, a born and bred Englishman who “lost his fortune, changed his name to ‘Jackson’ and fled to America, leaving his wife and three children in England for many years.” (274), for reasons unknown. This further personalizes the story as a variant of Jackson’s own link to the American Revolution and the question of male ancestry: “The strange family history suggests that disaster – complete financial ruin, desertion, and loss of identity – can occur overnight and can arrive suddenly, with no warning, out of nowhere.” (Long Hoeveler 274) 100

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house. Bernice M. Murphy reads Jackson’s prevalence for mansions as settings in her novels (such as The Sundial, or We Have Always Lived in the Castle) setting as the heir to the classic gothic of the Castle of Otranto, the American variant of haunted European homages to a past that returns to haunt one. The mansion, as an import from America’s banished mother, Europe, is still tied to the theme of the haunting sins of the past under the guise of the aristocracy: The country mansion is where the squire or the lord traditionally resided, a figure whose worth was based upon the rent and labor of his tenants. The house in such cases functioned as both headquarters and showcase: an intimidating symbol of power whose very solidity gave an illusion of permanence, and a visible reminder of the wealth and taste of tis occupier. The psychological and social importance of such a building is given a unique resonance when transported to the colonial landscape of America, which is partly why the feature of the antebellum plantation house recurs with such frequency in the southern gothic. (114)

The feeling of nobility that gives Jackson’s characters a sense of entitlement and patronage over the villagers or fellow citizens is thus explained by their view of themselves as either original New England dwellers or simply the descendants of European aristocrats. Though she does not live in the country or has villagers she can exploit for labour, Miss Adela views herself as the smaller version of the British country lord with a country mansion in the colonies. Mocking the concept of American nobility and exposing it as just another facet of the very exploitative values the original thirteen colonies were distancing themselves from, Jackson also attacks the Emersonian spirit of self-reliance, on which the new aristocracy of the colonies was supposedly based. Miss Strangeworth’s grandfather, the owner of the lumber mill, enacts a similar type of exploitation of the villagers, which he comes to regard as property, because indebted to him for jobs, in much the same way that the English aristocracy retained their class privilege. The mentality of “businessman as savior”101 of the local economy is one that Adela inherits in fancying herself the princess of the entire town, with power over her subjects (“there wouldn’t have been a town here without the lumber mill” 378). The American spirit of entrepreneurship F. Scott Fitzgerald had, after all, presented a similar portrayal of the entrepreneur’s god complex in 1922, the publication date of “The Diamond as Big as The Ritz”. Braddock Washington, whose father is the one who discovers the gigantic diamond, does not tell the black servants he keeps in his isolated chateau about the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, keeping them in a state of payless subservience. The most revealing scene in regard to his god complex, however, is when their luxurious hiding-place is in danger of being discovered and the family patriarch offers God a bribe if things are restored to their previous condition. 101

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favours a capitalist form of materialistic elitism102 similar to aristocratic exploitation, as the first builders of mansions across the pond were “Victorian exemplars of free enterprise, the new aristocracy in American life” (Murphy 114) Adela, whose name itself is a derivation of the Germanic word for “noble”, is a character in a parable of the hollowness of self-aggrandizing American capitalism. The importance of writing in the making of history becomes apparent, further problematizing Adela’s own relationship to it and the gendered approaches to women’s participation in history. Miss Strangeworth’s awareness that she is not just anyone in town, but part of a family who has made history, is a strong incentive for her to make her own imprint on the course of events, albeit anonymously. Pencil stub and childish block characters replace quill and golden fountain pen and their inevitable calligraphy, multi-coloured note-pad is preferred to engraved paper in a lack of permanence part of the housewife’s day-to-day (the pencil can be erased, the pastel sheets are the disposable carriers of shopping lists) characteristic of women’s status in society - woman’s words are gossip, not the law. What Adela does is put gossip (perceived as inconsequential, petty and trivial) in writing, in the most piercing and hurtful possible way, but by doing so, she is mimicking the articulation of history. The difference between occurrences which are gossip and important events is determined by the existence of an authoritative figure which determines which is which: the transformation of common facts to culturally altering events does not become official until recorded and recognized as such by the authorities that be. History, understood as the chronological succession of truthful events, is the ultimate masculine construct of an interrupted string of victories. Its artificiality and embeddedness in ideology is contrasted to the intrinsically problematic “truth” of gossip. The tensions between “masculine” writing and “feminine” speech, legitimate versus illegitimate discipline and punishment, the overt and covert policing of collective mentalities, the negotiation of the public and private constitute the deeper, gothic underlayer of a spurned princess’s fairy-tale. Adela’s refusal to defer to male authority, not marrying, reigning in Strangeworth house by herself, is the ultimate American act of rebellion for a country that establishes its identity by breaking with the mother-country – a self-titled princess, she wields her power however she sees fit. Adela Strangeworth, thus, is carrying on the forefather’s legacy, but in a rebellious, Marxist readings of “The Lottery” include Peter Kosenko (“A Marxist/Feminist Reading of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’”) and Teresa Hakaraia (“Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’ and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity”). 102

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disruptive way, signaling the foremother’s voicelessness in having their contributions as makers of history publicly acknowledged. If we dare upset the father and grandfather and integrate Miss Adela’s epistles in the tradition of female writing, she is certainly different from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper”, but similarly disruptive. The one thing the two characters have in common, however, is the impossibility to sign their name (“She never got any answers, of course, because she did not sign her name. If she had been asked, she would have said that her name, Adela Strangeworth, a name honored in the town for so many years, did not belong on such trash.” 382). The apparent cognitive dissonance in revering and respecting her name and its place in the town’s history and the act of sending such vile letters which dishonor it Adela’s anonymity is a metaphor of women’s historical anonymity, which she instrumentalizes to shape the lives of the townspeople, a political, as much as personal, act. The character’s ambivalence towards children is all the more startling as their behavior to her is, in fact, beyond reproof. Ironically, it is the Dave Harris’s good deed – the one accused in the anonymous letters of something so nasty (“you need to have a dirty, dirty mind for things like that” 384) that Linda Stewart’s father says he will horsewhip him if he comes by their house again – that inadvertently exposes the town’s anonymous well-wisher. The group of children and teens gather at the new post-office after closing hours, which is precisely the time when Adela mails her missives, “as the darkness started to dim the outlines of the trees and people’s faces, although no one could ever mistake Miss Strangeworth, with her dainty walk and her rustling skirts.” (383) For one so fond of the washed, bright, sunshine, the woman’s walk at dusk is a faux pas: the letter addressed to Don Crane, insinuating his baby might be developmentally challenged, gets caught in the mailbox slot and falls outside. The Harris boy delivers it to the Cranes, indicating the sender, so that Miss Strangeworth receives one of her own epistles the following bright morning: “Look out at what used to be your roses.” (385) It is children that bring about the character’s inevitable downfall precisely because she underestimates them, just as she does all townspeople, believing that her title, “Miss Strangeworth of Pleasant Street”, makes her impervious to criticism: Miss Strangeworth had never had any self-consciousness103 before the children. She did not feel that any of them were staring at her unduly or longing to laugh at her; it would have been most reprehensible for their Bourgeois exploiters do not have class consciousness, which is the privilege of the proletariat. 103

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Adela’s previous description of setting off towards the post office to fulfill her mission, brimming with a sense of duty, pocketbook under her arm, indomitable (and old-fashioned) hat on, noisily announcing her arrival by the rustling of her skirts, upright and dignified, defies ridicule by sheer force of her booted-and-spurred confidence. Like a knight of justice/rider of the apocalypse dispensing discipline and punishment right and left, Miss Strangeworth sallies forth with a “strange” sense self-worth (may the questionable pun be pardoned) because it is grounded in an ill-understood entitlement. God-like, it is her inflated sense of self-importance that spurs the evil in the community and not the townspeople’s actual deeds, which should not concern her in the first place. Adela’s interference in folks’ personal lives erases the boundary between the public and the private, an erasure as deeply American as New England puritanism itself. The embeddedness of sin and guilt into the cultural premise of the American Revolution, the paradoxical combination of self-reliance and self-hatred, of the faith in victory in attaining the American dream and transgressing all obstacles with the right amount of determination and proverbial Protestant work ethic and the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity, between belief and self-doubt, might explain the character’s conviction that “The town where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet, but people everywhere were lustful and evil and degraded and needed to be watched; the world was so large, and there was only one Strangeworth left in it.” (382) Adela has fashioned herself into a preserver of the town’s social and moral purity and of distinctions of any kind – mingling with outsiders would translate to miscegenation, which explains her rejection of upward social mobility or any type of close rapports between classes, such as that between herself and Mr. Lewis, the grocer, or Linda Stewart and “the Harris boy”, whose first name she seldom mentions because she probably deems him unworthy of the girl’s attention. The reason why she never offers her roses to strangers is that they might “take them into strange towns and down strange streets” (378), diluting, in a sense, the town’s uniqueness, robbing it of its status of historical revolutionary town. The essential connection Miss Strangeworth makes is between her forefathers’ ability to found a town and the purging of evil from the settlers’ hearts, for the first American settlements were instilled, early on, with the doctrine of exceptionalism and the need to 160

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consider themselves the builders of a new Eden104, New Adams and New Eves, the descendants of John Winthrop’s “City Upon the Hill”. Adela is, in a sense, trying to prevent the Fall in the town that she sees as still uncorrupted by sin, upheld into a state of grace by her family’s excellent work, without seeing that she herself has morphed into the serpent of temptation. The poisoned words she pours in the townspeople’s ears through her letters is the unleashed evil in the world that she so fears. Paradoxically, Miss Strangeworth believes that, as town founder, she is endowed with the omnipotence to destroy that which she has created, the disembodied voice of God calling the sinful adamic couple to judgment after their fall from grace. For the recipients of the letters, the hints and insinuations (which can be generally taken to read “I know what you did”, unraveling the specific paranoia of each individual’s conscience) of unsigned papers read as indictments of one’s character, sentences passed by the all-seeing eye of God: “Miss Strangeworth awakened the next morning with a feeling of intense happiness and, for a minute, wondered why, and then remembered that this morning three people would open her letters. Harsh, perhaps, at first, but wickedness was never easily banished, and a clean heart was a scoured heart.” (385) Isolated, as she is, by her status, Miss Adela cannot participate in the gossip of the town with the other women, as she does not favor any close relationships outside the decorum of acceptable social interaction, and relay the incriminating information by word of mouth. The vulgarity of the prospect would taint her name; furthermore, her actions are neither idle nor petty, but well-deserved; their affirmed purpose is to “scour” the hearts of fellow townspeople to banish the evil therein. Tempting serpent and punitive voice of the divine at the same time, Adela operates from within the sweet-smelling core of her house on Pleasant Street like the worm in a red, shiny apple (“Miss Strangeworth had put a bowl of her red roses on the low table before the window, and the room was full of their scent” 381), the snake in the bower of her personal version of Eden.105 The roses’ pregnant, almost overbearing fragrance, the lustful “The Possibility of Evil” is not the only Jackson story where biblical imagery is present, corrupt garden of Paradise in particular. See Joan Wylie Hall’s article (“Fallen Eden Imagery in Shirley Jackson's 'The Road Through the Wall'”). Historicizing approaches in the same novel are detected by Richard Pascal (“The Road Through the Wall and Shirley Jackson's America”) “representative of much of middle-class suburban life in the post-war era.” (77) 105 Tzvetan Todorov’s 2002 survey of Otherness in the European humanist tradition of thought was useful here in understanding the American tradition of individualism. Starting with Alexis de Toqueville’s remarks on the American democracy, Todorov notes that individualism is the result of the passage from traditional society, dependent on a hierarchy, which forces individuals to socialize, and democratic societies, in which it is not obligatory for the members of the community to interact as much: “Modern or democratic society gives 104

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symbolism of their lush color are clear signs of lurking corruption and debased nature of Miss Strangeworth’s domestic garden of Paradise. It is as if the scent of the red roses were the trigger awakening the impulse to write her venomous letters, since the ones she keeps in her bedroom, where she takes her beauty sleep in the afternoon, are a purer, innocuous white. This aspect of women’s power as the forbidden fruit percolates the story, illuminating the correspondences between the character’s garden and the imagery of the fallen Eden. Eve’s transgression as an attempt to be “more equal” in a Miltonic sense translates to Adela’s violation of gender taboos. The exclusion of womanhood from the realm of Culture, Jackson seems to say, and not the intrinsic and artificial constructions of what a gender’s qualities should be, is what ultimately leads to sin. The presence of myth and intertextuality in her work is attributed by Joan Wylie Hall, author of a study of Jackson’s short works, to the young writer’s anxiety about penetrating into the tradition of male writing due to her gender, occupation as a housewife and status as a novice writer (Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction 7), while at the same time remarking her reliance on women’s oral tradition, on ballad and folklore that she makes extensive use of (in the female writing tradition of Katherine Ann Porter and Elizabeth Bowen). In this sense, Miss Strangeworth could indeed be, seconding Diane Long Hoeveler’s opinion, a double of Jackson herself, an emblematic figure of the woman writer as a witch, a self-appointed associate of her New England sisters-in-spirit from Salem. The mixture of innocence and corruption, childishness and maturity and the mythological layering in Jackson’s tale (Biblical, fairy-tale-inspired, historical) and Miss Strangeworth’s character reminds of Faith’s pink ribbons in Hawthorne’s emblematic story. As James C. Keil remarks, their much-discussed ambivalence in literary criticism revolves around the symbolism attached to them and their wearer, the “ambiguity in the description of Faith – is or is not her sign of her spirituality of faithfulness? is she modest or immodest?” (“Early Nineteenth-Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender” 90). Despite their childish colour, the ribbons are signifiers of female sexuality and redolent of the wife’s breach of Puritan conventions which forbid the married woman to express desire in public. While Faith’s hair is modestly covered by her Puritan cap, the ribbons’ movement in the wind, as she shakes her head outside the threshold, is just one element of a game of seduction that Goodman Brown cannot or does not everyone the same status; as a result, its inhabitants no longer have need of one another to constitute their identity.” (Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism 17). Miss Strangeworth is a strange combination of both, as she is both fiercely private and a busybody.

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want to grasp. Sexuality as an integral, natural part of human nature instead of a signifier of sin, woman as an organic part of the play of signification, avoiding Othering by the subversion of Nature/Culture binaries, is a path of reasoning unknown to Goodman Brown. His projection of hope in humanity’s salvation is fused to his wife’s (“I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven”), proof that Goodman Brown himself is unsure of what he believes in, dumping the burden of his personal redemption on the allegorically-named Faith. Ironically, to catch on her skirts into the heavens is to effectively follow her to hell, for the flying women of the story are witches, inevitably damned for all eternity. Goodman Brown sees sin everyone around him as a projection of his own lack of faith in his own purity in a similar way to Miss Strangeworth’s conviction that evil lurks in everyone except herself. She is a descendant of the Puritan doctrine of predestination and of the Elect, of which she indubitably considers herself to be one, divinely singled out to judge characters and assign punishment. Bernice M. Murphy identifies the New England Gothic in Jackson’s fiction as the most likely place for the setting of “The Lottery” as the place’s rifeness with gothic symbolism had already been established by the work of other gothic writers, among, whom, of course, Hawthorne ('The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us": Shirley Jackson's New England Gothic 105), but she is more interested in Jackson as an outsider to New England, where she moved from New York with her academic and critic husband in 1945. In this chapter I have tried to show that the Nature/Culture divide is still present in mid-twentieth century fiction along the same distinction as those explored in texts written by women writers at the end of the nineteenth. The play for power in 1950s America is deconstructed by Shirley Jackson through the gothicization of prescriptive roles of femininity – in the case of “The Possibility of Evil”, one of which is the spinster. Jackson reinterprets the character, already present in the gothic fiction of the American South in the works of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, from “victim-ofpatriarchy-turned-monster” as “monster-which-empowers-itself-throughthe-mimicry-of-male-power”. Granted, Miss Strangeworth is reprehensible, but all the more so because she harms from a position of privilege. She does not suffer or is abused, like Emily or Blanche, thus the reader cannot harbour any sympathy for her. The fantasy of small town America as the keeper of traditional values when, in fact, it is the most corrupt emphasizes the idea that the seed of all evil is the fixation on American exceptionalism106 and American purity: sin is in the eye of the beholder. Miss Strangeworth’s behaviour of surveillance is clearly traceable to Puritan doctrine. According to Deborah L. Madsen (American Exceptionalism) , “The terms ‘elect nation’ or 106

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III.3. The Gothic Bride: “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” Undated, but firmly attributed to Jackson’s later fiction, the story arrests the reader’s attention from its title, which immediately defines the protagonist as neither housewife nor spinster, but (presumably) giddy-with-love newlywed – a novelty for Jackson’s thematic preferences in itself and a presupposition presently kept in check by the tense beginning. Presenting another variant of the final public and collective murder in “The Lottery”, “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” is the story of a woman who knowingly marries a presumable killer to give her painfully unexceptional life a sense of purpose or perhaps to end her unexceptional life in an exceptional way; as in the majority of Jackson’s stories, these expectations can be expanded at a societal level to critique the widespread idea of marriage as the only road to happiness. Marriage is, indeed, a lottery, in that the husband of one’s choice might be psychopath with a wife-killing fetish a fact unproven and unprovable until its last and irretrievable consequence – the bride’s actual death. The clash between individual and collective consciousness, femininity as a space for collective projection, femininity as merchandize and spectacle107 for the consumption of the community – are all themes explored by Jackson’s story. The man Mrs. Smith weds bears a striking resemblance to the picture of a wanted murderer the newspapers are raging about: as the clerks, ‘redeemer nation’ referred to the collective experience of sainthood or salvation through God’s grace. Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed that God intervened in human history to work the salvation not only of individuals but also communities or nations.” (3) Furthermore, if a community was to be saved, it was entrusted with the salvation of all its members – the sin of the individual imperiled the fate of the collective: “Backsliding, by any member of the community, would place in jeopardy the salvation of the entire group. A sin committed by any one member of the congregation placed in threat the sainthood for all the others. Not surprisingly, this encouraged individuals to watch each-other, as they watched themselves, for signs of backsliding or any tendency away from the serious purpose to which they had devoted themselves and to which God had committed them.” (4) 107 I am using the term “spectacle” here according to Guy Debord’s definition from Chapter III of The Society of the Spectacle, “Unity and Division Within Appearance”, a re-reading of Marx applied to visual culture. Using Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, Debord argues that the modern fascination with the film industry is the result of the commodification of spectacle. His definition of the movie star, whose image is consumed by the public, is very similar to Mrs. Smith’s “performance” for her grocery audience: “The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things [my emphasis]. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption.” (Debord 29)

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druggists, grocery-shop owners, butchers and Mrs. Jones, the downstairs neighbor, suspect and actually express concern about, the mismatch in age and social standing between the two is a clear indication of a marriage of convenience between a woman over thirty who “looks like a lady” but is desperate to find a husband, any husband, because of her age, and a no-good, “rude” middle-aged man who is looking to inherit her money. With baited breath, the community relishes and fears the development of Mrs. Smith’s honeymoon with perverse anticipation relayed as concern (“Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip” 775), as they seem more curious to see if their dire presumptions do come true than interested in actually saving the potential victim. They could, of course, alert the police, but the ambiguity and the spectacular effect of the consequences is more alluring: “If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), they had none of them, the landlady, the grocer, the clerks, the druggist, lived in vain, gone through their days without the supreme excitement of being close to and yet secure from an unbearable situation.” (773-774) Mrs. Smith’s life only has value if she becomes newspaper fodder for the entertainment of the people that she happens to briefly interact with during her week as a newly-wed. By wishing to be involved in the scandalous murder whose protagonists they got to know personally, the people Mrs. Smith interacts with, in one way or another, have added value to their daily drudgery: by knowing the protagonists of the real-life drama, they will have not “lived in vain”, which means that they also articulate their identity according to the value bestowed to them by their murder-mystery heroine. The life-threatening situation that Mrs. Smith finds herself sardonically translates to entertainment for the people she interacts with, as far as even turning the ambiguity of the “will they/won’t they” typical of the romance plot of a soap-opera or sitcom into a game in which the potential victim herself is involved, cynically observing the morbid interest shown her. Mrs. Smith ponders all possibilities, with an uncanny detachment worthy of a spectator to the detective show of her own murder mystery: “if the dreadful fact were not true (and they all hoped it was) she was in a position of such incredible, extreme embarrassment that their solicitude was even more deserved.” (773) Considering the converse scenario of actually surviving her honeymoon – which everyone believes is a remote possibility, one unhoped for in its banality (yet another unhappy marriage of a mismatched pair fearing loneliness, old age and disease), Mrs. Smith feeds her audience’s hunger for the sensational by gradually adding detail to her story which match the incremental filling of her order. As she notifies the grocers that her slim shopping (a small loaf of bread, a pint of milk, “the 165

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smallest possible can of peas”, a quarter pound of butter, two lamb chops and a quart of coffee, which she makes a point of consuming before she leaves for her honeymoon) is the result of her impeding departure, she is aware of the audience’s reaction. The woman opens with the news she knows is most likely to have the expected effect: “I don’t need very much,” she said. “I might be going away over the weekend.” A long sigh swept through the store; she had a sense of people moving closer, as though the dozen other customers, the grocer, the butcher, the clerks, were pressing against her, listening avidly.[…] “Not laying in much for the week-end,” the grocer said with satisfaction. “I may be going away,” she said, and again there was that long breath of satisfaction. She thought: how silly of all of us – I’m not sure any more than they are, the all of us only suspect, and of course there won’t be any way of knowing for sure… but still it would be a shame to have all that food in the kitchen, just rotting there while… (772)

The “long breath of satisfaction” expressed by the parties present at the news of her honeymoon confirms the unholy complicity between the presumable victim and her spectators. The unfinished sentences and the thrift in only buying food which will be consumed up to a trip which she might never return from create a semantic ambiguity around the meaning of “rotting”, a parallel process in which the food she is wary of leaving behind at the apartment, decaying in their absence, is replaced with the prospect of her own decomposing body after the prospective murder. The symbolic substitution between her body and produce bought at the grocery store ironically equates women with merchandise, where women are “fair meat” for self-interested husbands. The metaphor of women as food is transmuted into the spectacle of their consumption, as the people in the store are avid customers not only of the goods in the grocery shop, but also of the story Mrs. Smith inevitably presents them with, an asset she brings to market for public appraisal. It would seem, in fact, that Mrs. Smith only values her life for as long as her public of the pharmacy, apartment building, newspaper stall and grocery story are willing to invest in it, which explains her self-effacement in every other part of her existence. As her trip at the grocery store revolves around the procurement of sustenance, there’s a reciprocity regarding consumption between Mrs. Smith and her audience: for those listening too and feeding off the sensational nature of her story, she is like food to hungry babes. This imbalance of consumption between the individual Mrs. Smith, who is careful to consume very little (“even though they did not actually have to economize, they both felt that the largely mutual bank account that they now had ought not to be squandered unnecessarily, but should be kept nearly as intact as possible” 775), but her 166

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story is rife with unlimited potential, that can feed the newspapers and gossip for years to come. In explaining the concept of commodity fetishism for the bourgeois society of labour, Marx distinguishes between “value”, which supposes exchange, and riches: “Value – (i.e. exchange value) “is a property of things, riches” (i.e. use-value)” of man. Value, in this case, necessarily implies exchange, while riches do not.” “Riches (use-value) are the attributes of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a commodity is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable…” (“Commodities and Money” 46). Marx’s nuancing of economic terminology translates to the language of nature and culture thus: nature can acquire exchange value, while culture should not. Mrs. Smith, as a person, should be valued according to her inclusion into the realm of Culture; however, due to her gender, she might as well join her grocery shopping list, alongside lamb chops and coffee, for she is still part of Nature. Applied to Jackson’s text, Mrs. Smith appears to deliberately de-humanize herself by behaving as if she were an object subject to a transaction,108 willfully marketing herself to this or that seller, and ultimately deciding to “sell herself short” in accepting an offer which, under different circumstances, would have been unworthy of her. In the words of her nosy neighbor, the alliance between herself and Mr. Smith seems off because the community perceives her as a cut above her social milieu and her chosen spouse: “you didn’t look like you belonged in this house, or in this neighborhood, because you always had plenty of money, which, believe me, the rest of us don’t, and you always acted like you ought to be in a better kind of situation” (778). Mrs. Smith’s value is superior to that of her groom, an evident observation for anyone with a modicum of life experience – the pair do not belong in the same social class nor do they seem united but much else (“You’re not that wrapped up in your husband” – emphasis in the original 777). Mrs. Smith’s meager shopping list thus becomes the artifact of her slow effacement from the world, a metaphor of women’s transience in the greater scheme of things, of their short shelf-life after they reach a certain age (“you’re no blushing eighteen-year-old girl” 777); with a shopping list instead of a will, the only things that she might leave behind are perishable with a short shelf-life that need to be consumed soon, before they meet their impending expiry date – i.e. before she leaves on her honey-moon and never comes back: Social domination through the commodified body (“le corps merchandise”) is also mentioned by French sociologist Christine Détrez (La Construction Sociale du Corps 170). Any body inscribed in the mechanism of production becomes merchandise, just as the proletariat’s body is used to increase capital. The human resource turned into a spectacle (such as in sports) can also become a commodified body. 108

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“Hastily and desperately” are words that describe a person who consumes as a semblance of living, with no life purpose, who has replaced the logic of being with that of owning and being owned. In the case of Jackson’s spinster heroines whose sense of identity dissolves into madness, the triggering event (the loss of a parent, a bus journey that endlessly repeats itself, puzzling the traveler’s sense of orientation, or the mere removal of a tooth) is usually the final straw for an individual whose sense of self depends on someone else – on the husband who is now absent, on the familiar city she has just left, on the deceased parent. Like Young Goodman Brown, who needs to cling to Faith’s skirts and “follow her to heaven”, Jackson’s heroines pin their sense of identity not on their intrinsic value, but on what the market establishes it should be according to the law of demand and offer. If the Bluebeard scenario is, indeed, true, the inherent double entendre in “I might be going away” as a euphemism for death denotes an incredible self-effacement on the part of the wife, who wishes to leave nothing behind, as if she had never existed in the first place, erasing every trace of herself in an effort to prolong the ambiguity of her own disappearance: “It will have to be soon”, “Everyone is waiting; it will spoil everything if it is not soon.” (781). The use of “spoil” here, in its polysemy which applies to both the spoiling of food and of situations, once more draws attention to the metaphor of women as food, of their consumption up to a certain expiry date tied to their age. Since Mrs. Smith is now pinning her worth not only on the Bluebeard’s consumption of her, but also on the public’s consumption of the murderer’s publicized tale, her importance in the eyes of the audience is in equal proportion to the swiftness and sensationalism of her death, as stories with ample media coverage do have, after all, a front-page life of her own. As the awaited resolution – her death at the hands of her husband, the suspected serial killer – drags on, her value decreases, as a subject only retains its market value, its ability to sell newspapers, as long as there are people interested enough to buy them. Mrs. Smith’s life is a repository of metaphors of transience, for newspapers has a short a life-span as perishable foods. An additional aspect they have in common is their reliance on a third party that gives them value: for the newspaper, it is the marketability potential, while the food is dependent on whether or not someone will consume it, the very reason why Mrs. Smith is reluctant to leave any behind. 168

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Consumption is the perfect means of self-obliteration for the main character, Helen Bertram, precisely because it leaves no traces behind, just like a serial killer worth his salt remains undetected even in the midst of a newspaper-reading community – furthermore, the members of the said community themselves find excuses for postponing or avoiding the authorities’ involvement: ““I wanted to call the police two, three days ago,” Mrs. Jones said sullenly. “Ed wouldn’t let me.”” (778). While presumably saving Mrs. Smith from the clutches of (if confirmed) a serial (wife) killer calling the police would effectively put an end to all speculation and silence the newspapers, an outcome the sensational-thirsty community would not want, as it would halt the circular process of consumption generated by Mr. Smith, her husband, and the watching community who co-creates their story. By looking and observing, by fostering speculation and gossip, Mrs. Smith is actually contributing to the creation of a personal narrative, which she actively grows into a personal myth by collaborating with those who have a vested interest in how her story will end - the surveilling members of the community. This consumption through the gaze, the fomenting process of co-creation of identity through narrative begins from the story’s first line: “When she came into the grocery she obviously interrupted a conversation about herself and her husband.” (772). The narrative of Mrs. Smiths’ wife, thus, her legend, has already begun within the members of the neighborhood, but it is not entirely out of the protagonist’s hands, as she herself offers a certain, performative image of herself to the public. The newlywed is perfectly aware of the scrutiny, gossip and expectations that put her under constant surveillance: Mrs. Jones came hurriedly, still a little out of breath, down the landing and up the stairs to the third floor. “Thought I’d missed you, she said on the stairs, and, “Good heavens, you look tired.” It was part of the attitude that treated Mrs. Smith as a precious vessel. Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip, a faint paling of her cheeks became the subject of nervous speculation, any change in her voice, dullness in her eye, disarrangement in her dress – these were what her neighbors lived on. Mrs. Smith had thought early in the week that a loud crash from her apartment would be the sweetest thing she could do for Mrs. Jones, but by now it no longer seemed important: Mrs. Jones could live as well on the most minute crumbs.” (775)

The metaphors in the above paragraph – “precious vessel” to refer to the female body and gossip as “minute crumbs” - revolve around the known stereotypes of femininity as the recipient of projected collective meaning; food (crumbs), mother (as the “vessel” is an allusion to the uterus), and overall Holy Grail of precious, delicate womanhood. As the repository of the 169

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neighborhood’s hopes for involvement with a real media celebrity, i.e. the serial killer, Mrs. Smith is, of, course, precious, but not in and of herself; as the object of her neighbor’s specular fetishism, she is “filled” with their projections. The religious correspondences between the sacred “cup of femininity” (about to be spilled in death) highlight’s the woman’s emptiness, the vacant lot she occupies in the sex-gender dynamic109 and Mrs. Jones’ lifegiving crumbs of gossip permeates the passage with the imagery of the Eucharist, the complementary blood and body of Christ that literally sustains the souls of believers. Mrs. Jones and her like, who thrive on the creation and perpetuation of gossip, are participants in the holy communion of surveillance. Mrs. Smith is a “precious vessel” because from her they imbibe the product of their own projections, the life-sustaining Eucharist whose “crumbs” are religiously sourced. The phrase is based on a Biblical quote from Timothy 2:20: “Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable” (biblehub.com), but more specifically to refer to the Virgin in a Catholic prayer from the Middle Ages, the Litany of Loreto, where she is referred to as “spiritual vessel” and “vessel of honor” (www.ewtn.com). Ironically, the preoccupation with a relatively young woman’s body usually signals the community’s care in case of pregnancy. Virgin Mary as a “spiritual vessel of honour” embodies womanhood’s ambiguity as at once paragon of virginity and motherhood, the paradoxical traits of Immaculate Conception. Mrs. Smith, however, is far from being pregnant; her value resides strictly in her ability to be “filled up” with the potential of being murdered, offering entertainment for the consumption of her fans and the latter’s validation by proxy. Additionally, the serial killer’s preferred M.O. is to execute his victims when they are taking a bath – if the newspaper reports are, in fact, true, Mrs. Smith will perish as a vessel within a vessel, circularly contained in her own solipsism. The regression to water, the mother’s womb, is an apt metaphor of death for Helen Bertram, who had spent her life believing she was an extension of her deceased parent. Dying in water is a fitting way to portray not only death as the journey back to origins, but her desire for the The Freudian structural “lack” in defining femininity critiqued by Teresa de Lauretis in Technologies of Gender: “If Nietzsche and Derrida can occupy and speak from the position of woman, it is because that position is vacant and, what is more, cannot be claimed by women.” (32) and Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which is Not One (Irigaray 69): “In fact, this sexuality is never defined with respect to any sex but the masculine. Freud does not see two sexes whose differences are articulated in the act of intercourse, and, more generally speaking, in the imaginary and symbolic processes that regulate the workings of a society and a culture. The "feminine" is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex.” 109

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dissolution of the self, the death drive. The rejection of the erotic connotations of the “precious vessel” is the embrace of the opposing Todestrieb as defined by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, the result of war neuroses also manifested in repetition compulsion: But how is the predicate of being 'instinctual' related to the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life. (30)

In a similar way to the co-creation of narrative between the governess and the double “Is”/eyes (belonging to Douglas and narrator) of “The Turn of the Screw”, the specular exchange between Mrs. Smith and her jailers/surveillers is a two-way street, as she acknowledges and freely offers herself to the voyeuristic vampirization and consumption: to the community she offers her image as Bluebeard’s victim, while to her husband she offers the body on which that image is constructed. If the governess is a writer, the author of her own manuscript, her writing is exploited by the specular pleasure of multiple others just as Jane’s is colonized and overridden by John’s (“The Yellow Wallpaper”). Jane and John co-create the diary entries for as long as the woman writer’s mind internalizes the dominant male speech; it is the equivalent of the “phallocratic law” (68) Luce Irigaray mentions in her critique of Freud. Indirectly, Mrs. Smith is also an author, except her story will be written by others, reaching the newspaper headlines after her presumable death, because she has decided to grant them this privilege. Unlike Jane, she has willfully surrendered the right to authorship over her own life and narrative. If, in “The Possibility of Evil”, Miss Strangeworth reassesses the oral tradition of feminine gossip by imbuing it with more authority through the practice of writing, Mrs. Smith continues to dwell in the impermanent sphere of the spoken word. With the same desire for self-effacement, the protagonist places the legacy of her existence with the neighbors, the third-party eye-witnesses who will recount the story of her probable murder to the newspapers. The definitive and irrevocable act of death is still not enough to make her existence worthy of being discussed in print; even in death, she is defined in relation to the violent man who will put end to her life, and even then she will soon be “yesterday’s news”. As Mrs. Smith participates in the co-creation of her death’s narrative alongside her surveillers, her tolerance and even encouragement of 171

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Mrs. Jones’ nosiness is proof of her willingness to collaborate; she, in fact, perceives the downstairs busybody as someone close to her, someone whose differences from oneself can be easily obliterated: Here we are, Helen Smith was thinking, two women of the singular type woman, one standing uneasily and embarrassed in front of the window, wearing a brown dress and brown hair and brown shoes and differing in no essential respect from the other, sitting solidly and earnestly, wearing green and pink flowered housedress and bedroom slippers – differing, actually, in no essential, although we would both deny indignantly we were the same person, seeking the same destiny. (777)

Mrs. Jones lives vicariously through Mrs. Smith, who is merely an image of what the latter could become in a few years had she not taken the path of self-annihilation. Furthermore, this would thwart the wife’s plan to commit suicide by resorting to the “help” of a third person, of becoming useful by being absorbed into the narratives of other people: her neighbors or her husband, while she herself becomes effaced in the process. The motif of death as a journey (“I might be going away this week-end”), of a smooth, progressive displacement from point A to point B, from life to the character’s non-existence beyond her own narrative construction (for the reader does not know what actually happens to Mrs. Smith, whether her husband kills her or not) is replaced by the metaphor of death as a form of dissolution, a gradual merging of the self into the fabric of a bigger structure: the “text” of the newspaper story (if she is murdered), the fluid nature of the water the killer finishes off his victims in, or even the morsels of herself that she presents to the members of the community that she interacts with. The information that Mrs. Smith imparts to the people at the grocery store or to Mrs. Jones, the nosy downstairs neighbor, actively shapes the image of herself that she wishes to leave behind; they will each contribute a piece to the mosaic that the newspapers will report. In the media-covered story, the image of Mrs. Smith as victim will bear the imprint of a plurality of collective voices, the dismembered equivalent of her actual body by the serial killer. Her death by dispersion is symbolic of the larger dispersion of women in the social body, whose lives are consumed, ingurgitated and passed daily in everyday life without society necessarily taking notice. That Mrs. Smith regards her own life as disposable is reflected in her desire to leave behind nothing at all, not even the impersonal coffee, which bears no imprint of its owner, no personal history or significant legacy of any kind. Mrs. Smith is intent on leaving no commodities behind because she, herself, has become one. If, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I interpret the hysterical “wandering uterus” as the equivalent of the text’s wandering meaning in the chain of signification; the same repetition compulsion present in the narrator’s 172

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obsessive “creeping” is found in the patterns of consumption and symbolism that Mrs. Smith reads in her life. Gilman’s story has been interpreted as a parable of reading and misreading, of feminine and masculine writing, of the inherent phallocentricity of language that Jane’s circular movement, while tied to the bed, mimics; Jackson’s narrative is even more prone to the application of deconstruction theory as her identity dissolves into the body of a yet unwritten text that she does not mean to anchor or to “center”, but to infiltrate everywhere and nowhere. Like Jane, however, the ghostliness of woman’s condition is perfectly captured by the competing narratives of Mrs. Smith’s narrative and the imagined, unreal, phantasmatic “narrative of desire” of future newspaper headings. Significantly, “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator who adds to the plurality of eyes that are watching this gothic newly-wed, detachedly observing her thoughts and deeds – a detachment so complete that it leaves out the conflict resolution. A text with an open-ending and a plurality of surveilling eyes, it becomes the perfect metaphor for the never-ending displacement of meaning: we do not know where Mrs. Smith’s place in the text is because she is constantly dispersed in it, both present and absent. The self-gothicization of Mrs. Smith echoes the self-hysterization of the patients at the Salpêtrière photographed by Martin Charcot, participants in the spectacle of hysteria. The reasoning behind the Russian roulette the new bride is playing can be traced back to Helen Smith’s relationship with her deceased father. Similarly to Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, the woman spends her youth under the shadow of an overbearing parent. In Jackson’s novel, Eleanor travels to Hill House in the search of new adventures that might set her on the path to self-fulfillment and romantic love, as she hums “Journeys end in lovers meeting” on her way to her destination. The house, instead, becomes a double of her selfish, vampiric, recently deceased mother she has sacrificed her youth to, and it succeeds in eventually destroying the main character, who crashes into a tree as she is trying to leave the premises. In “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”, a similar kind of unconscious obliteration takes place as a result of a convergence between her father and her husband, the male figures Helen is used to deferring to: “It had been clear to her after her father’s death that this patterned existence was no longer meaningful, and had been a product of her father’s life rather than hers. So, when Mr. Smith had said to her, “I don’t suppose you’d ever consider marrying a fellow like me?” Helen Bertram had nodded, seeing the repeated design which made the complete pattern.” (780-781) The daughter’s sense of belonging, in a way, to her father, illuminates her deeply-ingrained belief that her life is a commodity in search on an owner, and that in accepting Mr. Smith’s hand in marriage, she is merely 173

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perpetuating the exchange of goods. The patterned, pre-established existence she is referring to centers around the economy of habit instead of meaning; it is the logic of consuming and gleaning purpose from the repetitive acts of domesticity, such as shopping or cleaning, that define one’s use – consequently, Helen Bertram seeks to recreate the oppression of the protected, but stifled existence alongside her father by seeking his double in the figure of an equally oppressive husband. While it is true that Mrs. Smith herself is aware of the ultimate and immediate consequence of her hasty marriage, deliberately seeking it out, her chosen method of self-obliteration is an additional option to the spinster’s dissolution into madness through the appearance of the phantasmatic demon lover - it’s the quicker, violent effacement of swift and painless murder instead of the simmering inner death of a long and unhappy marriage. The sympathy for Mrs. Smith as the victim of a murderous husband is different than the ridicule the spinster has to endure; Mrs. Smith’s victimhood is worthy of collective sympathy and perfunctory attempts as warning her of the husband’s past because she is a “missus” and thus enjoys a higher social status than a spinster. The pattern motif repeats itself in Mrs. Smith’s climbing of the stairs, in the repetition of number three, in the repetitive actions of the clockwork toy dog that her husband gets her from a street-vendor as a present, as a strategy to read meaning and purpose as a reflection of the indomitable force of destiny rather than the imposition of one’s own free will: The three flights of stairs were narrow and high, and Mrs. Smith, with the immediate recognition of symbols she had inherited, had always had, potentially, and was now using almost exclusively, saw the eternal steps going up and up as an irrevocable design for her life; […] she had no choice but to go up, wearily if she chose; if she turned and went back again, retracing labouriously the small progress she had made, she would merely have to go up another way, beginning, as she now almost realized, beginning again a search which could only, for her, have but one ending.” (775)

The wound-up felt dogs that “run in circles” and shriek in a semblance of a bark reinforce the pattern of circularity, of inescapability that dictates Mrs. Smith’s life, as well as her complete surrender to the process: “If she had ever tried to phrase it to herself – […] she had been chosen for this, or that it was like being carried, unresisting on the surface of a river which took her on inevitably into the sea.” (774) Mr. Smith’s present to her, infantilizing and “tawdry”, according to her own description of the gift, is imperfect, as the vendor forgets, neglects or purposefully sells them a dog without the necessary key to wind it up. The stair-case motif, in which the direction one is going, laden with heavy bags of groceries to last for a week, but not more, is another metaphor for the circularity and pointlessness of existence. 174

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The never-ending stairwell, with its uncanny connotations and confounding of space, can also be read as a metaphor for the text and Mrs. Smith’s tenuous identity in having her meaning pinned to an exact place within it. The place of woman, as this state of in-betweenness suggests, is neither signifier of signified, but the trace that meaning leaves in the game of continuously displaced signification. Mrs. Smith’s characteristic shunning of permanence is also visible in her lack of decisive presence in the apartment. The neglected look of the flat itself, for the decoration of which Mrs. Smith shows no girlish enthusiasm, is far removed from any nesting or homemaking behaviors that a bride might indulge in. The squalid newlywed’s apartment - “the bare little room which, with a small bedroom, a dirty kitchen, and a bath, was the honeymoon home of Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (776) – is the very opposite of Mr. and Mrs. Malkin’s freshly painted new home, the very definition of shabbiness. The more personal belongings in the apartment are the couple’s clothes, kept, again, to a minimum, just like the food which is exactly calculated to last for a fixed amount of days: …she had not bothered to unpack many things and the closet looked empty; there were two or three dresses and a light overcoat and an extra suit of Mr. Smith’s; this was so obviously a temporary home for them both, a stopping place. Mrs. Smith did not regard the three dresses with regret, nor did she particularly admire the suits of Mr. Smith, although they were still a little unfamiliar to her, hung up next to her own clothes (as was his underwear in the dresser, lying quietly beside her own); neither Mr. nor Mrs. Smith were of the abandoned sort who indulge recklessly in trousseaus or other loving detail for a preliminary purification. (775)

Clothes – the symbols of social status – are similar to the image of the “precious vessel” in the sense that their “worth” depends on being “filled”, inhabited, worn. Mrs. Smith’s dresses, hanging side-by-side with her husband’s suits, are the husks of personhood, metaphors for the emptiness and lack of identity that Helen perceives as definitory for herself. Empty clothes, which are used in Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty to portray the phantasmatic nature of desire in the young girl’s day-dream of Prince Charming, are repurposed, in Jackson, to signal the protagonist’s desire as emptiness itself, the ultimate feminine “lack”, coinciding with the death drive. The ordinariness of the marriage ceremony, where the couple get married in matching blue suit and dress, without investing in special clothes to mark the special occasion – painfully highlight that this is not the epitome, but the anticlimax to Mrs. Smith’s life, the implacable fulfillment of the journey towards death: “She had worn her best dark blue dress to be married in, and Mr. Smith had worn a dark blue suit so that they look unnervingly alike when they went down the street together.” (181) The fusion with the other celebrated in marriage and posited in the Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore shall a 175

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man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”) is flipped to reveal the husband and wife as ghostly doubles of each other, showcasing Mrs. Smith’s entry into the realm of the beyond from the very moment weds him. In Jackson’s James Harris stories, the demon lover/Prince Charming’s distinctive clothing is a blue suit; as Prince Charming’s gothic twin, the groom who sweeps the protagonist away to the exciting prospect of a different life is Jackson’s James Harris/Mr. Smith in a rewriting of Disney’s scenes of the young girl’s fantasy of erotic love. As a screen for the projection of others’ desires, Mrs. Smith embodies the romance plot turned gothic, reflecting back the public’s intention to fictionalize the ordinary. Marianne Noble’s remarks about the similarities between the plot of the sentimental novel, centering around the ingénue’s constant rebuttal and flight from the rake’s sexual depredations and the reader’s perverted spectatorship of her pain, only partly apply to Jackson’s story. The voyeuristic public is present, already deriving satisfaction from the possible turn of events, but while the murder is eagerly anticipated, it is never shown, and might, after all, never happen. The titillation and enjoyment derived from the heroine’s pain is replaced with “the possibility” of evil, like in the previously discussed Jackson story. This possibility is constantly nurtured, morphing into a psychological game of stated and suggested intentions which might be interpreted differently by participants in the plot. The gothic element in Jackson’s work is this very deprivation of an irrevocable, spectacular ending; its charm consists in its never-diffused ambiguity. Jackson’s stories are explorations of the female psyche; from this point of view, the psychological construction of identity in relation to desire centers around the avoidance of drudgery. The community construct adds value to itself by collectively projecting the murder scenario on Mrs. Smith, encouraging it instead of preventing it, while the “star” of the murder willfully contributed to their scenarios with every performance of her “housewife role” in the drugstore, library or grocery shop. This brand of suburban gothic thrives in its suggested, but undisclosed, possibilities, as desire (in this case, the woman’s wish for death at the hands of a famous murderer, which might make her own drab existence less pointless) is a trace that promptly leaves the shapes it briefly inhabits. The community participates in the constructions of Mrs. Smith’s narrative, yet it fails to save her: the woman who enters their environment for three weeks, thus indirectly participating to and vetting her murder, in a similar way to Tessie Hutchinson’s collective killing in “The Lottery”. The woman’s ultimate sacrifice, as she progresses towards the honeymoon which she knows will coincide with her death, is a parable of the social scape-goating of women with society’s overall knowledge and complicity. 176

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Spinsters who marry late in life are disposable because childless women in American society are ultimately disposable – they fulfill no other social function than to be the fantasy of men, fantasies which come true no matter how bloody; it is the story of Bluebeard with the approval of a 1950s small town community. The shopping scene that opens the story bears a striking resemblance to the beginning of “The Possibility of Evil”, except the roles of Miss Strangeworth and Mrs. Smith are swapped: the former uses it as an excuse for surveillance, while the latter goes there to be surveilled. In the small town’s/community’s panopticon, someone, somewhere, is shopping for information, whether it is the individual or the community who has the upper hand. The catalyst of social attitudes towards the new bride is the shop, a prevalent place for the confrontation of the individual and the collective will in Jackson’s fiction.110 The strong presence of places where the transactions of goods happen, where things are weighed and exchanged, creates a parallel between individual will and identity and the overbearing force of the collective. The use of scenes which include shopping in Jackson’s works enhance the theme of the main character’s negotiation of identity which begins in the public eye, a transaction that the woman needs to barter for. Her identity is shaped by the collective gaze, it is weighed and assessed according to what she buys or she does not, and in what quantity. Shopping is not the depersonalized event of multiple products hastily scanned at the supermarket, in an attempt to reduce queues and the irritability of multiple customers waiting, but a socialization ritual in which highly coded sentences about the members of the community are passed. It is the place where information is circulated and imparted, where the purchase of goods is seen as an intrinsic part of social consumption: what people buy is not as much the pound of coffee or the can of peas, but the narrative with which one surrounds the purchase. The ability to persuasively articulate certain narratives and reject others is the process by which the woman articulates a certain identity – pathetic spinster, with a dinner for one, or pitiable victim-to-be, who shops for two while planning for a honeymoon that will end in murder. As the place where the housewife spends a lot of time deftly managing the household’s resources so In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the task of weekly grocery shopping falls in the lap of Merricat (Mary-Kate), the 18 year-old girl who poisons her entire family with the exception of her older sister and their uncle Julian. Isolated from the community because of the gruesome murder, the trio are the target of the villagers’ hatred, which reaches a climax when they set their house on fire in a primitive display of the fear of the other. Every trip that the girl takes into the village, with the obligatory stops at the grocery-shop, library and coffee-shop, is a battle of wills between the individual need for integrity and privacy and the collective prying, bullying intrusions. 110

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that no scraps are wasted, the shop becomes symbolic of the town market, where a family’s financial ability is proven. To consume is to exist; to consume much and often is the definition of middle-class respectability. The grocery shop is the emblematic place where the housewife undergoes the community’s scrutiny because she has to be there so often– shopping, an essentially public act, exposes a plethora of private details about the household’s activities and economy; it is the new bride’s trial by combat, and facing the collective gaze is a tool of the battle. One would assume that the protagonist’s interior monologue is hesitant because, as a newcomer, she is anxious about not being welcomed in the husband’s environment when, in fact, it exemplifies yet another instance of pitting the individual against the community, of scape-goating the woman (“She was very different in their eyes, she was marked” 773) in a way that is more acceptable to the public because of its covert violence. The femme couverte legal status of women in the late nineteenth century, which puts them in their husband’s shadow by not allowing them to have a distinct legal identity and to own property in their own right, is challenged by Jackson’s portrayal of a wife who is trying to give herself an identity through her relationship to her husband in exchange for the relationship of ownership she had with another man, her father. According to societal logic, becoming a victim of marital violence is better than not being married at all: “If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), Mrs. Smith was, for them, a salvation and a heroine, a fragile, lovely creature whose preservation was in the hands of others than theirs.” (774). From the beginning, the protagonist is acutely aware of her extraordinary status, as Jackson’s women like to compensate for the pain of their unexceptionality by creating fantasies in which they become the center of attention, like Miss Strangeworth crowns herself the town’s despotic princess, or by fashioning demon lovers with whom they escape into the meandering streets of an unknowable metropolis. The thin line between reality and fantasy is made manifest in “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” by her depersonalization; turning herself into a commodity, offering herself for the consumption of collective scrutiny, dissolving into the meta-text of texts both written and unwritten, the generic Mrs. Smith, in her blue wedding dress, has become the perfect counterpart of James Harris, the demon lover of the Jackson short prose canon. III.4. Gothic Wives and Mothers in “The Mouse” In Shirley Jackson’s suburban universe, mollified by routine and predictability, few things are what they seem. Internalizing the uncanny, the characters, seemingly set in their ways, glued to the moulds of their 178

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prescriptive gender and class roles, find coded ways of expressing the dynamic of power in sexual and family politics. Apparently trivial aspects of everyday life (Jackson’s latest collection of short stories, edited by her children and including previously unpublished material, is suitably entitled Just an Ordinary Day) develop into points de capiton,111 the Lacanian quilting points where the Real and the Symbolic converge, exposing the imperfect overlapping between the conscious and the subconscious mind and allowing the uncanny to break onto/into the smooth surface of humdrum day-to-day, which prompts critics such as S. T. Joshi to categorize Shirley Jackson’s short fiction as domestic horror or even “weird fiction”, in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft (Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror 183). Another previously unpublished story of Jackson’s, like “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”, “The Mouse” concisely encapsulates 1950s pressures on women and marriage by employing an ostensibly minor metaphor to unmask the dissolution of the couple’s relationship under the burden of specific societal constraints. The reduction of femininity to the bearing of children, the indictment of “obligatory motherhood” and its negative impact on the couple, but especially the wife’s, are brought to light as the unwary begetters of domestic monsters. With typical irony and sardonic wit, Jackson selects the least predictable suspect for the absolute destruction of relationship’s already tenuous strength: a small kitchen mouse, whose modest size belies the depth of the rift between Mr. and Mrs. Malkin, whose very surname (a coinage from mal, French for “bad”, and kin – relative) suggests the ill-fated foundation of their family. Tiny, sneaky, elusive, but perseverant in the incessant and consistent perpetration of stealthy damage, the mouse is the perfect metaphor for the steady, hidden erosion of the Malkins’ marriage. The story opens with what should be a happy event for a young couple: the acquisition of a better, improved home. The pair of the story (the husband Also translated as “button ties” in the complete translation of Lacan’s work into English. The term is mentioned in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, where Lacan critiques Saussure’s description of the signifier and signified as two layers whose sinuous movement is perfectly overlapping: “The notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier thus comes to the fore—which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis. It is a twofold flood in which the landmarks - fine streaks of rain traced by vertical dotted lines that supposedly delimit corresponding segments - seem insubstantial. All our experience runs counter to this, which made me speak at one point in my seminar on the psychoses of the "button ties" [points de capiton] required by this schema to account for the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject” (Écrits 419) The quilting points/button ties propose the occasional intersection of the two layers of language which parallel the simultaneous movement of the conscious and subconscious, leading to psychosis. 111

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is twenty-nine, which leads us to believe the wife a few years younger, according to the expected standards of the age) have just moved into a new apartment, of increased comfort and space (“It had a woodburning fireplace, and a big kitchen, and was near Mr. Malkin’s office” 729) which the stay-at-home wife promptly decorates: Mrs. Malkin had had the living room painted a soft rose, and the bedroom an equally soft blue, and the kitchen green, and then, in a sudden burst of what Mr. Malkin might have thought was wifely humour, she had taken the room Mr. Malkin had felt immediately to be his study and had had it painted gray, a heavy slate gray. Mr. Malkin worked for an insurance company and had read somewhere that light, cheerful colors were best for work – Mr. Malkin’s minor executive’s office had tan plaster walls and straight chairs – but Mrs. Malkin had been firm: “You’re such a gloomy type anyway,” she had said unkindly. She had relented to orange drapes and a bright rug, but Mr. Malkin never did like working in the room. Sundays, when Mr. Malkin was moving cheerfully about in the kitchen, Mr. Malkin sat in his grey and orange room and pretended he was working… (729)

The refurbishing of the new apartment for a young couple is the type of personalization that transforms a house into a home, bearing the imprint of the couple taken individually and together and a reflection of their relationship. A gendered process, it is relayed to the wife and her practical skills: the woman is expected to assume the part of nest-maker, creating a nurturing environment for the family. Houses in gothic fiction occupy a distinct place as projections of the inhabitants’ psyche, which often turns them into characters themselves. Whether they’re ancestral mansions deep into the English country, like the sentient House of Usher, or creepy apartments in New York gothic buildings, like in Ira Levine’s Rosemary’s Baby, the environment absorbs and intensifies the dwellers’ psychoses. Mrs. Malkin’s decision to paint the husband’s room gray recalls the gendering of space into masculine and feminine from the turn of the century,112 except this time it is the wife who is given a choice over the environment, deciding to confine the husband into a room covered in a colour he finds uninspiring. The gray is far from accentuating any potential “hysterical tendencies” Mr. Malkin might have, but it is an accurate summation of the wife’s view of her partner: unremarkable, gloomy and lazy. Furthermore, the light colours that would inspire Mr. Malkin to be productive in his work are deliberately vetoed by his dictatorial spouse, in an act that seems more of a symbolic castration than decorative choice based on aesthetic principles. More than a statement about flaws of character, interior design in the gothic genre is a sub-branch of the fraught geography of the gothic. In the 112

As explained in chapter II. 5.

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introduction to their 2016 anthology on the typology of the genre’s topography (Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties), editors Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey remark upon the expansion of gothic landscapes with the gothic’s evolution, noting its importance in highlighting the “cultural reciprocity” between theme and mood, literary device and social reality: “Because of the political and cultural nature of the Gothic, it is no wonder that landscape plays such a central role in the genre.[…] Whether in a garden or in a literary work, landscape is more than a physical identity, it is a canvas upon which cultures paint their world, their desires, and their cultural and political beliefs.” (5) Whether it is the castle, the urban jungle or the hospital, the environment is a reflection of the latent issues oppressed or hidden by the discursive regimens of power – in this instance, of the nature versus culture dynamic. Yang and Healey argue that “Landscape, whether natural or human-made, is an aspect of the Gothic that powerfully embodies how the genre’s fluidity enables it to challenge tradition and liberate anxieties.” (5); the human-made landscape of the Malkin house is a reflection of the wife’s resistance to the masculine tradition that would impose itself as dominant, reclaiming intellectual activity as its default province, corresponding to the feminine’s challenging of the male’s claims to superiority and dominance. As the Medusa’s stare turns one into stone – another gray, “heavy slate” object, Mr. Malkin seems to merge with the environment, as unproductive, immobile and passive as his wife wants him to be. Gray, the shade of dullness and indecision, the by-product of the unsurprising alliance of non-colours black and white, is symbolically assigned to stasis and non-intervention, the truce between extremes, but also of moral and psychological stagnation, the metaphorical impasse of their marriage. That Mr. Malkin cannot actually get any work done in the study is unsurprising as this corresponds exactly to his wife’s intentions his creative impulses are stalled in both work and family life. If the yellow wallpaper in Gilman’s story was also a symbol of the stifling of feminine creativity, the gray in the new apartment’s study is its masculine equivalent. Mrs. Malkin loads an additional layer of emphasis onto her recreation of the same dull atmosphere that her husband, the minor insurance executive with a colourless job, has at work, a place similarly chromatically impersonal in its tan walls and chairs. The colour choice is the wife’s verdict on masculinity as unimaginative and oppressive, a view belied by Mr. Malkin’s preference for light, bright shades which stimulate productivity. Instead of the expected happiness, the tensions between husband and wife escalate, with the latter’s dissatisfaction manifesting passive-aggressively in the smallest of ways, similar to the mice’s pestering invasion, whose tracks are all over the kitchen. From choices regarding interior decoration (she 181

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chooses to paint the walls of his study “a heavy slate grey”, despite his objections, because “You’re such a gloomy type anyway”) to undisguised condescension (“Mrs. Malkin was going to say that he never had done any work anywhere anyway”), culminating with the event which lends the story its title: “Mr. Malkin liked his wife, or did until the terrible accident of the mouse.” (729), it is clear from the outset that all is not well in the Malkin house. As the mouse resurfaces every now and again, imprinting the couple’s freshly painted kitchen, the unsettled question of their presumptive baby periodically re-emerges. Creativity, this fertility of the mind, and the symbol of the mouse (connected, in the story, to physical fertility) are interrelated. Also gray, the mouse is the expression of the larger infestation of the Malkins’ home: the silent, smouldering question of their own biological productivity, which the woman would like to bring to a dead-end. The symbol of the mouse is ambivalent because it captures both the wife’s and the husband’s psychoses: the woman who will not be defined in terms of her biology and reduced to motherhood, thereby refusing to have children, and the husband caught in a boring, dead-end job, who would like to compensate for his lack of productivity at work through fatherhood. The stay-at-home wife and the working husband are mirrors of each other’s frustration in the sense that each envies what the other has as the result of gender-specific roles: Mrs. Malkin would like to enjoy the “masculine” opportunity of expressing herself outside the home and be valued for more than her ability to produce children, while Mr. Malkin’s longing for a child and interest in decoration reveal a nurturing, “feminine” side. The result of these reversals of gender expectations is conveyed succinctly by the mouse. For the woman, the mousey-gray with which she paints “his” room is an attempt to symbolically castrate the husband, as she does not want to have children, and a reminder that a concern with colours and babies is a feminine activity – the gray, thus, is supposed to relay him to a more gender-neutral or masculine zone.113 For the man, the mouse, as a symbol of fertility, is a memento of his own desire to procreate. The purchase inexorably leads to speculation that a bigger flat is connected to an addition to their family, but this appears to be one-sided: the revelation of new apartment’s infestation coincides with the wife’s coming upon The 2016 anthology on Shirley Jackson’s work remarks upon the dynamics of gendered spaces. Shari Hodges Holt’s contribution on the representation of masculine and feminine interpretations of the gothic house in film adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House reaches the conclusion that each movie offers an interpretation that suits the corresponding tenets of second and third-wave feminism. In the 1963 adaptation, the oppressive house is phallic and masculine, while in the 1999 one, it is maternal, an expression of Eleanor’s longing for her lost mother. (Hodges Holt 160) 113

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another troublesome discovery: a bankbook made to the name of one Donald Emmett Malkin. The first names indicate that there is the spectre of the third looming over the family – that of the child that they do not have: “Who’s Donald Emmett Malkin?” Mrs. Malkin said. “Just a name,” Mr. Malkin said vaguely. “A joke I had at the time.” “Donald for your father, Emmett for my father,” Mrs. Malkin said. “You say you’ll get that money back? Shall I leave the book out for you?” “Yes,” Mr. Malkin said. “I saw the mouse, by the way.” “Frighten you?” Mr. Malkin said. “I hate mice,” Mrs. Malkin said, “it was all fat and funny. Well, I’ll throw out this little book then, if you’re sure you won’t want it.” “Sure,” Mr. Malkin said. He hung up with some relief. (731)

This dialogue between the Malkins, filled with spoken and unspoken questions and answers, is enlightening for the decryption of the connection between their unborn child and the mouse. The bank account into which Mr. Malkin had started saving money (“twenty-nine dollars; a dollar a week for about six months” 731) could be a hint about a possible miscarriage, followed by Mrs. Malkin’s adamant decision not to have children, or simply a reflection of Mr. Malkin’s expectations when they moved into the bigger house. Presumably, the man’s intention to repaint the room at the end of their first year in the new flat does not only fit the purpose of relenting to Mr. Malkin’s discomfort – what is a study for a childless couple can be easily converted into a nursery, especially one what in bright, light colours. To oppose any changes in the room and its chromatic universe is to forbid the possibility of it ever welcoming a baby. An apparently non-consequential domestic decision regarding the shades of one’s apartment walls is infused with life-altering connotations about reproduction. The persistence of the check, indicating the husband’s hope that she will change her mind, is swiftly rebutted by the woman’s insistence that he get the money back, implying that there will be no one to have a savings account for (“I’ll throw it out then”). Mrs. Malkin’s decisive answer when asked if the mouse frightened her (“I hate mice”, which could easily translate to “I hate children”), as well as the inclusion of the detail of the mouse’s appearance (“fat and funny”) foreshadow her even more brutal rejection of motherhood. As a symbol of proliferating fertility, the mouse is only the source of the Malkins’ infestation in more ways than one: one the one hand, it takes over the feminine space of the kitchen, just like an unwanted pregnancy would colonize the woman’s body, and on the other, it is the expression of their marriage’s contagion with inconclusive, passive-aggressive hints about whether to have children or not. By killing the pregnant mouse, the wife puts an abrupt and non-negotiable 183

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end to all possible barter – she has annihilated, in cold blood, the source of the issue, the mother of all future mice, the living mascot of pestering, unregulated, erratic reproduction itself. To provide a direct answer to Mr. Malkin’s question, which is never answered – it is not the wife who is afraid of mice, but the mice should be afraid of her. After several conversations about buying mice-traps which are only successful once because, as the husband boasts, brimming with knowledge, “mice can smell where other mice have died”, the wife takes the matter into her own hands, dealing with the source of the matter directly, not missing an opportunity to condescend upon her partner’s all-knowing attitude (“What makes you think you know anything about mice?” 730, the equivalent of “what makes you think you know anything about children?”). When Mr. Malkin comes home from work, he finds his wife “wearing her wine-coloured housecoat” and her hair “sleek and straight down her back” (732) - a seductive stance more fit for a still smitten newlywed than a bored, jaded housewife. Instead of leading him to the bedroom, this femme fatale of mice and men (“wine-coloured” is a less conspicuous way of saying “blood-coloured”) leads him to the study, to proudly present her prize: the corpse of the enemy she has single-handedly vanquished with only a frying-pan, no trap required. The ensuing exchange between the pair is studded with all possible connotations of an artfully directed play, where every detail is assigned a particular signification. The theatricality of the following scene cannot be missed, as the wife is clearly staging a performance of femininity to the effect of exposing her gender’s intrinsic reliance on the perpetuation of a pre-established normative construct: The mouse lay in the center of the floor, on a piece of white typing paper. The mouse was, too, just the colour of the walls. “For her?” Mr. Malkin said with more strength. “I hit her with the frying pan,” Mrs. Malkin said. She looked at her husband. “I was very brave,” she said. “You certainly were,” Mr. Malkin said heartily. “Then I put her on the piece of paper with the broom,” Mrs. Malkin said, “and brought her in here. And I know why she was so fat.” Mr. Malkin bent over the mouse and saw why she was so fat, and then he looked up at his wife. From the look on her face, Mr. Malkin realized that she was the most terrible woman he had ever seen. (732)

Mrs. Malkin’s choice of displaying the corpse in the study, on a “white piece of typing paper” – the chromatic contrast deliberately emphasizing the dramatic effect – is a deliberate trespassing onto a masculine-coded space, as well as a statement about the gendered activity of writing, perceived as masculine par excellence. Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper” resignifies the act 184

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of writing as feminine by smudging the walls of her nursery/asylum’s ward/prison cell with the bodily, smelly, yellow smooch; Mrs. Malkin makes use of anther, but just as bodily, symbol of femininity – that of the pregnant mouse. The proliferating fertility of the male mind, pouring its yield onto the page, is expressed here by the immaculate sheet of typing paper, an expression of another male myth, that of feminine purity. The two types of proliferation – that of the mind and of the body – are in direct competition with each other. After creating a gendered room for the husband herself and coding it gray, the wife then plays with the space’s connotations by transforming it into the setting of her mouse-chapel charade, where pregnant femininity rests in the oppressive, dull crypt of symbolic masculinity – the show that the wife puts on is a patent funereal mockery of motherhood as the ultimate standard for femininity. The study is also the place where the desk (where the wife finds the hidden bankbook), the emblem of masculine intellect, of Man as the embodiment of Culture, is placed. Like the one in the Strangeworth residence, complete with the trimmed quill, which deems it easily mistaken for a museum piece, the desk is ideologically fraught territory. As the place where the town matriarch pens her testaments of power and hatred over her subjects and family heirloom passed from grandfather to father, it problematizes the issue of women’s writing as legitimate. In bringing the mouse into the study, Mrs. Malkin re-assigns, once more, the room’s place in the gothic geography of signification, by displacing the masculine desk as symbolic center, the clean, orderly, abstract “brain” of the room, with the grotesquely physical corpse of the dead pregnant mouse; thus, instead of being the “head” of the house (like the man is traditionally “the head of the family”) Mrs. Malkin changes the anatomical correspondence of the room, turning it into a womb. Gilman’s indictment of enforced gender norms through the house’s reflection of the hysteric’s body, whose uterus wanders from its anatomical place to the higher regions of the body, is also found in Jackson’s story. By inhabiting the room with the yellow wallpaper that John prefers, Jane’s descent into madness unravels – Mrs. Malkin’s killing of the mouse constitutes a stark statement that she refuses to go down the same path. The vertical anatomy of John and Jane’s house into the feminine lower floor of the womb and the upper precincts of the brain finds its parallel into the horizontal distribution of space in the Malkin apartment. The womb, symbolized by the mouse, migrates into the study, the traditional site of the male, a breaching of limits with the potential of hystericizing the husband himself. When realizing the extent of his wife’s mental dissolution, John’s characteristic composure breaks down and he faints, while Mr. Malkin is struck with the silencing epiphany of his wife’s terribleness. The assertion 185

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of female subjectivity in ways that evade the sex-gender binary constructions of society is the trigger of crisis for the masculine identity, as well. When Mrs. Malkin shows her husband that she, too, can manipulate the game of signification, the man must consequently reassess the role that he himself will play in this altered dynamic. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman’s entrapment in the symbolic realm of Nature is transformed into writing – an act of Culture – by Jane’s use of her entire body to smudge the yellows smooch all around the room, tracing the margins of a symbolic page. Mrs. Malkin’s counterpart of this lies in another organic branding of the room, without using her body, but that of her surrogate of femininity onto a page that already exists – the typing sheet on which she places the mouse. This pattern of the typical hysterical narrative, where the husband is in control of the wife/patient and colonizes her discourse in a parasitical way until the woman decides to evade the chain of signification altogether and re-enter the symbolic realm of Nature, and then retort by inscribing and colonizing the man’s house/body with her feminine discourse of madness. Jane refuses to leave the room with the yellow wallpaper, tying herself to the bed and thus hystericizing John’s cause by literally bringing the womb further up the body; the more empowered Mrs. Malkin has no intention of ever allowing her spousal counterpart to confine her to one symbolic area of the house or other. Elisabeth Bronfen’s remarks on the specular pleasure provided by the dead body’s woman as an object, but never Subject, of the male gaze, are useful here in showing that Jackson, in one short scene, re-evaluates the entire tradition of the reification of the feminine corpse as the projection of masculine fantasy and desire. The predatory process which allows for the reification of woman via its transformation into an imago, mimicked by the doctor’s similar treatment of the female patient, whose body becomes the de-personalized tool through which the higher ideal of science is achieved, is reversed in Jackson’s story, which confronts the male gaze with an unexpected version of womanhood, one that cannot be tailored to suit male desire. If the stasis of the female corpse allows the male to instrumentalize it according to his own liking, this particular instance of passivity in death, bringing together decay and motherhood, is anti-aesthetic, the very opposite of Poe’s tenet that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic of possible subjects. What Mrs. Malkin sardonically cooks in her kitchen is his own prejudices of femininity scrambled in a frying pan; she is serving him the death of his own ideology, of his own misinterpretation of her and her wishes, instead of a homely candle-lit dinner. The disruption of the nature/culture binary in “The Mouse” also revolves around strategies of resisting the male gaze and even opposing it 186

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with an alternate female strategy of looking that is not tailored to male fantasy and desire. The importance of the medical gaze for supporting the discursive regimens of power and the hystericization of women’s bodies, was discussed in the previous chapter; despite the absence of medical masculinities in Jackson’s story, female resistance to reification is still conveyed by playing with representations of stock, both “good” and “bad” femininity: the femme fatale, the ingénue, the hysteric, the housewife, the witch. Mrs. Malkin’s performance of her gender passes through all of the above: she is a squeamish young woman who is afraid of mice and passively defers to her husband’s assistance (“Mrs. Malkin put her foot down on the mouse, which was racing for cover into the refrigerator. She screamed and ran into the living room, where Mr. Malkin was sitting and reading.” 730), hysterical in the sense that the prospect of babies/mice “makes her nervous”, a witch who uses this dual emblem of domesticity and female empowerment, the broom, to make her views known; seductive and literal “killer” when she welcomes her husband home, in a red house-coat and flowing hair. The “womb-for-brain” displacement that occurs in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and hystericizes the female narrator occurs in Jackson’s story, with the exception of its ultimate consequence – the protagonist’s complete dissolution into madness. Mrs. Malkin is a wife who has perfected strategies of resistance to hysterization, understood as a male medical construct for the control of women’s bodies. In refusing motherhood, the wife reclaims control over her own reproductive function, refuses to be defined according to male standards and articulates herself as Subject. This grotesque mimicry of the spectacle of death performed by Mrs. Malkin in an insipid domestic setting can be read as a vindication of the Western’s canons dearly held dynamic of man-as-villainous pursuer, woman-as-fleeing ingénue, a long due redressal for all Clarissas,114 Pamelas and their literary sisters, whose image is robbed, even in death, by the male gaze. The similarities between Jackson and Richardson do not stop here, with critics Jennifer Preston Wilson and Michael T. Wilson noticing that the reciprocity between the sentimental and the gothic that Leslie Fiedler himself had based his Love and Death in the American Novel on can be easily explained through an identity of plot construction:

The connection between Shirley Jackson and Samuel Richardson has been noted before. In their 2016 article, Jennifer Preston Wilson and Michael T. Wilson note that Jackon’s love of the eighteenth century author (also revealed by her biographers, which she lends to some of her characters, too) is explained by a need to return to a sense of virtue and order as a form of escapism from the disruptiveness of ordinary life. (“We know only names, so far”: Shirley Jackson and the Exploration of the Precarious Self 7). Interestingly, Richardson is the author preferred by James’ governess in “The Turn of the Screw”. 114

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Ioana BACIU In fact, Samuel Richardson’s and Shirley Jackson’s novels deploy psychologically complex plots of family conflict that are remarkably similar, when stripped of their extraneous historical effects. Their fictions ask questions about the integration of the self within Gothically drawn domestic environments and share a striking repetition of motifs: the use of female character foils to expose fears about the individual’s ability to assert herself against social conventions, a focus on fraught child-parent relationships that shape the heroine’s allegiances in conscious and unconscious ways, and the deliberate staging of conflict within evocative formal settings, such as the summerhouse, to frame significant trials and transformations. (Wilson and Wilson 7)

Through Jennifer and Michael Wilson compare Jackson’s novels (The Sundial and The Bird’s Nest) to Richardson’s work, the similarity of themes stands true of the short stories, with “The Mouse” as a case in point: “gothically-drawn environment” could not be a better definition of the Malkins’ house, the resistance to social conventions is the wife’s rejection of the sex-gender construct of femininity as defined by motherhood and the foil is the mouse, while the relationships between the spouses are expressed both directly and indirectly, “in conscious and unconscious ways.” Female subjectivity, at the core of Jackson’s fiction, shapes itself as the Other of normative social constructs revolving around marriage and reproduction. By placing the mouse on typing paper, Mrs. Malkin joins the two types of fertility: the presumable masculine creativity of her spouse, who is supposedly working steadily in his study and creating masterpieces of the mind, and feminine, physiological proliferation through childbirth. That Mr. Malkin would presume that his work as a minor insurance company executive is in any way creative and proof of his superiority over his stay-at-home wife, while all he does is pretend to be working in a room especially chosen to glorify his mind (there is no corresponding “study” for the wife in the house, dedicated to the fulfilment of her mental pursuits) is evidence of the inherent nature-culture divide in their relationship. Upon assessing the compartmentalization of the new apartment, that such a room, meant for the birthing of intellectual masterpieces, should exist in the first place, is the first idea that occurs to the husband: “she had taken the room Mr. Malkin felt immediately was to be his study…” (729) Since his job in insurance requires no intellectual tour de force, but is rather the definition of glorified corporate boredom, the man’s pretension of having a study at home seems a bit farfetched. Mr. Malkin is no book-worm, but a mere office mouse who would like to parade authority, manliness and intellectualism at least in the safety of his own apartment, to his wife, but he lamentably fails as his home study becomes just a copy of his colorless workplace with the tan walls and chairs, where he is just as inadequate and unproductive. There is no-one to impress at home because the wife is no fool and will not tolerate the husband’s 188

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self-aggrandizing illusions – she promptly signals her awareness of his mediocrity by painting the walls gray. The feminine space of the kitchen, in temporary disarray due to the mouse invasion, thus mirrors the woman’s resistance to stereotypical definitions of femininity. Yang and Healy read gothic geography as a mirroring of mental and emotional disorder at societal level: “Disordered landscapes in the Gothic represent the chaos of culture in transition, or the violence of passions seething beneath the veneer of civilized society.” (5) The Malkin house, thus, is a micro version of the American 1950s; its disarray is the age’s disarray and the wife’s unsettling violence in smashing the pregnant creature is an attack upon the presumption of civilization itself, for, according to Teresa de Lauretis,115 a society which allows symbolic violence against women cannot call itself civilized. In her important 1987 study, the film studies theorist uses the phrase “rhetoric of violence” (Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction ) in showing how the depiction of violence in language is gendered: When one first surveys the representations of violence in general terms, there seem to be two kinds of violence with respect to its object: male and female. I do not mean that the "victims" of such kinds of violence are men and women, but rather that the object on which or to which the violence is done is what establishes the meaning of the represented act; and that object is perceived or apprehended as either feminine or masculine. An obvious example of the first instance is "nature," as in the expression "the rape of nature," which at once defines nature as feminine, and rape as violence done to a feminine other (whether its physical object be a woman, a man, or an inanimate object). (42)

Femininity as passive and masculinity as active, woman as victim and man as conqueror – these are phallogocentric constructions of language along the nature/culture divide. Mrs. Malkin’s decisive and ruthless gesture is a response to systemic masculine domination through enforced gender roles; she cracks the veneer of civilized society armed with a frying pan by moving from the masquerade of easily frightened femininity, one that “wouldn’t hurt a fly”, into a more aggressive, masculine role. The disorder of the Malkins’ kitchen becomes a disorder of the female body that wishes to retain control over itself – the mouse is an alien presence in the same way that an unwanted pregnancy would be. Consequently, the gendered Feminist and film studies scholar de Lauretis is preocuppied with strategies of silencing women, which she investigates by drawing on semiotics and spychoanalysis. The man as writer/woman as writer dychotomy is relevant for the Nature/Culture divide as the Gilman narrator, for instance, is a writer, and Jackson’s housewife uses not just any type of paper, but “typing paper”, for her morbid offering: “the question of women's writing in feminist theory: Is it speaking the language of men or the silence of women? And I would answer, both.” (Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Writing 242) 115

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compartmentalization of space in gothic texts is a political statement of feminine vindication. As the mouse intrudes upon the space of the kitchen, the symbolic womb of the house, Mrs. Malkin colonizes the masculine space of the study with the dead mouse’s body, an artificial embryo in an unwilling uterus. The imposition of motherhood is a form of violence upon women, condoned at the social level by the worship of motherhood. The dead mouse, with its protruding belly grotesquely burst open, revealing why “she was all fat and funny”, becomes the study’s centrepiece – in her wine-coloured robe and sleek hair down her back, she is reminding him that she does not want to become “fat and funny” herself, in a reminder of a pregnancy’s effects on a woman’s body. Mrs. Malkin does not feel the need to explain why she carefully put the body on the clean, white sheet of paper and move from the kitchen into the study, of all possible places, but merely narrates it with the utmost casualness, as if it were the most natural thing to do. The wife mocks the husband’s naïveté in believing the wife to be the stereotypical “damsel in distress” (he contends enthusiastically to her ironic remark that she was “very brave” in killing the mouse all by herself) who depends on a man for the menial tasks of mouse extermination, the Tom and Jerry cliché of the squeamish housewife who takes refuge, shaking, on a chair, while the man of the house takes care of the pestering nuisance. The latent violence of the couple’s marriage is no cartoonish slapstick, however; its articulation is real and raw, highlighting the differences between the fantasy of men’s representations of femininity and motherhood, which can easily be idealized (and thus dehumanized) when put on paper, in men’s works of fiction, versus women’s raw reality of the biological processes involved in masculine phantasms of childbirth. Nature and Culture are contrasted by the wife when she uses the mouse’s body to symbolically write nature over the masculine space of culture – another instance of “writing with the body”, as clear as gray on white. Mr. and Mrs. Malkin severe misalignment with each-other’s views of femininity, masculinity and marriage would not be possible without the context of the worship of motherhood in American culture, in itself oppressive as it creates the discourse of sacrifice and martyrdom for the woman who gives all to her children, denying her own wants and needs. The subversion of prescriptive gender roles is all the more comical as, in the Mr./Mrs. dynamic of the relationship, it is in fact the husband who appears as infantile. The use of pronouns and their role in the economy of the narrative is also significant. In “The Turn of the Screw”, the masculine control over the governess’ narrative is achieved by the multiplication of the narrative “I”s of the prologue that filter the hysterical woman’s manuscript and establish her account as unreliable. Jackson uses the third person omniscient narrator to 190

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create the impression of objectivity, but the emphatic articulation of the strong subjective presence is established at the end with the use of the third person feminine pronoun. While deliberately keeping her characters suitably impersonal in this parable of the sexual politics of marriage, Jackson infuses her short and sweet story with a twist with an abundance of “Mr.” and “Mrs.”, keeping further details about their name or other aspects of their personality to a bare minimum. The banality of this couple, which makes it representative for so many other American couples in similar situations, ensures the piercing concision of Jackson’s achievement, while preparing the introduction of gendered pronouns in the dialogue at the very end. Malkin’s confusion at his wife’s use of a gendered pronoun for an animal is a foil for the impending revelation, as the mouse evidently bears a higher significance for the couple and their marriage. The use of the feminine pronoun hints at the mouse’s condition, but it also personifies it, creating parallels with the human: in killing the mouse, Mrs. Malkin is putting a violent end to the reproductive version of herself; the use of the pronoun simultaneously humanizes the mouse and de-humanizes the woman. It is the portrayal of the mouse as a sentient being, in addition to “bearer of offspring”, that makes the female protagonist “the most terrible woman he had ever seen”, overlapping the images of the woman and animal, further contributing to the image of woman as a frightful, irrational emanation of cruel, immoral nature. The impersonal “it” is replaced by “her” because the wife makes it clear that she is not exterminating vermin, she is killing a mother – a distinction that belongs to culture, not nature, and the very detail that makes her “terrible” (i.e. a vision of aberrant femininity). Not all pregnant creatures are mothers, as the term itself is laden with the cultural signification of nurture and an antropomorphic projection of human social patterns onto animals, whose behaviour towards offspring can be very diverse. To be a “mother” in the cultural sense proposed by 1950s America, biology alone does not suffice, the ability to bear children and give birth is not enough. If parenthood is a sacred aspect of being human, it has become so culturally, through the application of certain discursive regimens of knowledge-power and the maintenance of the sex-gender system. In the eyes of the husband, Mrs. Malkin has grown to be monstrous, not only because she does not wish to become a mother herself, but because she destroys a symbol not only of fertility (so prevalent in primitive agricultural societies, whose Venus of Willendorfs are a part of the cult of), but of motherhood. Mrs. Malkin has thus pledged her allegiance to the Darwinist dynamic of the survival of the fittest, where the more powerful outruns the slow and the weak (“I was too fast for her”) – if she must survive an oppressive cultural environment that wishes to impose obligatory 191

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motherhood on her, the wife must “outrun” the mouse, must oppose the constant pressure, indirectly and constantly enforced on her by the very existence of the bank account in the name of the child that she does not want, placed where she is sure to find it while cleaning by a husband who is trying to change her mind. Ironically, Mrs. Malkin uses the social Darwinism of the propagation of the species through reproduction, used to promote various racist ideologies and leading to the creation of the Malthusian couple, to establish her own survival. Paradoxically, her way of resisting biology is by embodying cruel, heartless nature and killing the mouse as if it were just vermin, an infester in the house which simply has to be eliminated, instead of the projection of maternal sweetness horrifies her husband so. As in the case of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the only useful strategy of resisting masculine domination through the othering of femininity is to embrace that Othering, as it is the only stance that frightens the oppressor, entailing an emasculating effect –it makes John faint and it silences Mr. Malkin. Tellingly, in this satire of reproduction-centered marriage, the only full name is “Donald Emmett Malkin” which, in the absence of personalized first-names for his parents, reads as a full, right royal title. This name, however, is in itself a construct of masculine desire along patriarchal lines, as it brings together the names of the parents’ fathers, and as it excludes the presumable mother’s desires, completely overriding them. Mr. Malkin tellingly does not imagine he will have a daughter, but fantasizes about his future male heir, as if his entire life purpose were centred around reproduction and the passing along not only of one’s name, but also of those of the forefathers. By contrast, the deictic nature of “her”, which could refer to anyone in the absence of context, bringing ambiguity to the relationship between signifier and signified, semantically constructs the Other as female: “her” is a competitor to “him”, the invisible Donald Emmett. Like in “The Possibility of Evil”, where Miss Strangeworth acknowledges the power and the legacy of the forefathers, but cannot express it directly, so she articulates it covertly, through the sending of anonymous letters, Mrs. Malkin imposes her point of view in an alternate way. As the possibility of the feminine is excluded by the father to be, the gothic nature of this story is the male’s confrontation with the reality of female violence as a retort to symbolic patriarchal violence. The story’s title, encapsulating its theme, is a subversion of the ideal of motherhood as silent, indistinctive, submissive, “mousy”: the prospect that Mrs. Malkin and the mouse should be one and the same is the offensive statement that the wife rebels against. Like in “The Possibility of Evil”, the violence of women assumes other guises, as Miss Strangeworth’s status prevents her from exerting power overtly, she mimics the stealthy “feminine” mechanisms of gossip. Deprived of other “weapons”, the wife 192

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fashions her own from the props she has at her disposal in mimicry of conventional femininity whose irony the husband fails to comprehend. Mr. Malkin’s “hearty” assent that she was “very brave” in killing the mouse herself, without a man’s assistance, is comical, as the man is clearly offering praise where none is due: his wife is, after all, the “terrible”, indomitable, cold-blooded warrior who exerts violence in a very methodical, unemotional manner, after several naïve assurances from the part of the husband that he will take care of the problem. In calling her “brave”, in a way similar to an adult’s validation and encouragement of a child preparing to take a sour-tasting medicine or face an irrational fear of spiders or the dark, Mr. Malkin is inhabiting the conventional role of the patronizing male who treats his wife like the embodiment of stereotypically feminine fears, despite her claims to the contrary. Though she is aware of the corresponding role she has to play as a response to the husband’s own impositions of conventional masculinity, the wife dismantles it, while successfully pretending to uphold the façade: her claims that she is not actually afraid of mice can be interpreted as ambiguous, as she may or may be lying so as to be thought “a good girl” by her husband, she takes on the role of interior decorator, but disrupts the man’s peace and quiet by painting his study gray, and comes across the secret bank account by cleaning. While performing housewifely duties, Mrs. Malkin reconfigures the trope of “housewife with a broom” into that of “witch with a broom”, as all of the domestic tasks that she performs in this story - which may be short and poignant, but is pregnant with unspoken tension – are transgressions of the husband’s will. Like Miss Strangeworth’s observation that “princesses can be a lot of trouble sometimes”, Mrs. Malkin is the living proof that housewives can be a lot of trouble, too, even more so than mice; she is an unruly woman who will not be told what to do. When Mrs. Malkin repeatedly says that she is not afraid of mice, she mentions that she hates them nonetheless them because “they’re making me so nervous” (730) – a statement identical to that of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, whose isolation from her infant is motivated in the same way (“I cannot be with the baby, it makes me so nervous”). The hystericization of women’s bodies mentioned by Foucault in The History of Sexuality as a means to control reproduction publicly, as an instrument of knowledge-power. In refusing to be a mother, Mrs. Malkin is resisting hysteria and refuting the entire medical discursive regimen of power of the men that uphold it. If Jane did not have a say in John’s treatment of her as both wife and patient, the anonymous Mrs. Malkin does. Jane and John, with their semantically twin names, mirror the doubling of surnames in “The Mouse”: impersonalized by distinctive first-names, the spouses are solely defined by their legal connection to each-other in marriage, thus their roles 193

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are pre-determined. Jackson is providing a concise allegory of married life as an identity-forming battle, where the feminine tries to articulate herself as subject. In debating their “mouse problem”, Mr. and Mrs. Malkin are establishing their identities around the issue of reproduction. The power play between the masculine and the feminine corresponds to the “study”/”kitchen” division of space in the Malkins’ new apartment. Like in “The Jury of Her Peers”116, a story which Annette Kolodny interprets as exploring the gendered reading of female texts according to standards which might be culturally opaque to male readers, in “The Mouse” Mr. Malkin is someone who fails to read the hints of his wife’s behavior. His experience is vastly different from hers, as well as the expectations imposed upon him, until his fantasy of fatherhood is confronted with the gruesome reality of pregnancy in the mouse’s split belly. “The Yellow Wallpaper” has also been read as a parable of masculine and feminine strategies of writing and reading, where the man misinterprets the signs which clearly show the deterioration of the wife’s health. Culturally speaking, Jackson’s text comes at a time when the deterioration of women’s mental health as a result of their confinement to the role of housewives had just become the main discussion of budding second-wave feminism. When exposing the fallacies of the American Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan resorts to the cultural weight of women’s magazines to mirror the age’s descent from the suffragette impetus of the 1930s to the domestic drudgery of the 1950s and 60s. The product of this lapse from the career-oriented New Women to the children-and-housekeeping ideals of the housewife is predicated upon the women’s magazine’s editor’s reasoning that “maybe the genius of some women has been thwarted, but "a world full of feminine genius, but poor in children, would come rapidly to an end."” (Friedan 37). By focusing on the infinite boredom of university-educated women who had made it their lives’ work to be the carers of the nation’s future generations, Friedan’s initiative is not only a militant cry for equal rights for men and women, but a sustained, painstakingly documented argument against the obliteration of women’s intellectual potential into child-rearing and motherhood. Further embedded in the Mystique’s discourse, however, is the idea that, deeply ensconced in the biologically-confined realm of the home, half of the American population wastes intellectual brawn mending shorts and frying chicken in an effort to guiltily scrub away unsavoury desires for a more fulfilling life in the working place. Coincidentally, the Housewife will materialize into one of the staples of suburban American Gothic, thus 116 Jackson’s work is also assessed by Elaine Showalter in her survey of American woman writers

(“A Jury of her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Broadstreet to Anne Proulx”).

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emphasizing a feminine mystique whose unresolved frustrations grow into unexpected, albeit full-blown, horror. As an author of the 1940s (thus beginning her career two decades before the Mystique was published), Shirley Jackson anticipates the housewifely concerns made explicit by Friedan in a series of short stories focusing on the invisibility of these women whose apparent sanity deviates into piercingly real domestic horror. Jackson’s first major hit and best-remembered short piece of prose, “The Lottery” (1948), pursues the gothic vein that echoes the Puritan roots of the housewife mystique: in a quiet suburban neighbourhood or village (it isn’t clear which, but it is obvious that the participants are members of a tight-knit, small community), eager anticipation is met with careful and deliberate preparation for the impending highlight event of the year, the “lottery” of the title in which each and every member of the community awaits with baited breath. All the steps of the process completed, names are drawn as the final stage, and it is at this point of the story that the reader becomes aware that the prize awaiting the lottery winner was a public stoning to death – another killing of a mother, of Tessie Hutchinson, in which her own children participate. A smaller, kitchen-sized death occurs in the Malkins’ apartment, and while it does not acquire the public dimensions of the Foucauldian discipline and punishment, it is still representative of larger social issues, such as the oppression of women in marriage. The implementation of the disciplining of women’s bodies in the domestic sphere, the devastating results of which were signalled by Betty Friedan, leads to the development of feminine strategies of resistance, one of which I have attempted to chart in this chapter. Within the classic narrative of entrapment, the symbolic dimension of the gothic house as an extension of the male oppressor (be him husband, physician, or both) can also become the place where the masculine is challenged instead of fled from. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s treatment of the house in “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the self-fulfilling prophecy of the summer residence’s Gothicism, insinuating the familiar trope of the escaping heroine, but only partly fulfils it as the narrator colonizes the space which had been its prison. While the metaphor of the embryo as invader is far from reaching the full-blown gruesome horror of alien invasion through the woman’s body, like in the Alien franchise, Jackson astutely prefigures it. In “The Mouse”, it is the wife that ultimately wrests a symbolic victory over her husband, while Miss Strangeworth’s house in “The Possibility of Evil”, a museum where the patriarchal order of the past is preserved, represents both the materialization of the forefathers’ desire as well as its appropriation by female desire. The gothic house as the ultimate setting of the projection of male desire becomes complicated by the articulation of the 195

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1950s home as the housewife’s paradise. This other type of prison becomes the ideal setting for the woman with a broom. As Snow White was projecting her would-be lover in the sweeping dance of Disney’s 1937 animation, Jackson’s work investigates the domestic, and often gothic, reality that follows Prince Charming’s corresponding efforts to “sweep her off her feet”. The fantasy of heteronormative romance targeted at young girls through films such as those made by Disney, whose fantasy of class and labour are intertwined with those of gender, is followed by housewife’s fantasy of the perfect house, that effortlessly keeps immaculate through invisible magic-labour that does not drain the wife. Critics like Alexis Shotwell have recently (2013) expressed criticism in the superficial attention given to Jackson’s domestic fiction, deploring the superficiality criticism treats the home-making aspect of her work ("No proper feeling for her house": The Relational Formation of White Womanliness in Shirley Jackson's Fiction). According to Shotwell, Jackson’s “critique of middle class white heteropatriarchy” and gender as a “relational enactment” contribute to an understanding of race, sexuality, class and gender “constructed through and with the relationships between the women and the houses they tend.” (119) The women’s confinement to the house, its keeping and the tending of children, do not cut off the housewife’s engagement with the community she lives in, on the contrary – they articulate these relationships within the space of the woman-house dynamic. Furthermore, “the normalizing force of domesticity” in the relation between the family and the town allows for the woman’s expression of identity formation – the friction between the individual self and the collective force of community is a struggle from which female Subjectivity either emerges stronger, fully formed, like Mrs. Malkin in “The Mouse” or Miss. Strangeworth in “The Possibility of Evil”, or is entirely annihilated by the overwhelming force of the town/village, like “The Lottery’s” Tessie Hutchinson or the protagonist in “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith”, who willingly submits herself to an ambiguous sacrifice. Domestic space dwells, thus, in the illusion of privacy, as it represents an ideological battlefield for the clash of larger societal struggles; it is a form of female oppression based on the housewife’s surveillance by the community and the constant judgement of her performance based on the standard of ideal homekeeping. (Shotwell 120) The importance of the housewife and the Gothicism of domestic fiction leads to the entwinement of several generic strands in Jackson’s fiction, as James Egan has noted, spanning the comic-satiric-fantastic-gothic (Comic-Satiric-Fantastic-Gothic: Interactive Modes in Shirley Jackson's Narratives 34). Consequently, the housewife realities of Jackson’s own life as the mother of four as recounted in the humorous autobiographies Life 196

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Among the Savages and Raising Demons offer the humours and satiric side to her fictions fantastic and gothic. If the prince leaves romance and courtship behind to join the ranks of productive labour, the girlish ingénue who screams at the sight of a mouse turns into woman and indomitable housewife armed with a killer frying pan. With a mixture of sardonic humour and gothic revelation, of slapstick comedy with Darwinian feminism, Jackson plays with male and female stereotypes and projections: the princess’ projection of a charming husband finds its match in the husband’s phantasy of fatherhood and a male heir for his kingdom. The subversion of the sex-gender constructs embedded in the ideology of Disney films transforms the female protagonist, in Jackson’s story, from aspiring home-maker to gothic wife. In an 1998 edition on the new directions of the American Gothic, William Veeder asks a question that sums up the correspondence between the figure of the mother as emblematic for the genre: how can the gothic be both popular and subversive?, stating that the nurturing, motherly side of the gothic is to periodically contribute to its own generic regeneration and thereby compel and record social cultural shifts (“The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive”): A gothic text positions its reader in a potential space where the psyche's repressed desires and the society's foreclosed issues can be engaged and thus where healing can occur. The gothic text itself functions as a transitional object. It is created by the reader, yet it is already there. We produce a novel that has never before existed, though a century old. By engaging in the creative play of reading, the individual experiences the pleasure that indicates the extent to which he or she has experienced desire. Desire is in fact what is produced by the reader's healing play with the text. (20)

Veeder’s remarks help draw a parallel between the gothic mother and the nature of the gothic genre itself. The condition of woman of trace, always circulating within the text, is similar to the definition of the gothic as a “transitional subject”. Reading as creative play is in keeping with Harriet Hustis’s remarks on the “gothic of reading” in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, where meaning is co-created with the reader. III.5. The Gothic Child: “Charles” The regression to the mother (such as those exemplified by certain readings of Poe, especially in “Berenice”, “Morella” or “A Descent into The Maelstrom”), subdued in marriage and motherhood, rears its ugly head in the ambivalent figure of the child, whose state of innocence is quickly revealed as a middle-class adult fantasy. In Jackson’s stories and novels, of a 197

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Gothicism both female and American, there is no male fear of female sexuality, like in Poe; the emphasis is placed on the female rejection of motherhood, the truculent relationship between a woman’s identity and social pressure and the relationships between mothers and children. The child’s absorption back into the mother’s womb, noted by several critics (Rubenstein, Newman, Lootens), in a recurrent theme in Jackson’s fiction, one usually discussed in the novels. Some stories preserve the same turn of the century struggle to incorporate femininity into Culture by having the female protagonist preserve her identity as both housewife and writer. If it is possible for the lonely spinster to construct a fantasy of a demon lover that provides her with the identity of the victim, the housewife’s perfect child is followed by its own shadow. The American theme of the public versus the private self, ingrained in Puritanism and identified by Leslie Fiedler in the works of Hawthorne, is also present in Jackson’s work (Hague). Suburbia emerges as the space where the rift between the public and private self deepens in equal proportion to its repression. If, however, the child is merely imitating that which he sees in his parents, he or she functions as a social mirror, not only reflecting, but also amplifying the rifts between their feelings and actions. Societal pressure absorbed by and repressed by the mother will resurface in the unruly, provocative offspring who easily borrows the adults’ behaviours, with an uncanny prescience of the need to uphold the façade of respectability. As doubles or mirrors of the adult world they inhabit, the children of Jackson’s fiction are the ideological fighting ground for discursive regimes of power. Rousseau’s theory of man’s innate goodness crumbles, as loss of innocence – that of children, first of all, who are raised into a ritual of barbarism, like the one in The Lottery - expands the traditional role of women – that of nurturers at societal level. While the monster/vampire in gothic fiction is a more cryptic embodiment of various social anxieties, the collective pressure in Jackson’s works is palpable, it breathes down the protagonist’s neck, whether she be the unmarried woman in her 30s who, unable to fit into the 1950s mould of successful femininity completely plunges into the neurosis of her imagined demon lover, or the overwhelmed mother who, despite ticking all the boxes in the women’s magazine “perfect housewife” catalogue, basis her worth as a person on the behaviour of her child. The gothicization of the child in fiction transcends its mere presence; as Margarita Georgieva shows, not all children in these types of texts become so by dint of inclusion. As the locus of the repressed, the gothic disrupts and reveals that which is unacknowledged – in this case, ambivalent, socially unacceptable attitudes about motherhood in the cultural environment of the 1950s. As a mother-and-child-worshipping society, America reiterates the 198

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late nineteenth century trope of the angel-in-the-house by creating the myth of the housewife, which it firmly plants in a domestic paradise steeped in consumerist fetishism and for which it creates its own iconography, the pinup of household advertising. With a mixture of humor and irony, Jackson disrupts the myth of homely suburban bliss by destabilizing its core – the symbiotic relationship between mother and child. It is the essential innocuousness of gothicization of the child exposes societal pressures around the typified suburban household in which the housewife is a domestic goddess who magically flips a wand and chores take care of themselves: the washing machine does the laundry, a car presents itself to her to pick up the children from school with and go grocery shopping. Her cares revolve around keeping the house comfortable for the husband and offspring. Cooking and cleaning are balanced with hair dresser’s and nail appointments; she is not merely a house-wife, but a home-maker. This image of the effortless magic of domestic life is the one presented in 1950s ads, presenting the housewife as a sort of fairy godmother who magically makes stains and tears disappear. Jackson’s own experience of child-rearing is quite tellingly worded in the titles of her two autobiographical works on life as a housewife, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1956), which unsurprisingly opposes the housewife’s “good magic” to the “bad magic”, the witchcraft, of writing. “Charles” draws heavily on the experience of women who to take on the socially constructed role of wives and mothers and of the child as a space of the parents’ projection of desire. In “The Mouse”, Donald Emmett Malkin is the construct of the perfect child as imagined by the husband, a fantasy of male desire centered around fatherhood, an illusion of perfection promptly faced with the biology of what having a child entails in the reality of the wife’s body through the gruesome image of the crushed pregnant mouse. The cold medical gaze of anatomist’s portraits with their dissected women’s corpses analyzed by Elisabeth Bronfen in Over her Dead Body is now flipped, as the woman confronts the husband not with the projection of his own construct of femininity, except this time is that which he does not want to see, thus deconstructing the gaze as an instrument of the enforcement of male desire. Similarly, the parables of misreading of the text and body from the previously discussed texts, especially the misreading of the female body/text by the male, can be applied to the mother’s own romanticized version of her child as perfect: The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a longtrousered,

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The sentimental tone apparent in the story’s first lines does not deter from the conspicuousness of the mother’s own construction of herself as authoritative narrative force, as the story is a critique of the myth of the mother as contributing to the construction of the next generation’s “demons” and “savages” as much as a revelation of the existence of the gothic child itself. What seems to be an abrupt passage from the restrained mobility and helplessness of infancy expressed by the “overalls and bib” view the woman has of Laurie, as if early childhood were a fixed phase in which the infant is frozen in the imago which he never reverts from. The mother’s objectification of her boy into a static familiar image of dependent childhood that she is comfortable with mimics the man’s transformation of the woman’s body into a space of projection. The reference to Laurie’s bib in the boy’s description is that of a baby in a high chair, waiting to be fed, which continues the physical connection between the mother’s body and that of the child who breastfeeds, essential for the formation of cathexes according to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. Furthermore, the fact that Laurie is a boy has certain implications of the mom’s view of him, adding an additional layer to the mother’s already rose-tinted glasses: the passage from the strictly domestic realm of the house to the public sphere of the kindergarten is a rite of passage for both (“that era of my life had ended”) due to its correlation between the boy’s emergence into the public sphere and masculinity. The “longtrousered, swaggering character” so entranced by his new adventure that he forgets to say good-bye to the mother who waves at him from a distance displays an excitement on taking on the world is comparable with that of a cowboy (complete with jeans and belt) fulfilling his destiny of taking on a new quest, always leaving places and women behind, being a conqueror in a world of men. The mother as the teary-eyed, emotional pillar of the home, the guardian of Laurie’s childhood whose confines she never leaves, as she is the very embodiment of domesticity: the mother’s body is home and home is mother’s body. Recurrent in the classically American genre of the western, the image of the woman arrested on the threshold, fence, corner or any other symbol of her restrained freedom of movement as a reflection of her gender’s limitations, the image of the woman waving the man goodbye is a classic ending of the genre’s filmic productions. The western, concerning itself with the formation of the myth of the American frontier, is masculine par excellence, as the expansion of nationhood and the conquering of new territory is an ongoing battle with malevolent forces which test the characters’ willpower. 200

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The theme of good versus evil in westerns, developed around the confrontations of lightning-fast pistol-drawing men, excludes the interference of the feminine, whose sole purpose is to play damsel-in-distress and be rescued from her kidnappers, the red skins, or to keep home as the husband lays the law in the wild, wild west, hoping that he returns unharmed. To go into the world, thus, is a masculine act, the American conquering of Nature117 on which America was built, and to leave home to become an explorer is not to simply cease being a child, is to become a man. Looking into the distance at her grown boy (“I watched him go off...”), the mother impersonates the future wife, anxiously supervising Laurie’s rite of passage into a world that will base its expectations of him on his gender. That Jackson would court comparisons between a five-year-old’s going away to kindergarten and a cowboy’s quest west is undoubtedly comical, but understandable, given the larger goal of exposing the unrealistic expectations that mothers project on their children when they themselves have internalized the binaries of the sex-gender construct, worshipping the male issue of their loins as the nation-shaping man-to-be from an early age. While the typical western ending features cowboys riding into the sunset as the woman longingly sees them off, Laurie’s sending off to kindergarten is the reversal of that scene, where nostalgia is mixed with optimism: as the mother sighs nostalgically, but proudly, at the sight of her little boy morphing into an man, he enthusiastically swaggers off into the bright morning (not completely alone, however; the older girl he is with is still a motherly surrogate that sets the fretful parent’s mind at ease). The mother sees in her kindergarten aged-son what he could become, the masculine ideal of “swagger” and belted jeans that is about to make his indelible mark on the world. Laurie’s “mark on the world” is unforgettable, alright, but not in the way his mother expects. When the boy come home with unsettling stories of another child’s disruptive behavior, the mother’s anxiety grows, fearing for her own offspring’s safety in an environment where the corrupting influence of someone like Charles is allowed to continue uninterrupted: The third day - it was Wednesday of the first week - Charles bounced a see-saw on to the head of a little girl and made her bleed, and the teacher made him stay inside all during recess. Thursday Charles had to stand in a corner during storytime because he kept pounding his feet on the floor. Friday Charles was deprived of blackboard privileges because he threw chalk. Annette Kolodny’s 1984 study of depictions of women settlers on the frontier concludes that, even when their courage, industriousness, grit and zest in facing the harsh conditions of settling West are acknowledged by men’s narratives, they are still described as “meek” so as not to become overly masculine (The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 85). 117

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The child’s version of the world as large is, as yet, confined to the kindergarten, the first public space where he can assert his identity, and it is here that the first stories of the character-forming confrontations of childhood begin. The education one gets in school is different from what the mother imagines, as not so much the acquisition of formal knowledge (““Did you learn anything?” his father asked. Laurie regarded his father coldly. “I didn’t learn nothing,” he said.”” 73), but as the environment where the essential skill of being able to accurately read of the dynamic of social relations and how to manipulate them according to one’s best personal interest. If Laurie’s grammar is deteriorating instead of improving – ““Anything,” I said. “Didn’t learn anything”” (73), the mother gently corrects him, there are other skills that he has successfully mastered, such as the mother’s place and authority over the male. If the mother does read the child’s behavior and language incorrectly, assuming that there is, indeed, a prankster named Charles in her son’s class when, in fact, such a boy does not exist, there are two types of education, feminine and masculine, that compete in the text, one at which Laurie is winning and his mother is failing. The kindergartner’s acquisitions in school are, indeed, in keeping with the ideal of boisterous masculinity presaged by the woman as she set him off on his first day as an independent being into the world, but only partly, as the mother deliberates certain manifestations of boyish violence as the natural way for a man to behave: ““He came home the same way, the front door slamming open, his cap on the floor, and the voice suddenly become raucous shouting, “Isn’t anybody here?”” (73) This distortion of entitled masculine behaviour is already many miles off from the confident swagger of just a paragraph before, as Laurie has gone from enthusiastic young boy to miniature dictator. Like the iconic western ending of the man riding into the sunset followed by the teary gaze of the woman, this scene is a yet another parody: that of gendered domesticity, where the male child copies the behaviour expected of the husband (the “Honey, I’m home!” narrative), who spends the day working outside the home to return in its midst expecting the instant gratification of his desires by a woman, whether she be mother or wife. The exasperation lingering in the italicization of “here” (“Isn’t anybody here?”) is telling of the way in which young Laurie expects to be treated – like the Lord and master of the household, his mother’s care revolving around him. Without realizing, by entertaining the ideal of 202

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traditional masculinity apparent in the story’s opening paragraph, she is contributing to the perpetuation of the male glorification of violence and the sex-gender system in which women’s role is shaped around men’s needs and fantasies. It is the very expectations of “becoming a man” that the mother subconsciously projects on the boy when he waves him off to kindergarten, into the unknown micro-universe of child socialization. The woman’s reactions to her son’s blatant manifestations of poor upbringing are surprisingly mild: though she corrects his grammar, acknowledges his behavior and records the many instances of rudeness towards the other members of the family, she never intervenes in a more decisive way. Conversely, Laurie’s display of masculine traits runs parallel to his father’s infantilization, who also fails to assert himself in any way worthy of the title of “head of the family”: ““Look up,” he said to his father. “What?” his father said, looking up. “Look down,” Laurie said. “Look at my thumb. Gee, you’re dumb.” He began to laugh insanely.” (73-74) That the father lacks the disciplining skills one would expect of a typical 1950s American family means that Laurie’s ideal of masculinity is shaped entirely according to his mother’s vision of what a man should be (perhaps in contrast to her own husband’s lenient attitudes) and her coddling. Clearly Laurie’s pertness (“At lunch he spoke insolently to his father, spilled his baby sister’s milk” 73) is a more assertive way of action than his father’s, to an extent to which one would believe the little boy to be the head of the family. This particular gothic child has become the projection of the other masculine figures in the wife’s life, which results in overcompensation. The woman’s blindness to Laurie’s behaviors and to the similarity between Charles’ and Laurie’s abuses highlights the fact that the gothic child is a projection of that particular brand of female desire which has internalized the worship of the male as nation-maker, thereby justifying bullying behavior under the excuse of the putative “boys will be boys”. The inescapability of Othering, the creation of evil as a construct that resides in the outside world, but never suspected as a projection of one’s own moral inadequacy, is one of the main themes of Jackson’s fiction - the narrator’s glee in changing the linguistic attributes of the mischievous little boy’s name into a common noun that defines bad behavior is further proof of that: With the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family; the baby was being a Charles when she cried all afternoon; Laurie did a Charles when he filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen; even my husband, when he caught his elbow in the telephone cord and pulled telephone, ashtray, and a bowl of flowers off the table, said, after the first minute, “Looks like Charles.” (75)

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“Looks like Charles” is the perfect summation of the individual and family’s psychological need to invent a third upon whom to cast blame; the existence of a “Charles” is necessary not because the mother is convinced the Laurie is the nicest child there may be, but because she is relieved that there is actually another boy who surpasses hers in naughtiness; it is the joy of finding someone more deficient than oneself and thriving by comparison. The family’s strategy to refer to use the third person and the name of the disruptive boy as if they all knew him is the equivalent of the scape-goating strategy that the magical thinking of the tradition of “The Lottery” is also based on the primitive, yet cherished long held belief that the ritualistic sacrifice of a human life was tied to the abundance of the crops (“lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”) leads to the community’s remorseless stoning of Tessie Hutchinson, in a process which periodically purges the Other from their midst. The specter of the third, thus, is ambivalent, both evil and reassuring. The counterpart of the father’s righteous statement that there are “Bound to be people like Charles in the world”, the third or Other that Charles has come to embody is living proof that evil must have a name in order for one to stay away from it – by giving evil the name of Charles, the family believes is safe from harm. While it is true that evil might exist in the world, at least it lies elsewhere, and the family’s only preoccupation is to first identify it, and then keep away, as one feels safer from known, rather than unknown, ill. This fixation on the other Alexis Shotwell mentioned in relation to Shirley Jackson’s domestic gothic, identified as autobiographical, is the outsider’s unsurprising preoccupation with “her own housekeeping and child-rearing practices being under surveillance, either hostile or friendly” (121) and emphasizes the theme of the individual versus the community also present in “The Possibility of Evil”, “The Honeymoon and Mrs. Smith” and “The Lottery”. Laurie’s mother’s participation in the teacher-parent meeting is fraught with the same impulse of surveillance that she herself dreads, it is a fear that she exorcises by projecting it out, on the faces of the other women that could have spawned Charles, the child that no mother wants to be held accountable for: “At the meeting I sat restlessly, scanning each comfortable matronly face, trying to determine which one hid the secret of Charles. None of them looked to me haggard enough. No one stood up in the meeting and apologized for the way her son had been acting. No one mentioned Charles.” (77) The mother’s prying gaze is a confrontation of the collective, which at once hides and protects: to be one in a large group of mothers who could all “hide the secret of Charles” is to also be hidden in the collective preservation of anonymity. When the mother finally musters the courage to approach Laurie’s teacher and to casually broach the topic of Charles, the instructor probably interprets her anxiety to meet her not as the 204

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normal anxiety of the mother who meets her child’s teacher for the first time, but as the self-consciousness and shame of the parent whose disruptive son is the talk of whole the school: ““I’ve been so anxious to meet you,” I said. “I’m Laurie’s mother.” “We’re all so interested in Laurie,” she said.” (77) The degree of interest they “all” have in her son is another reference for the corresponding collective scrutiny herself and her family had in Charles, as the dreaded surveillance of the community is reversed, pointed at her own brood. The gothic device of doubling that Jackson uses in her stories serves as a foil for thematic and character construction: Mr. and Mrs. Malkin are counterparts of each-other just as Laurie and Charles are. The most poignant antithesis in the story, like in many other Jackson works, is that between the imaginary object of desire and reality. Many of her stories are about the dissolution of identity and the spiraling into madness, a process which starts to unravel when the female protagonist stops distinguishing between fantasy and reality, following the fulfillment of her desire into the fantastic. The domestic gothic stories, however, are based on the integration of this inability to distinguish between projected desire and reality into the everyday. The imaginary Charles is the gothic twin of Donald Emmett Malkin in “The Mouse”, the real counterpart of the mother’s fantasy of child perfection and the probable reason why Mrs. Malkin did not want to have children in the first place, as by dreaming you are the mother of Laurie you might end up being the mother of Charles. The Jekyll and Hyde split applied to the gothic child underlines the Darwinian theme of marriage as lottery reproduction supposes biological risks, culminating in the mother’s ultimate fear as perfectly summed up by the cruel Miss Strangeworth: “Haven’t you ever seen an idiot child before?”

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Conclusions

The exploration of the Nature/Culture divide in this study was based on a series of gothic texts roughly spanning a hundred years, from approximately the mid-nineteenth century (Poe) to the fin-de-siècle (James, Gilman) and the half of the twentieth century (Shirley Jackson); the goal of such a task was to re-examine the strategies of othering employed by authors in the perpetuation or subversion of women’s identity. Patriarchal culture’s methods of female oppression throughout time is to objectify the woman and consume its image; it is a strategy of de-humanization that excludes women from the realm of power. Freud’s interpretation of woman as lack is still prevalent; the feminist psychoanalysts’ work to vindicate femininity was useful in shedding light on the oppressive mechanisms of patriarchal sexual politics. Foucault’s contribution to the understanding to the mechanisms of power/knowledge was of great benefit in identifying the instrumentalization of science as a means of controlling women’s bodies and reinforcing their prescribed gender norms. The image of the doctor in gothic literature has the merit of adding an extra layer of masculine domination to the already disciplined and punished social body, as well as acting as the foil of rational Culture to the gothic instability of the feminine psyche. Always operating according to heteronormative binaries, patriarchy genders its cultural constructs, inevitably oppressing the female. In women’s writing, the injustice of femininity’s treatment at the hands of the male erupts with gothic violence as an attempt to resist the oppressor and, at times, to even turn his own weapons against him; such strategies of resistance are multiple in Jackson’s fiction, in which the intrinsic violence of patriarchal culture is pitted against women’s violence. It suffices for the woman to refuse to embody her socially prescriptive roles (mother, wife) for her to become monstruous. The first obvious conclusion would be that the social issues reflected in these texts, ranging over a little more than a century, undergo little 207

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change; the only shifts that occur do not belong to the patriarchal mindset, but to women’s writing, preoccupied with exposing their gender’s oppression by creating characters who, at first, are merely victimized (Gilman) and then begin actively resisting their objectification (Jackson). The legitimacy of female writing itself is a core issue for the selected authoresses and a point of entry into the realm of Culture. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an icon of the first wave feminist movement in America: suffragette, writer, lecturer, self-titled feminist, unabashedly leading an unconventional life; her work is trailblazing in exposing the far-reaching consequences of society’s deliberate ignorance about the “woman question.” As a housewife, “faculty wife” and writer, Shirley Jackson experienced cultural marginalization herself – the oft-quoted anecdote of the nurse’s incomprehension when taking down “writer” as her stated profession (upon checking into the hospital to give birth) and replacing it with “housewife” is more than eloquent (Shotwell 121). Reclaiming writing as a woman’s proper place is a political act reflected in Jackson’s characters, a counter-masculine means of establishing a strong tradition of women’s writing. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique made waves in the early 1960s, prefiguring the birth of the second-wave feminist movement; as participants in the current third wave, the fight for control over women’s bodies is still raging. Subsequently, reassessing the work of female writers of the past is a sobering act in assessing how much there is still to do in dismantling the sex-gender system enforced by the patriarchy. In keeping with the feminist motto “the political is personal, the personal is political”, a female-authored book on women writers in a country where, in 2020 A.D., Parliament passes a bill outlawing the teaching of the difference between sex and gender, claiming it is a synonym for “ideology” and “proselytism”, is a political act. Current debates in third-wave feminism focused on the explosion of gender binaries expose the ways in which the patriarchy has also oppressed masculinity, bringing into the fore the need to reappraise the restrictions imposed on men by social constructs of masculinity, focusing on the importance of redefining it to include previously “feminine” qualities. Normalizing stay-at-home dads, rewriting the rules of fatherhood, portraying men as nurturing and sensitive, normalizing the expression of feelings in men are ways of breaking the sex-gender system that run parallel to the feminist struggle against misogyny. Consequently, the reappraisal of gothic texts written by canonical men writers from a fresh perspective, with an eye to the unacknowledged transfer of hysteria onto the male seemed like a necessary pursuit. The chapter on gothic masculinities in Poe is but a tentative beginning at what could be very fertile scholarly ground for a future research project, an attempt at turning the male gaze back upon itself. 208

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The proverbial mentally unstable male narrators in Poe, whose conditions were diagnosed according to the theories of the day (phrenology and moral insanity), can also be interpreted as hysteria projected onto the male – the argument of my reading of Roderick Usher and Montresor as exhibiting hysterical tendencies. Sensitivity – a traditionally “feminine” trait, is consequently emasculating in a member of the opposite sex. The effeminate man’s connection to Decadence, fully in bloom in the last decade of the fin-de-siècle, can already be traced in the first half of the nineteenth century in the writings of Poe, as the latter’s translator into the French, Charles Baudelaire, is considered the original source of inspiration for the Decadent Movement, who, in turn, engenders the creation of the ultimate “Decadent Bible”, Karl-Joris Huysmans’ Against Nature/Against the Grain. Ironically, the Belgian author’s title effectively sums up the entire premise of the female struggle against male oppression; women writers’ collective effort is a movement “against the grain”, running counter to the cultural norms of masculine hegemony, one “against nature”, against woman’s objectification, de-humanization and Othering into Nature as a means of excluding her for Culture.

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