Through the ages, numerous men have expounded on the role of woman. For two thousand years and more, their ideas have been much the same: woman's "proper purpose is to produce [children]" (Rousseau 362), practice "the art of weaving, and the management of pancakes and preserves" (Plato 4), and be "the recreation of the warrior [man]" (Nietzsche 1). Woman's wisdom is that "of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking easily" (Nietzsche 3), and not meant for the higher art of logic (Rousseau 386). Woman is to be gentle, submissive, and subtly manipulative: this is her power. To pursue the open power of man is to ruin her as a woman (Rousseau 370, 387). Such are the prevalent ideas of the culture in which the narrator has been raised, and while they do not form her entire identity--she also writes and has the gall to make open requests to her husband John (Gilman 1)--in many ways she fits the mold of the ideal woman: she obeys her husband although she disagrees with him, attempts to rationalize his condescending behavior, desires to do housework (Gilman 1), and has produced a child (Gilman 2). Yet her illness and the societal response thereto conspire to strip her of both her outwardly created womanhoodity and her more private self: she is forbidden to do housework, to raise her own child, to manipulate her husband through sex (or any means, for that matter), to provide emotional support for her husband, to write, to see her best friends, or to have any of her opinions heard. All that is left for her is obedience; that, and boredom, loneliness, and severe depression. Such an existence is not fit for any human being, yet her husband can do this to her because she is a lesser being, "the Other," as Simone de Beauvoir would put it. Things certainly look grim for the narrator.
As the summer wears on, and the narrator spends more quality time with the dreaded yellow wallpaper, the dynamics of her world change. As she loses her grip on sanity, she gains power over John and Jennie, the maid: she knows things about the wallpaper that they will never know (Gilman 6). And while this particular instance of power may be all in her head, she is also approaching a place where John's restrictions have no hold on her. In her way of thinking, John is becoming the Other, she the subject: she is superior to him in knowledge and in cunning, and she no longer justifies his actions as those of the big strong man who knows best in all things (Gilman 7). And such steps, according to de Beauvoir, are key in becoming the subject: to cease enjoying otherness, and to stop thinking of oneself as other (de Beauvoir 101, 99).
By the end of summer, the narrator is completely obsessed with the paper and freeing the woman she sees within it (Gilman 7). She does so, and upon seeing the creeping women outside, ponders, "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" (Gilman 8). She is the woman in the paper, and she is free now. Even John's return and his agitated response to the locked door do not fret her: she is in complete control, possibly for the first time in her life. And for the first time in their marriage, John listens to her and finds that what she says is true. The narrator has said only a few months before, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage" (Gilman 1). Clearly, this is no longer the case, as John faints--like a stereotypical woman--in response to the narrator's explanation for her behavior. How the tables have turned! Now John is the emotional, irrational one, while the narrator, calm and preoccupied, crawls over him to get what she wants.
"But what," some may argue, "about this 'Jane' business? If the narrator's name is Jane (a wholly reasonable assumption), she must be very disconnected from herself and reality to refer to herself in the third person. Her victory cannot be a true one." But it can. Her exact words are, "I've got out at last . . . in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Gilman 8). The narrator who has come out of the wallpaper--mulier ex pariete, as it were--is the narrator's new self; Jane is her old one. Jane cared about doing housework, pleasing John, getting better, writing in her diary, and looking after the baby; mulier ex pariete cares about creeping around the room and guarding her freedom from all who would steal it from her. This self, while still arising from patriarchal restrictions, is more hers than was the Jane self, because it holds new values that are not synchronous with societal values regarding women, but belong to mulier ex pariete alone. She is pure subject; others, pure Other, and while the future is unclear, for the time being, she has won.
While critics still insist on arguing about the meaning of "The Yellow Wallpaper"'s ending, it is clear that from de Beauvoir's standpoint, the narrator has won. She has gone from otherness in a world not of her making to subjectivity in her own eyes and perhaps even her husband's, and in so doing, she has changed her self forever. May she live to enjoy it.
November '02
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