Since 1973, the year in which Elaine Hedges's groundbreaking edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story has been read primarily as one of America's leading feminist texts. With potent symbolism and a fragmented style of narration, it is easy to understand why many feminist scholars fashion the story's narrator into a proactive feminist, a courageous heroine who rebels against patriarchal oppression. While this trend of interpretation compellingly attempts to empower the narrator, it often overlooks her perspective of disability and projects the characteristics of a nondisabled, high-functioning feminist on a mentally ill woman. This paper reads Gilman's short story as a narrative of mental illness and applies the research of feminist disability scholars Anita Silvers, Jenny Morris, and Susan Wendell to a close reading of the story. Approaching the story from this perspective, we can identify the systems of oppression that disable the narrator and read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a way that validates the subjective reality of depression and invites disabled voices into feminism's exploration of womanhood.

Focusing on "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Singing Detective (1986) by Dennis Potter in dialogue with theories from Freud, Szasz, Foucault and Butler, my thesis considers the role of medicine in encouraging a patient toward a normative subjectivity. The protagonists of each text have become ill as a result of their inability to accept the social contradictions and lies upon which gendered subjectivity is reliant; the unnamed narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" comprehends femininity as servitude to male demands, while Marlow of The Singing Detective desires the power patriarchy offers him as a male, but his loss of belief and faith prevent his ascension to masculine status.Both the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Marlow resist the imposition of normative gender by practitioners of mainstream medicine. Therefore, a more complex and subtle method of treatment, the psychoanalysis developed by Freud, is employed in The Singing Detective, thereby encouraging the patient to identify illness and discontent as personal, not societal, responsibility.I commence the thesis with an overview of the unequal power relations presupposed and encouraged by medical discourse. Through a process of 'hystericisation' the patient is infantilised and made dependent upon medical care. Linguistic control is central to manipulating patient behaviour within the hospital, and correspondingly the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Marlow both seek a new subjectivity through their writing. Difficulties in appropriating language leads to internal incoherency for the protagonists, met by a split subjectivity - a defence mechanism which allows the protagonists to deviate from, at the same time as preserving, their 'good self'.The refusal of "The Yellow Wallpaper's" narrator to relinquish her defiant self and assume femininity is contained by patriarchy - embodied by her husband, John - as insanity. The strict limitation upon a nineteenth-century woman's expression prevents her from positively escaping her physician/husband's script leading to her mental demise. By contrast, Marlow successfully resocialises himself by modifying the hypermasculine persona he idealises, and is finally situated to confront and reform the social contradictions that precipitated his ill-health. However, subdued by having been led to identify discontent as a personal problem, Marlow is unlikely to challenge the power relations which have made his subjectivity possible. His capitulation to normalisation demonstrates a fundamental point linking the otherwise divergent theories of Freud and Foucault, that the creation of agency first requires the subject's subordination.

The term “phantom limb” is used to describe the phenomenal tingling sensation that occurs in the nerve endings of an amputated limb; though the limb is no longer physically attached to the body, the person experiences pain and physical sensation in the space the limb once occupied. Though the body part has been removed, it haunts both the body and the brain. It is through this metaphor that I am interested in investigating the connection between the disembodied and the embodied. The disembodied connects to the embodied through the loss or lack of a bodily form; the embodied, therefore, links the disembodied to movements and mannerisms of the body. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, I define manner as a fluctuating force that operates as a spectrum. Manner links, rather than separates, the internal and the external through the social. In other words, the interplay between the internal and external must be socially interpreted in order to be understood as manner. The first chapter of my thesis will focus on embodied manner and use Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a case study to explain how society impacts the construction of normative manner. Building off Jack Halberstam, I adopt the theory that Mr. Hyde “is both a sexual secret, the secret of Jekyll’s undignified desires, and a visible representation of physical otherness” (82). My argument focuses on the connection between the “deformity hidden within” Mr. Hyde and that “inscribed upon his...skin” that Utterson, Enfield and Lanyon struggle to identify (82). The second chapter of my thesis will focus on how manner operates as both a disciplinary force and cultural haunting. In other words, just as the phantom limb reproduces a distorted version of the lost limb, the social control of manner ultimately reproduces imperfect replicas. In George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, the protagonist, Latimer, begins suffering from visions after he parts ways with his dear friend Charles Meunier. Here, the unconscious operates at the individual level; I argue that these “visions” are the result of an implosion of Latimer’s repressed sexuality. I then turn to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to argue that manner operates as a type of social law that attempts to stave off haunting but instead inadvertently reproduces it. In this section, I argue that the narrator’s secondary status as a female character gives her a different kind of agency from Mr. Hyde and Latimer, and that her husband’s ultimate failure to control her results in a type of queer production that calls into question the dialectical relationship between haunting and manner.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, une femme de lettres du XIXe siècle, a bien failli perdre, complètement et à jamais, sa capacité d'écrire au terme de traitements inappropriés pour sa dépression. Elle rédige un récit autobiographique et dénonciateur qui illustre son combat contre la science et la société de son époque. À la fin du récit, la narratrice, quoique anéantie, refuse de se soumettre et continue désespérément d'aller de l'avant. C'est une fin qui suggère, même au XIXe siècle, qu'elle (la femme, la Nature) avait raison, et que le médecin (l'homme, la Culture) avait tort. Au XXe siècle, Martine Desjardins reprend cette histoire sous forme de fiction. Notre étude comparative des deux oeuvres repose sur l'hypothèse principale selon laquelle Desjardins s'est largement inspirée du récit de Gilman pour rédiger son roman. De fait, les deux oeuvres, La Chambre au papier peint (1892) et Le Cercle de Clara (1997), l'une inspirée d'une histoire réelle et l'autre présentée comme imaginaire mais fort probablement inspirée de la première, racontent sensiblement la même histoire. Pourquoi une femme du XXe siècle a-t-elle choisi de réécrire cette histoire en disant « je » à son tour? En quoi le « je » d'une femme du XIXe siècle peut-il trouver écho chez celui d'une femme moderne? Et, comment, par l'écriture, la femme peut-elle exorciser ses souffrances et reconquérir son identité? Le premier chapitre de ce travail traite de la mise sous silence des femmes au XIXe siècle. Le second dresse le portrait de Charlotte Perkins Gilman et présente son récit autobiographique, puis le troisième porte sur la parole que les femmes ont reconquise au XXe siècle et met de l'avant les ressemblances et les différences entre les textes en mettant l'accent sur la modernité et le féminisme de l'oeuvre de Desjardins. Desjardins a rédigé son roman en hommage aux femmes qui ont donné leur corps et leur âme à la société pour permettre à celles d'aujourd'hui de pouvoir publier. Le « je » individuel de Gilman est donc, aujourd 'hui plus que jamais, collectif. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Féminisme, Écriture, XIXe siècle, Hystérie.

Submitted by Franciele Moreira (francielemoreyra@gmail.com) on 2018-10-15T13:33:36Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Nilce Meire Alves Rodovalho - 2018.pdf: 2114262 bytes, checksum: 094713f58f55396ea2cef9e71f105da5 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2018-10-15T14:46:46Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Nilce Meire Alves Rodovalho - 2018.pdf: 2114262 bytes, checksum: 094713f58f55396ea2cef9e71f105da5 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-10-15T14:46:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Nilce Meire Alves Rodovalho - 2018.pdf: 2114262 bytes, checksum: 094713f58f55396ea2cef9e71f105da5 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The present research aims to analyze the process of discursive constitution of the narrator- character subjectivity of the tale The Yellow Wall Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The tale tells the story of a woman cloistered in a colonial mansion by her husband, who is a doctor, because of her supposed propensity for hysteria. In the seclusion, she notices other women stuck to the wallpaper of the room in which she is staying. By this movement, she writes in a diary to deal with her anxieties, yearnings and feelings, while deciphering the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. It is a literary corpus and through it we understand that historical and social practices produce the subjectivity of the narrator-character. We base ourselves on Discourse Analysis as descriptive-interpretative and analytical support, based mainly on the following foucaultian notions: knowledge/power relations, objectivation/ subjectivation and freedom practices, madness, self-care, self-writing, resistance, desubjectivation. The study is structured in three chapters: in the first, we present the story and its author, gather academic research about the story, point out some elements of the fantastic literature observed in it; in the second, we discuss the theoretical-methodological framework, analyze knowledge/power relations in the constitution of the madness in the story; in the third, we explore freedom and self-care practices employed by the narrator-character, evidencing processes of desubjectivation that deprive her identity and place her before new possibilities of existence. Therefore, in this process of Foucault's discursive analysis, we reflect about the subject- positions assumed by the narrator-character, the discursive practices in which it inserts itself and is inserted, the effects of knowledge/power incident on its (dis)constitution as subject and the ruptures of patterns and roles imposed. We understand that the subjects constitute themselves and are constituted in and by the discourses of a given historical and social conjuncture, in addition to breaking with the imposed standards, the subjects transgress social norms, resist knowledge/power relations and, when desubjecting themselves from the standard model imposed upon them, they produce new subjectivities, reinvent themselves into something which is yet to come. This was the movement of resistance built by the narrator-character, the protagonist of the narrative under study. / A presente pesquisa tem como proposta analisar o processo de constituição discursiva da subjetividade da narradora-personagem do conto O papel de parede amarelo, de Charlotte Perkins Gilman. O conto narra a história de uma mulher enclausurada em uma mansão colonial por seu marido, que é médico, em decorrência da suposta propensão dela à histeria. Na reclusão, ela percebe outras mulheres presas ao papel de parede do quarto em que está hospedada. Por esse movimento, escreve em um diário para lidar com suas angústias, anseios e sentimentos, ao passo que decifra o padrão do papel de parede amarelo. Trata-se de um corpus literário e por meio dele entendemos que as práticas históricas e sociais produzem a subjetividade da narradora-personagem. Fundamentamo-nos na Análise do Discurso enquanto suporte descritivo-interpretativo e analítico, pautados, sobretudo, nas seguintes noções foucaultianas: relações de saber-poder, práticas de objetivação/subjetivação e de liberdade, loucura, cuidado de si, escrita de si, resistência, dessubjetivação. O estudo se estrutura em três capítulos: no primeiro, apresentamos o conto e sua autora, reunimos pesquisas acadêmicas sobre o conto, apontamos alguns elementos da literatura fantástica observados nele; no segundo, discutimos o arcabouço teórico-metodógico, analisamos relações de saber-poder na constituição da loucura no conto; no terceiro, exploramos práticas de liberdade e de cuidados de si empregadas pela narradora-personagem, evidenciando processos de dessubjetivação que destituem a identidade dela e a coloca diante de novas possibilidades de existência. Portanto, nesse processo de análise discursiva foucaultiana, refletimos sobre as posições-sujeito assumidas pela narradora-personagem, as práticas discursivas nas quais ela se inscreve e é inscrita, os efeitos do saber-poder incidentes na (des)constituição dela enquanto sujeito e nas rupturas de padrões e papeis impostos. Apreendemos que os sujeitos se constituem e são constituídos nos e pelos discursos de dada conjuntura histórica e social, além de que, ao romper com os padrões impostos, os sujeitos transgridem normas sociais, resistem a relações de saber-poder e, ao dessubjetivar-se do modelo padrão que lhes é imposto, produzem novas subjetividades, reinventam-se em um devir. Foi esse o movimento de resistência construído pela narradora-personagem, a protagonista da narrativa em estudo.

In 1890, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a piece of fiction that reflected her personal experience for treatment of nervous exhaustion. The story she developed created controversy and comment after it was published and, years later, agitation among feminists who found allegories of truth in its narrative. This thesis explores the use of linguistic features employed by Gilman to establish cognitive connections between physical structures and social institutions, such as marriage and domesticity, that confine women within contractual obligations. Gilman’s use of extended metaphor challenges conventional conceptions of the home, inanimate objects, and institutional authority and her use of metonymy extrapolates examples from the particular to a wider review. The main findings of this inquiry reveal feminist opposition to women’s subjugated status in the marital relationship and to established hierarchies of male control. The literary analysis exposes the efficacy of narrative gap and textual silences in provoking the reader’s participation.

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