Breaking Walls with Madness: Redefining Corporeal Oppression in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Abstract

In the hauntingly silent chambers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a tale that is more than just diving into madness, it is an extreme struggle against corporeal oppression. This story, when analyzed through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz's philosophical writing Freaks (1991), Rosi Braidotti's conceptualization of transformation in Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming (2013), and Tabish Khair's theories on resistance in The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009), goes beyond its direct context to address wider themes of gender, autonomy, and rebellion against patriarchal norms. The yellow wallpaper in the story itself becomes a symbol of something far more sinister than only decorative taste thus representing the pervasive and subtle nature of corporeal oppression, a concrete expression of a woman's struggle against the societal and psychological constraints that bind her. This research focuses on how the writer, through her protagonist's interaction with this wallpaper, redefines the concept of corporeal oppression, raising the question: how does one's environment, both physical and societal, morph into an oppressive entity, and what does it take to break free from its clutches?