Institutionalized Patriarchy in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: Analysis from Millett’s Perspective

Abstract

This research paper presents a feminist re-evaluation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), in the context of Kate Millett theory of patriarchy, proposed in Sexual Politics (2000). In the context of this research study, a qualitative and interpretive research design is used, and thus it undertakes close textual analysis of Gilman story and feminist scholarship. Purposive sampling technique is employed to select the variable and sample of the study. This study finds its foundation in Kate Millett s Sexual Politics (2000), feminist analysis of discourse formulated by Treichler (1984), feminist history of medicine by Showalter (1987) and Stiles (2011), and feminist reception history and the history of the book by Dock (1998).

The findings demonstrate that medical discourse, which is expressed in the role of the physician-husband as a man of authority, imposes epistemic silence and dependence. The use of domestic architecture to incorporate carceral power into the domestic sphere can be found in several aspects: the nursery-turned-sickroom, as well as its wall paper and its unpredictable pattern. The diary that the narrator writes in secret can be viewed as a counter-discursive practice: she creates an independent domain of her own in the context of an arrangement that pathologies her sense of agency as madness. Feminist reception history further shows that the feminist influence of the story is mediated by both publishing and pedagogical institutions hence being given a direction by these. Although the study does validate the thesis of Millett that patriarchy is internalized in cultural and intimacy structure, it also requires an intersectional extension that includes race, class, and embodiment in the Milman’s cultural context.