Exploring the Metaphors of Gilman Via Cixous

Even though more than eighty years marks the distance between Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I found Cixous’ description of the imprisoned/oppressed universal, yet individual, woman in a phallocentric culture (who writes…or, should write!...in order to declare her self), beneficial in articulating the metaphors implied by the wallpaper, the woman writer, and the woman behind the wallpaper in Gilman’s short story. In the story, as the woman writes, from the confinement of her attic room (a former nursery), with bars on the windows, and a gate in front of the door, she begins to see the yellow, irritating wallpaper differently, particularly at night, noticing the peculiarity of the “sub-pattern” from which the “formless sort of figure” (1533), eventually, a shape “like a woman” (1535), emerges. She initially wants to escape from this figure, but, ultimately, she sets her free and, essentially, becomes this woman (1540-1541). “ Cixous’ descriptive phrases, such as the woman who is “led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism” (1943). The woman has difficulty speaking her self—especially to her husband—and can only express her self through her secret writing – an occupation which her husband and his sister strongly disapprove of. Cixous talks about how women writers have been deemed “‘silly,’” and that writing in secret does not promote good writing (1943-44). Additionally, there were several descriptions of woman given by Cixous that specifically resonate with the woman and her alter ego who escapes from the wallpaper. Cixous writes “The little girls and their ‘ill-mannered’ bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes—there’s not end to it—for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock” (1944). Such a description accurately portrays the way we see the woman who writes internally seething in anger towards her husband’s consistent inability to hear her (to recognize her subjectivity/selfhood), matched with the way the woman in the wallpaper shakes the bars of her confinement: the outer layer of the wallpaper (which could arguably be read as phallocentric writing or control, see Gilman p. 1536). Another description given by Cixous of the women wandering “around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing” (1944), also directly links up with Gilman’s story and the yellow line on the wall that circles the room (1538). Again, Cixous counsels woman to “Break out of the circles; don’t remain within the psychoanalytic closure. Take a look around, then cut through!” (1958), which is exactly what happens in Gilman’s story. One last comparison (even though there are so many more), the “within” that Cixous talks about also seems to manifest in the woman in the wallpaper (Cixous 1953). The only thing that I am not sure matches up so well is the end result. Is liberation for the woman in the wallpaper a good thing, or a bad thing by the end of the story? Are the woman who writes and the woman who emerges combined into one, or does something else happen to the woman who writes? Is she punished for writing? For Cixous, writing is, without a doubt, a positive act: “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (1946), but I’m not so sure it’s a positive liberation for Gilman—there seems to be consequences.