The Character of John in The Yellow Wallpaper -- The Yellow Wallpaper E

The Character of toilet in The xanthous Wallpaper Johns fascination with observing his wife can be attributed to a physicians distorted interest in the carcass. We can certainly speculate that, as physicians at the turn of the century were beginning to explore the female body assisted by developments in gynecology, John may have been equally interested in these new techniques of viewing the female body. More so than ever, the patient and her body became subject to the physicians privilege to intimately observe and name her. Ostensibly, the narrators illness is not physiological, but mental. John concludes that his wife is well and for a temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosing that is confirmed by the narrators own physician-brother (Gilman 10). Johns profession, and moreover his diagnosis, is a license to closely observe, scrutinize, watch, gaze upon, seek out, and investigate his wife and her ailments, which consequently permits him to deploy plainly inexhaustible (medical, scientific) means for (re)formulating and (re)presenting the hysteric female--not only for the purpose of giving her logical representation, but in order to de-mystify her mystery and reassure himself that she is, finally, calculable, harmless, and non-threatening. To speak of John in psychoanalytic terms, his preoccupation with his wife, her body, and her confinement, reveals unspoken anxieties the fear of castration and the wishing the female body represents. There are, as Mulvey explains, two ways a man can potentially escape castration anxiety. One is a voyeuristic route in which the man is concerned with re-enacting the original trauma. present the man is concerned with asc... ...ican Fiction. 17 (1989) 193-201. Haney-Peritz, Janice. Monumental Feminism and Literatures Ancestral field Another Look at The Yellow Wallpaper Womens Studies. 12 (1986) 113-128. Kasmer, Lisa. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper A Symptomatic Read ing. Literature and Psychology. 36, (1990) 1-15. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions Images of Gender in Science and care for between the 18th and 20th Centuries. London Harrester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Mulvey, Laura. Pandora Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Princeton text file on Architecture, 1992. 53-71. ------. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen. 16 (1975) 6-18. Wigley, Mark. Untitled The lodgment of Pleasure. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 327-389.