UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER: A READING OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER AND JUDITH BUTLER’S ‘PERFORMATIVE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION: AN ESSAY IN PHENOMENOLOGY AND FEMINIST THEORY’

Abstract

The Yellow Wallpaper is at its core a critique of the patriarchal society in which its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, lived. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman not only seeks to challenge the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, their perception as the purer sex, and the denial of any creative ambitions, but to confront the power of the patriarchy in medical discourses, a challenge which remains to an extent to this day. Gilman uses her narrator’s descent into madness to critique the way women were treated for mental illness, especially the use of the rest cure – a schedule of treatment, applied mostly to women, which began with the complete control of the treating doctor over the patient, followed by seclusion from her normal environment and bed rest for weeks on end. The rest cure was designed and promoted by Weir Mitchell, a doctor who is named in The Yellow Wallpaper, and to whom Gilman mailed a copy of her work. He believed the cure should be applied to those women who struggled to control their emotions, were ‘hysterical’ and prone to sharing their feelings. Gilman’s account of the effects of patriarchal medical discourses, and by extension, patriarchal control, is made more powerful through her use of the motif of the yellow wallpaper, which lines the walls of the room in which the narrator is confined