Politics of/and Postpartum Depression: Motherhood/Wifehood and the Ailing Self in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Pak Wansŏ’s Short Stories
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Situated in the context of her mental collapse after childbirth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) has been primarily read as a narrative of hysteria. My goal in this essay is to reread Gilman’s story as a narrative of postpartum depression, rather than hysteria, against the backdrop of contemporary cultural and gender politics. This essay begins with a discussion of the politics of causality in the representation of postpartum depression in Gilman’s short story. Then it moves on to an explication of South Korean writer Pak Wansŏ’s short story “Thus Ended My Days of Watching over the House” (1978) in order to explore connections between Gilman and Pak, and the late nineteenth-century American and twentieth-century Korean societies that use women’s suffering to maintain the status quo of domesticity. In the fourth section, I read Pak’s “About the Recuperative Period after the Postpartum Depression” (2013) as a text that reveals the possibilities of defining postpartum depression as a kind of culture-bound syndrome. Addressing the two authors’ texts, I would like to shed light on how Gilman and Pak embody their personal experiences of breakdown through the consciousness of public discourse, which implicitly constructs the female subject of motherhood/wifehood as an ailing self.
Abstract
Situated in the context of her mental collapse after childbirth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) has been primarily read as a narrative of hysteria. My goal in this essay is to reread Gilman’s story as a narrative of postpartum depression, rather than hysteria, against the backdrop of contemporary cultural and gender politics. This essay begins with a discussion of the politics of causality in the representation of postpartum depression in Gilman’s short story. Then it moves on to an explication of South Korean writer Pak Wansŏ’s short story “Thus Ended My Days of Watching over the House” (1978) in order to explore connections between Gilman and Pak, and the late nineteenth-century American and twentieth-century Korean societies that use women’s suffering to maintain the status quo of domesticity. In the fourth section, I read Pak’s “About the Recuperative Period after the Postpartum Depression” (2013) as a text that reveals the possibilities of defining postpartum depression as a kind of culture-bound syndrome. Addressing the two authors’ texts, I would like to shed light on how Gilman and Pak embody their personal experiences of breakdown through the consciousness of public discourse, which implicitly constructs the female subject of motherhood/wifehood as an ailing self.
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