저항의 정치학과 「누런 벽지」

Abstract

The Politics of Resistance and “The Yellow Wallpaper”Won, ChulCharlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an ‘autobiographical text’ which seeks to recover the woman’s self repressed by the Western patriarchal society. But this standpoint fails to read the resisting self defying the Western modern society and its discourses. Patriarchy has a conspiracy with the modern values in interpellating an individual as a subject in a society. In this paper, we will read “The Yellow Wallpaper” not only as a autobiographical text but also as a ‘resistant text.’ In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman narrator is constructed as a subject by being prescribed as a patient in the male/medical discourse. However, this subject presents a misrecognized identity to the narrator. John, the narrator’s husband and physician, describes his wife within the male/medical discourse conspired with the modern values such as reason, rationality. The narrator, a resisting self, rejects this unified and transcendental subject presented in her husband’s authority and modern discourses.The autobiographical text is a writing through which the writer writes about his or her own self instead of the subject given by the society. Autobiographical writing and the narrator’s madness in this text are both the means of resistance. And yet, this text is Catherine Belsey’s ‘interrogative text,’ which presents a splited self between ‘the subject of the enounced’ and ‘the subject of the enunciation’ to its readers. So, it can be said that this text is a resistant text which presents a self defying the modern discourses and constructing its own identity.