길먼의 「누런 벽지」(“The Yellow Wallpaper”): 쓰기 치료와 여성간의 유대

Abstract

This paper examines how a nameless narrator in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has been repressed by the reign of phallocentric culture and attempts to pursue her own independence and freedom by writing about herself. This paper will employ Hélène Cixous’s theory on feminine writing, in order to analyze the importance of feminine writing in this novel. Cixous insists that women free themselves of the repression in patriarchal setting through the act of writing, writing from their bodies. Women's writing, for Cixous, is hysterical, but she is celebratory about the “validity” of hysteria as a response to social pressure, seeing the hysterical body as a liberating self-expression. Writing as a subversive act, threatening the system of control constructed to contain women, is the subject of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In this novel, the hysterical nameless narrator, like Gilman herself, attempts to free herself from the constraints of her husband’s patriarchal structure by writing her diary. The narrator suggests that women should be connected with each other in their writings: She tears the wallpaper to free the woman trapped behind the pattern. This novel asserts that women, as shown in Cixous’s paradigm, can achieve their own identities and freedoms by writing their own bodies.