Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by John S. Bak

When S. Weir Mitchell diagnosed Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson) as suffering from a variation of "nervous prostration," or "neurasthenia," as outlined in his Fat and Blood (1877), he prescribed what many nineteenth-century physicians (including Freud) believed to be the necessary recuperative regimen - rest. Included in Mitchell's Rest Cure treatment were locking Gilman away in his Philadelphia sanitarium for a month, enforcing strict isolation, limiting intellectual stimulation to two hours a day, and forbidding her to touch pen, pencil, or paintbrush ever again.(1) Mitchell believed, Catherine Golden tells us, that both companionship and work proved a detriment to his patient's recovery, further taxing her nerves already frazzled from an admixture of hysteria and postpartum depression (Golden, "|Overwriting' ..." 146). Gilman dramatized her experience with Dr. Mitchell in "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a journalistic/clinical account of a woman's gradual descent into madness (or is she mad at the beginning and is pathologically reliving the descent that has already taken place?) at the hands of her husband John, a doctor who subscribes to the Mitchell treatment.

Gilman's narrator is isolated "three miles from the village" (11) in an upstairs nursery of a "colonial mansion" (9), its windows barred and its walls covered in a faded yellow wallpaper whose "sprawling flamboyant patterns" commit "every artistic sin" (13) imaginable. It is a room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about the room. For this reason, feminist critic Elaine Hedges wrote in 1973 that the "paper symbolizes her situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself" (Afterword 51), a view echoed by later critics. "The Yellow Wallpaper," then, became a feminist text that indicted the men who were responsible for the narrator's physical confinement and subsequent mental demise.

But this is also a room not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon. Originally designed to replace the dark and dank "houses of security" so common throughout England with the bright and salubrious "house of certainty" (Foucault 202), the Panopticon developed into an unscrupulous method of inquisition that perpetuated fear and bred paranoia. Like the room that confines Gilman's narrator, the Panopticon proved to be not a utopia for prisoners, mental patients, and schoolboys, but "a cruel, ingenious cage" (Foucault 205) that misjudged human reaction to unabated surveillance. Yet what Gilman critics for the most part have until recently) tended to neglect, and what this interpretation will stress, is that the narrator, despite her doctor's ill-advice and her husband's dehumanizing imprisonment, is successful in freeing herself from her male-imposed shackles, her Panopticon. Such a view supports the feminist label already attached to "The Yellow Wallpaper" but counters the premise upon which the arguments of Hedges and others are based: that she "never does get free" and, in fact, "has been defeated" in the end - in short, "destroyed" (Afterword 52-53, 55).(2)

The benefits of the Panopticon over the prisons, factories, and psychiatric wards of his time, Bentham argued, were several. Its primary goal, though, was to generate a symbiotic relationship between the observer and the observed. In reversing "the principle of the dungeon," the Panopticon, an instrument of power and observation, would provide the interned with a clean, well-lighted, and relatively pleasant environment, and the warden with the most efficient means of control through minimal effort (Foucault 200). Wheel-like in structure with a central tower at its hub and connecting cells, like spokes, protruding from its middle, "the panoptic mechanism," Foucault writes, "arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately" (200). Thus, one person alone could oversee from the central tower, thereby eliminating the need for a large, possibly corrupt or incompetent, workforce.

The beauty behind Bentham's structure was that, despite the shared "pleasantries" between inmate and warden, authoritative power was irreversible. The Panopticon's directive would be to "induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (Foucault 201). The goals to achieve this power were twofold: to make the subject visible and the observer's presence unverifiable. Identical in principle to a two-way mirror, the Panopticon utilized the transparent cells to keep the prisoner at all times in sight, and the prisoner knew this. Moreover, since the prisoner had no means of counter-surveillance, he could not tell when he was, or was not, being observed. Foucault writes,

Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.(201)