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HomeIssuesXV-1Symposia. Pragmatism and Feminism...On the Borderlands of Madness

Symposia. Pragmatism and Feminism. Epistemological, Social, and Political Spaces of Resistance

On the Borderlands of Madness

Narrative Tactics of Resistance in C. P. Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Disability Justice
Àger Pérez Casanovas

Abstract

Storytelling is a central device in cultures of resistance, which enables us to trace back such cultures to precedents in the history of literature that in turn can furnish new strategies of resistance by providing narrative tactics. This paper argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper develops narrative tactics of resistance which can be fruitful for contemporary Mad Pride activism and poetic practices. To do so, I borrow a Foucauldian approach to account for how Gilman challenges the psychiatric industrial medical complex in her writing. First, the story is contextualized in nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and some critical warnings on the writer’s position concerning liberation movements are offered. Subsequently, I focus on three narrative tactics of resistance deployed in The Yellow Wallpaper: (1) an indetermination of genre, (2) a tension between form and dementia, and (3) a double subjectivity in the oscillation between the pronouns “one” and “I”. Finally, the reassessment of Gilman’s writing from the lens of Disability Justice is summarized in two results: first, it strengthens the grounds of Mad Pride by imbricating it in American literary and philosophical canons and, second, it provides tactics to open spaces of resistance for contemporary authors in the movement.

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1. Introduction

1The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) has become an exemplary piece of creative writing, imperative in the study of women writing disability, neurasthenia, and postnatal psychosis (see Davidson 2013, and Dosani 2018). This recovery of the short story emerged in parallel with the vindication of Gilman as a key figure in feminist approaches to American Pragmatism after the republication of her work Women and Economics in 1966, promoted by historian Carl N. Degler. Ever since, Gilman has positioned herself both in the American literary and philosophical canon as a gifted writer, poet and political philosopher and has been the subject of critical assessment, best reflected in the volume The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Golden & Zangrado 2000), where her contributions to social theory and women liberation are contrasted with her harsh position concerning race as expressed in “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” (Gilman 1908) and her labyrinthine writing on disability and eugenics both in her fiction and non-fiction works.

  • 1 I use the capitalized identity-first convention of Mad to emphasize the systemic oppression and soc (...)

2The aim of this paper is to retrieve narrative tactics of resistance to psychiatric control in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper that can be used by contemporary Mad Pride and Disability Justice artists and activists as a means for liberation and social change that challenge operating ableist mechanisms of oppression against Mad bodyminds.1 First, The Yellow Wallpaper will be contextualized within the psychiatric narrative and practice of the rest cure and within Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own history of neurasthenia. Secondly, the author’s position concerning mental health and disability will be further explored taking into account the status of disability and care in Herland as a fictional utopia that acts as a counterpart of the oppressive patriarchy of The Yellow Wallpaper. Thirdly, I will argue that in the short story Gilman deploys narrative tactics of resistance that rely on duality, ambivalence, and irresoluteness as a means to challenge the dichotomies governing the psychiatric discourse. By doing so, Gilman locates the protagonist in a middle ground territory, on the borderlands of madness, thus opening up the possibility for rebellion against confining definitions of neurasthenia and for liberation from the imprisoning of her caretakers. These tactics consist of the following ambivalences: (1) the indetermination of the genre of the story, (2) the contrast between good literary form and descent into dementia, and finally (3) the usage of personal and impersonal pronouns (“one” and “I”) as the fabrication of two ways of being in the world. Finally, I will delineate how these tactics can be appropriated by contemporary Disability Justice liberation movements, specifically Mad Pride, whose core has featured poetic and narrative devices as an emancipatory practice since its origins. Mad Pride is committed to using such devices to express how Mad bodyminds are “genuinely different from – not inferior to – normal people” (Farber 2012: 9) and should therefore be taken care of rather than “corrected.” Mad Pride founders both in England and America repudiated the psychiatric system narrative in favor of a community-based mutual aid system mirroring those of Gay Pride and Black Pride, vindicating the distinctiveness of the Mad “joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration [that] can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world” (ibid.). After analyzing the narrative tactics of resistance in Gilman’s The Yellow Paper, the last section will put forward how they can furnish additional strategies of resistance to subvert contemporary psychiatric discourses within Mad Pride activism.

2. An Unrestful Encounter: Gilman – S. Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1887

3The Yellow Wallpaper has often been linked to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own clinical history, linking the protagonist’s “postnatal psychosis” (Dosani 2018: 411) with Gilman’s breakdown years, which can be located in the span from 1886 until 1889. In “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?” the author herself notes that “for many years, I suffered a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia – and beyond” (Gilman 2011: 265), having suffered depressive episodes as early as in 1882. Her mental health worsened after giving birth to her daughter in 1885 and she was finally diagnosed with neurasthenia, conducing her to enter Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s sanatorium in 1887. Gilman explains how this “wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure” (ibid.), which led her to “utter mental ruin” (ibid.). Ultimately, she abandoned the rest cure and began to work again, “recovering some measure of power” (ibid.) and agency. After this episode, Gilman felt compelled to express her critical assessment of the rest cure, and finally published The Yellow Wallpaper in 1891 to save other women from this treatment.

  • 2 “Psychocriminalization” is a term used in Disability Justice and Harm Reduction programs, which ech (...)

4It is worth noting that Gilman’s critique of the rest cure in the short story is not limited to the medical dimension of the treatment, but rather extends into the ethical and political dimensions that oriented Weir Mitchell’s standpoint. The physician’s position can be drawn from his essay Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked published in 1871, only three years after the definition of neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion by George Beard in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, on April 29, 1869. Beard characterized neurasthenia as a condition of the nervous system usually connected to anemia which was “most frequently met with in civilized, intellectual communities” (Beard 1869: 217). The listed symptoms included “hysteria, insomnia, hypochondriases, [and] disinclination for consecutive mental labor” (ibid.: 218), which occurred with no sign of organic diseases. Due to the broad scope of conditions that could be categorized under Beard’s undetermined definition, neurasthenia became a common diagnosis, especially among urban women suffering any kind of mental distress. What is relevant for Gilman’s case is the correlation that Beard establishes between neurasthenia and “civilized” environments, which endows the condition with a social component that goes beyond physiology. Weir Mitchell’s “Wear and Tear” can be read as a response to Beard’s article. However, in his essay, the physician tints neurasthenia with a remarkable moral stigma and develops a psychocriminalizing discourse2 that primarily targets young women from urban areas. According to Mitchell, city-bred women had lost their natural functions of motherhood, and their failure to nurse their children manifested in an increased demand for professional nurses and artificial infant food had led them to psychological imbalances. Moreover, this failure constitutes a moral fault as a weakness of will:

Their destiny is the shawl and the sofa, neuralgia, weak backs, and the varied forms of hysteria, that domestic demon which has produced untold discomfort in many a household, and, I am almost ready to say, as much unhappiness as the husbands dram. My phrase may seem outrageously strong, but only the doctor knows what one of these self-made invalids can do to make a household wretched. (Mitchell 1871/2004: 4)

5This passage shows Mitchell’s misogynist and patriarchal political and ethical standpoint, since he prioritizes the side damage neurasthenia can cause to the husband. Therefore, women’s experiences are only valued and assessed by reference to the effect it can have on men. Furthermore, women are charged with the responsibility of their mental health as “self-made invalids” and are stigmatized, demonized, and judged as defective human beings that are a threat to social progress. “The woman who wears out and destroys generations of nursing relatives” he continues “is like a vampire, sucking slowly the blood of every healthy, helpful creature within reach of her demands” (ibid.). The remedy he proposed to these weakened city-bred women was a rest cure that consisted of “a few months of absolute rest, good diet, ale, fresh beef, and vegetables restored them to perfect health” (ibid.), a method he further developed in Fat and Blood (1877). When Gilman encountered Dr. Weir Mitchell in 1887, the physician prescribed not only strict rest, but also isolation, confining her to his sanitarium in Philadelphia. As John S. Bak has argued (Bak 1994), the rest cure as experienced by Gilman constituted an exemplary disciplinary mechanism of incarceration as theorized by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1975) and The Birth of Clinic (Foucault 1963). Here I will not delve into Foucault’s analysis of psychiatric power structures, but his hermeneutics of the self (Foucault 2012) will be used as a heuristic to understand how Gilman is able to develop tactics of resistance from within the power relationships she is immersed in. Bak attributes this capacity mainly to the visibility regime established in the narration. He emphasizes how the Panopticon principle of surveillance governing psychiatric wards also governs the structure of the bedroom that confines the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. Her caretakers act as the vigilant observers that trigger the woman’s paranoia, since she knows she is – or rather can be – observed at all times and, as Bak puts it:

While this power was good for the observer, it was not for the observed. The paranoia resulting from this constant surveillance affected the inmate’s psychological health more adversely than the damp conditions of his erstwhile cell did his physical health. (Bak 1994: 41)

6To sum up, Gilman’s experience of incarceration and surveillance in Dr. Weir Mitchell’s sanatorium in Philadelphia plausibly seems to have raised her awareness on the oppressive dimension of disciplinary clinical mechanisms, which affect bodyminds to the point of “mental ruin” (Gilman 2011: 265). Her escape from the isolation of the sanatorium may have inspired her to explore how one can maintain their agency and wholeness in a dehumanizing environment of constant control. As I will argue, Gilman’s narrator succeeds in developing tactics of resistance within a mechanism that constantly tries to negate her autonomy and agency, where her caretakers aim to permeate their power over all the dimensions of her being – notably her diet, sleep, sexuality, and imagination – in a way that forebodies Foucault’s analysis of the microphysics of disciplinary power in the twentieth century. As Kathryn Pauly Morgan has pointed out concerning Foucaultian approaches to clinical knowledge and psychocriminalization, for the French philosopher

mechanisms can range from macropolitical to intimately micropolitical in nature. Identifying, contextualizing, and understanding the institutionally mediated mechanisms that render the diffuse micropolitics of day-to-day life intelligible and complex are, for Foucault, the key to understanding power relations. (Morgan 2008: 309)

7Through the narration of a day-to-day particular experience in The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman unveiled precisely the technologies of control and the disciplinary practices that governed power relations in the treatment of neurasthenia on a systematic level, and power relations in marriage due to the double status of the husband-doctor. The macroscalar critique performed by Gilman is manifested in the fact that the challenge to Panoptic – patriarchal and ableist – practices of surveillance posed by the narrator within an intimate scale turned out to affect Dr. Weir Mitchell’s neurasthenia treatment. Having sent a copy of the short story to the physician, Gilman proudly remarks how the greatest achievement of her work was how “many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman 2011: 265). The Foucauldian heuristics proposed above help us account for how the micro tactics of resistance performed by Gilman could affect a wider network of power relationships in psychiatry.

3. Selective Care: Retracing Race and Disability in Herland Eugenics

8Despite Gilman’s proto-antipsychiatry activism and her defense of women’s agency in front of criminalizing and dehumanizing treatments like the rest cure, which renders her fruitful for Disability Justice to a certain extent, one must note the limits of the political framework in which Gilman develops her ethics of care. I will depart from a position in agreement with Lawrence Wilde, who has argued that Gilman “anticipates the ethics of care approach that has attracted so much attention at the interface of philosophy, psychoanalysis and social and political theory since the appearance of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice in 1982” (Wilde 2013: 2). Wilde defends that the principles of Gilligan’s ethics of care can be found as the grounds of the social organization of Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland. Here, Herland will be considered and discussed as the mirror-image and the counterpart of The Yellow Wallpaper. I believe that this interpretation offers a nuanced view of Gilman’s two most well-known fiction works, since they offer two extremes of a spectrum of power relations constructed around gender. While in The Yellow Wallpaper we find a disciplinary mechanism of incarceration governed by patriarchal structures, in Herland Gilman imagines a society composed only of women where a competitive capitalism that the author connects to patriarchal values is replaced by a social structure governed by cooperation, reasonableness, and motherhood. As Phillip Polefrone has recently argued:

Motherhood is the dominant cultural mode and economic paradigm in Herland, in terms that go well beyond the individual and even beyond the human [] Herlanders insist on sustaining their world’s ability to reproduce itself, as opposed to capitalism’s endless expansion at the expense of anything that gets in its way. (Polefrone 2021: 1122)

9It is precisely in the motherly shared care that structures Herland as a society that Wilde finds a form of ethics that anticipates Gilligan’s ethics of care. The main element shared with Gilligan is how gender affects moral priorities: in In a Different Voice, she argues that men focus on abstract rules and principles guided by an ideal of justice, while women focus on interconnectedness and equal worth among human beings guided by care. Gilligan’s ethics is grounded on a concept of fairness as the principle that “everyone will be responded to and included, that no one will be left alone or hurt” (Gilligan 1982/2000: 62-3). Although in Herland it is unclear whether motherly care depends on biological sex difference only or rather is a product of social education, it is undeniable that Gilman’s idea of a feminist moral approach shapes Herland, since its main characteristic is being composed only of women.

10However, when considering the anticipation of ethics of care and of social justice movements in both Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper, there is a considerable difference that distances Gilman from Gilligan’s equalitarian ethics: while Gilligan structures society and care around a premise of fundamental equality, Gilman’s standpoint is fundamentally hierarchical, based on a naturalist idea of human difference that provides her with an understanding of society as a body where each kind of person is a different organ with different functions and status. The most explicit formulation of this organic view of society is found in her defense of the inferiority of Black people in “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” where she states:

Society is an organic relation, it is not composed of constituents all alike and equally developed, but most diverse and unequal. It is quite possible to have in a society members far inferior to other members, but yet essential to the life of the whole. A man would rather lose all his ten toes than his two eyes; and both feet than his eyes and ears. Our special senses are far superior to our meat and bones; yet it is quite essential to the bodys life that even its least important parts be healthy. If the negro population can become entirely self-supporting and well behaved it ceases to be a problem and a menace. If it becomes more than self-supporting, contributing its quota to the general good, then it will be a valuable part of the body politic, an advantage to us all. (Gilman 1908: 80; my emphasis)

11The body politic is therefore based on an inequality among human beings. This inequality shapes the reproductive economy of Herland, where an eugenic practice has led to the fulfillment of the utopia of an ideal society according to Gilman: the annihilation of the inferior kinds of human beings, or the “lowest types.” Herlanders have eliminated the worst types by a process of biological reproduction selection:

We have, of course, made it our first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types [] If the girl showing the bad qualities had still the power to appreciate social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood. Some of the few worst types were, fortunately, unable to reproduce. (Gilman 1998: 70)

12Although the passage refers specifically to how Herlanders have got rid of criminals, thus suggesting that good and bad qualities here mean principally moral or ethical predispositions, the extent of the eugenic practice in Herland is unclear and, when read together with Gilman’s writings on race and class, we might raise the question about what kind of diversity is allowed in Herland. For this reason, when reappropriating Gilman’s narrative tactics to vindicate contemporary approaches to care such as collective care in Disability Justice, we must remain alert of the critical assessment required of the racist, classist, and ableist inequalities in her conception of the social body. Further discussion of Gilman’s anthropology and a comparative approach that offered hermeneutic tools to read her fiction and non-fiction production is still required in literature but is far beyond the scope of this paper.

4. Weaponizing Language: Narrative Tactics of Resistance

13Having considered some of the controversial aspects of Gilman’s legacy, in this section I will unearth some of the narrative tactics deployed in The Yellow Wallpaper. Considering the cautions discussed above, it is worth differentiating “tactics” from “strategy.” I understand “strategy” as an encompassing plan guided by a set of objectives, that is, a strategy is a goal-oriented project. Contrastingly, “tactics” are the specific actions performed to accomplish a strategy. Tactics are first and foremost performative. This difference enables us to appropriate specific tactics into different strategies, in our case, Gilman’s narrative tactics can be used for Mad Pride resistance strategies, even if the final goals of the first are not identical to the latter’s.

  • 3 Here I use “dementia” according to its nineteenth-century usage, that is, as an umbrella term for m (...)

14I will argue that three tactics are enacted in the literary form of the short story, which could be translated as (1) an indetermination of genre, (2) a tension between form and dementia,3 and (3) a double subjectivity manifested in the oscillation between the pronouns “one” and “I.” Drawing on resources from cultural theories of opposition and resistance, I will argue Gilman’s tactics can be transferred into resistance moves in social justice with which she shares a critical spirit against the either/or dichotomic thinking that categorizes and disciplines the subject in favor of a dynamic, pluralistic and relational subjectivity that accounts for the complexities of human lived experiences.

4.1. Indetermination of Genre

15As Núñez-Puente (2019) has noted, one of the main difficulties in literary criticism concerning The Yellow Wallpaper has been to constrict it within a specific genre. Some of the proposed categories have been those of personal diary (Michaels 1987), autobiography (Rogers 1988), “literature of hysteria” (Diamond 1990: 59), Gothic short story (Becker 1999; Dosani 2018; Johnson 1989), and écriture feminine (Rodríguez Salas 2012). Núñez-Puente argues that this indeterminacy of genre opens up Gilman’s short story to queer interpretative possibilities, and by doing so she joins a line of criticism inaugurated by Crewe in “Queering The Yellow Wallpaper?” (Crewe 1995). Despite the fact that Crewe focuses on “form” as the structuring of constants that shape a discourse, he does mention that the queerness of Gilman’s text is also related to the way it poses difficulties when trying to inscribe it in plural “forms” or literary genres which are “the productive templates and ordering mechanisms of society (ones that may by their very nature incite revolt)” (ibid.: 274). In the quoted passage it is already noted that genres are spaces for revolt and resistance because they follow a specific set of canonic rules that enables us to inscribe instantiations of writing as pertaining to a determinate genre. Therefore, they have the potential for becoming spaces of resistance insofar as authors can experiment with variation and by bending those rules. The Yellow Wallpaper, for instance, takes Gothic elements such as the haunted house (Davison 2004) and “demonic forces” (Johnson 1989: 526) and modifies them into a different chronotope (Bakhtin 1981: 84) – the imprisoning state house – in a way that constitutes a variation on Gothic themes. This modification takes place in parallel with a misfitting of the narrator herself, which remains unreliable and everchanging throughout the story. As Johnson has argued, Gilman

employs Gothic conventions to present an allegory of literary imagination unbinding the social, domestic, and psychological confinements of a nineteenth-century woman writer [] The narrator, her identity in turbulent flux, fits nowhere inside this theologically and socially determined allegory and is appropriately nameless. Despite the demonic forces marshaled against her, the narrator continues to rebel; it is important to stress the extent to which she chooses to suffer rather than accept the artistic sin of the wallpaper. (Johnson 1989: 526)

16The “turbulent flux” and misfitting identity of the narrator are reflected in the rules structuring the story. Despite the aforementioned elements borrowed from Gothic tradition, no convention is followed, and a myriad of literary resources mesh together in this stylistic mosaic. Notably, the text is divided into diary entries, which provide the rhythm of the text and a sense of time that sometimes remains repetitive, cyclic, and confusing. The rejection of genre conventions in creative writing in Gilman as a narrative tactic of resistance can be argued for when it is put in context to analogous actions by feminist writers, specifically in border thinking. In a tradition inaugurated by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), contemporary feminist authors in the borderlands have deployed “strategies of multilingualism” (Martínez 1999; Esplin 2016) and diffuse genre as methods to reject accommodation to rigid oppressive identities. Marina Camboni defines these spaces of resistance within women’s writing as “impure lines” (Camboni 2007: 34), which designate spaces where “gendered social, cultural, and political orders are redefined” (ibid.). For Camboni, blending genres “is a way of dirtying a language, of making it impure, to ruin its virginal cleanness” (ibid.: 36) in such a way that it rejects an oppositional binary logic, “where everything is either inside or outside, belonging or not belonging, central or peripheral” (ibid.: 37). This genre-bending that we already find in Anzaldúa can be traced to the writings of Toni Maraini, Anne Blonstein, and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas (Martin 2008; Esplin 2016) as developments of “languages of resistance” (Rose 1994: 99).

17Oppositional culture or cultures of resistance theory has argued that oppressed groups deploy stories and storytelling as a trick to shed light on legacies of oppression through disguised modes of communication (Scott 1990: 5) that draw on both their own cultural resources and resources from the majority culture to resist what Patricia Hill Collins has called “the either/or dichotomous thinking of Eurocentric, masculinist thought” (Collins 1991: 225). I argue that Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper can be inscribed in this tradition of playing with the limits of literary genre in such a way that it deploys a language of resistance. Semantically and politically charging Gilman’s refusal to accommodate genre conventions would enable us to connect her writing to the practice of borderland writing. This entails reclaiming her as an author within resistance practices that are shared by collective liberation movements that work from an intersectional lens that traverses gender, race, class, and disability. The mental patients’ liberation movement, although it has been boiling up since the 1970s, remains marginal in social justice movements, and constitutes still a complex struggle in our current social structures. Building up languages of resistance for oppressed psychiatric survivors means providing them with storytelling tactics which, as Mitchell and Feagin put it

operate to preserve dignity and autonomy, to provide an alternative construction of identity (one not based entirely on deprivation), and to give members of the dominant group an insightful critique of their own culture. From this perspective, members of oppressed subordinate groups are not powerless pawns that merely react to circumstances beyond their control, but rather are reflective, creative agents that construct a separate reality in which to survive. (Mitchell & Feagin 1995: 69)

18Gilman’s genre bending constitutes a paradigmatic example of this recovery of dignity, autonomy and construction from narrative tactics. This construction of a separate reality operates as well in Gilman’s critique of the psychiatric discourse through the tactic of playing with two contradicting worldviews simultaneously: the rationality of literary good form, and the maddening descent into dementia of the narrator.

4.2. Form – Dementia

19The second narrative tactic I will discuss is the dissonance between content and form that takes place in the progression toward insanity that the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper experiences. As Crewe argued, Gilman maintains literary good form throughout the story – Crewe accounts for “the narrator’s continuing impulse to align good form with a ‘bizarre’ new content or to bring the latter under the aegis of the former” (Crewe 1995: 276) as a defiance or resistance to the either/or mentality of her handlers, which persist to label her as either sane or mad. It is worth noting that Gilman’s capacity to successfully juggle the dissonances of good form and psychosis may stem from her own lived experience after Weir Mitchell’s treatment. As Knight has analyzed, Gilman writes that she was in a dormant state of idleness during the months after the rest cure and, nevertheless, it was during that time period that she wrote 49 analytical pieces of art writing which culminated in the publication of the volume Gems of Art in 1888:

The most intriguing question raised by Gems of Art, however, is how Gilman was able to produce a substantial work of scholarship in the midst of a breakdown. Since the breakdown years spanned the period from roughly 1886-1888, during which Gilman was treated for neurasthenia by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell at a Philadelphia sanitarium, the publication of Gems of Art in 1888 is both fascinating and puzzling. (Knight 2006: 486)

20Considering this experience of inhabiting a state of both mental dormancy and prolific writing, we can reassess the potential for resistance of good form. As Crewe argues, the “reason-in-madness, or oppositional écriture féminine” (Crewe 1995: 277) of the narrator constitutes a disruption to the binary thinking that structures the disciplinary mechanism of the “conjugal-medical authority” (ibid.). The critic notes how good form and dementia coexist in the narrator, a dissonant simultaneity that he reads as an accommodation to social correctness:

Stylistic good form is almost exaggeratedly maintained by the fictious author of the narrative (that is, by the female protagonist) as well as by Gilman as the real author. No linguistic lapse or grammatical breakdown marks the narrators apparent descent into terminal dementia [] The narrators adherence to linguistic good form corresponds to her adherence to social good form. (Ibid.: 275)

21However, it is unclear whether the compliance to good form entails a “normalization” or accommodation to social norms, which would dim the radical challenge that the narrator poses to the conjugal-medical authority. Rather, I argue that the stylistic good form constitutes an appropriation that would constitute the opposite end of Audre Lorde’s dictum “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1983: 94). That is, by creating a tension between the good form and the “mad” content, the narrator enters an arena that is forbidden to her and shows the blurry limits between madness and sanity. In a way, this appropriation constitutes a shock mechanism for the reader, also calling off their prejudices and expectations of how mad people express themselves.

22Gilman’s narrator performs an opposition to medical binaries by inhabiting the contradiction between good form and dementia. Rather than leading to a submission to neurotypical patterns and what the husband-doctor deems as “healthy” and “normal,” the narrator uses rational discourse and literary good form in a critical way, dismantling the medical discourse that expects her not to make sense from within. That is, she does not position herself in rationality, as opposed to madness, but rather shows how these are not two separate spheres that exclude each other: they are interrelated in such a way that identity can dwell in the borderlands, because identity is understood as a divided and multi-faceted whole. Many critics have noted the doubleness of The Yellow Wallpaper’s narrator (see Bono Velilla 2021; Delashmit 1990; and Johnston 1992), but it must be emphasized how this specularity is not to be seen as a lack or insufficiency. The narrator remains whole throughout, thus aligning herself with Disability Justice and Mad Pride’s principle of recognizing wholeness. And it is through narrative tactics that this wholeness in division, or reason-in-madness, is manifested, as Johnston notes:

Instead of creating the vision of a unified, cohesive subject, the female writer can approach her text as a divided, but self-sufficient (w)hole [] Gilman represents meaning – of the other, the outsider, the subjugated – as nonunified, many-sided, repeating and reflecting, changing. (Johnston 1992: 76-7)

23Reclaiming terms and discourses that have been weaponized to oppress neurodivergent people and psychiatric survivors has been a central task in Mad Pride. As Dubrul noted in a conversation with Farber in 2011:

Us madfolks, we can throw crazy and wingnut and mad around as terms of endearment or insults as we please and I find it refreshing to hang out with the people who speak my language re-appropriated from oppression. It’s a relief to find this oasis when we’re surrounded by a society that’s steeped in the stifling bio-psych DSM lingo of disorders and dysfunctions. (Farber 2012: 23)

4.3. “One” – “I”

24The last narrative tactic to be discussed in this paper is the opening of spaces of resistance through an oscillation between the personal, expressed by the first-person pronoun “I,” and the impersonal when adopting the position of what “one” does. I will argue that this movement enables the narrator to take a critical distance from her lived experience in such a way that she can act otherwise, while when using the third person pronoun “one” she expresses the attitudes and behavior that would fit and accommodate normalcy, the “class-marked and code-governed social personhood” (Crewe 1995: 175). Bono Velilla (2021) has emphasized the double subjectivity in Gilman’s narrator, arguing that this doubling of a split and multiple identity should be read as an illustration of feminist liberation rather than a sign of alienation.

25The oscillation between pronouns is remarkable at the beginning of the story, and it keeps the reader wondering where the narrator really stands. This cultivation of an in-between the pronouns, of the dwelling in the borderlands of madness and sanity poses, again, a challenge to the either/or mentality of the conjugal-medical authority. Rodríguez Salas speaks of a “literary language of madness” in Gilman, since she “consciously elaborates a mad language and discourse as part of her strategy to fight patriarchy from within” (Rodríguez Salas 2012: 105). The critic links the anonymity of the impersonal “one” to self-abnegation to the medical-patriarchal discourse, which is constantly contrasted by opposed opinions introduced by “personally”:

The first paragraphs of the story abound in the use of the anonymous pronoun one to highlight the narrator’s self-abnegation and recognition of her dependence upon her husband. She has no identity of her own, and this is reflected in what seems her unconscious use of language [] The repetitive use of the adverb personally and of the first person pronoun suggests that, in spite of her dependence, she has an opinion and a prospective voice, but the pressure of the system is unavoidable, and that is why she returns to her self-abnegating discourse by using again the impersonal pronoun one. (Ibid.: 107)

  • 4 This existential spirit would also link Gilman’s standpoint to the lineage of feminist pragmatists (...)

26When interpreting this oscillation, the multiplicity that resides within the narrator can be read as the simultaneous inhabiting of two different spheres of existence. Despite the fact it was published after Gilman’s short story, we can find a powerful hermeneutic tool to read this oscillation between pronouns in Heidegger’s 1927 development of the One (das Man) in Being and Time.4 Drawing on Heidegger’s linguistic resources, we can account for the opposition and tension between what “one” does and what the narrator “personally” thinks as the struggle between an inauthentic and an authentic existence, respectively.

27Generating a difference from the One can be read as a tactic of resistance in itself if we charge Gilman’s usage of the pronoun “one” with the characteristics of Heidegger’s analytic of the One. Gilman’s narrator reiterates the fatality of the one, especially in the first two pages of the story, and we find the lack of agency of the “one” in three occasions where the questions “what can one do?” and “what is one to do?” are asked (Gilman 1892: 647-8). And what does one do?

If a physician of high standing, and ones own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do? (Ibid.: 648)

  • 5 For a further development of the characteristics of the One as an inauthentic persona, see Bolea 20 (...)

28From this passage, we can trace some traits of the existential attitude of Gilman’s “one”: compliance with the socially accepted conjugal-medical authority, submission and accommodation to the government of that authority, and most notably a passive fatalism towards one’s fate. These resonate, respectively, with Heidegger’s characterization of the One by averageness (Durchschnittlichkeit), leveling (Einebnung), and discharge of being (Seinsentlastung).5 First, the compliance with the conjugal-medical authority mirrors the existence of the One under the dictatorship of the “anonymous Being” of the “they”:

Thus the “they” maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. (Heidegger 1978: 165)

29When using the pronoun “one,” the narrator shows the standpoint of the way of existing as the One, that is, as an average wife, patient, and woman. Against what they believe to be a successful wife, “what is one to do?” (Gilman 1892: 648). Even if she “personally” believes and feels otherwise, “one” maintains herself in the generally accepted. Second, this averageness requires a leveling to the priorities set by them: even if “[p]ersonally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (ibid.), one obeys the husband and does not write or even think about her condition. This submission or accommodation to the husband-doctor authority entails a leveling down of the narrator’s priorities, in such a way that it forecloses other possibilities of being, suffocating her into a reductive existence as an imprisoned patient. And third, in sharp contrast with the conscious and agential character of the utterances introduced by “personally” and using the pronoun “I,” which often defy and resist the authority of the caretakers, “one” is used in a fatalistic way: there is a passivity and a discharging of one’s own responsibility for one’s existence. The narrator’s “one,” like Heidegger’s One, abandons herself to the dictates of her handlers, who personify the tyranny of the average. Contrastingly, the personal opinions of the narrator cancel the conjugal-medical authority by achieving authenticity as a self-ownership.

30However, it is worth noting that in Gilman’s narrator, the subjectivation of the personal “I” remains dependent on an oscillation and struggle with the ‘“one,” thus manifesting how processes of subjectivation of an authentic existence still need a structure to hold on to, to subject and support them. That is, there is a codependence between the power structure of the conjugal-medical authority’s discourse and the tactics of resistance that enable a partial emancipation or distancing for the narrator. This tactic deployed by Gilman foresees Foucault’s conception of tactics of resistance that stem from mechanisms of desubjectivation and subjectivation of the self (Foucault 2012), that is, how the protagonist can develop resistance from within the power relationships she is immersed in. From our historical standpoint, a Foucauldian approach offers a powerful heuristic to understand the process of emergence of such resistance.

31Finally, Gilman’s oscillation between “one” and “I” can be put in dialogue with the way in which critical phenomenologists in Critical Disability Studies have recovered this tension between inauthenticity and authenticity, such as in McRuer’s Crip Theory. For McRuer, authenticity is not a separate sphere from normalcy; it is shaped as noncompliance: an “attempt to write noncompliance with heteronormativity, and affirmation of other ways of being, into existence” (McRuer 2006: 132), which is further developed as a phenomenology of being-in-a-world otherwise in Crip Time (McRuer 2018) and more recently in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future is Disabled (2022).

5. Dismantling Psychiatric Discourses Through Creative Writing: Allying Gilman and Mad Pride Liberation Movements

  • 6 Farber connected Mad Pride activism with crucial periods of cultural revitalization in America, spe (...)
  • 7 Since 2020 renamed Fireweed Collective.
  • 8 As narrated by Farber, “Mad Pride was officially launched in England in 1999 with the foundation of (...)

32To conclude, I want to raise the question concerning the value of tracing the genealogies of Mad Pride for contemporary Disability Justice liberation movements. This means considering what reassessing Gilman’s narrative from the lens of critical discourses on disability and psychiatry can bring to Mad Pride. I will argue that tracing genealogies of anti-psychiatric movements in American literature is a task that runs in parallel with the imbrication of Mad Pride discourse in the intellectual history of the country, which has been analyzed in depth by Seth Farber in The Spiritual Gift of Madness.6 Looking for historical precedents of anti-psychiatric movements in the American context takes Mad Pride history beyond the creation of the Icarus Project7 by Sascha Altman Dubrul and Jacks McNamara in 2002, which is usually set as the foundational landmark of Mad Pride in the States.8 For instance, Farber identifies anti-psychiatric precedents in the abolitionist texts of William Ellery Channing – who greatly influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson (see McKee 1994) – in the nineteenth century and in the writings of R. D. Laing in the sixties (see Laing 1960, 1967).

33I argue that finding precedents in history enables us to engage critically with the present, in such a way as defended by Foucault through his concept of genealogy, which seeks to unveil the emergence of the historical contingencies and processes that have shaped the structural order of the present. As Foucault expressed when interviewed in 1971:

I saw in [the history of power structures] ways of thinking and behaving that are still with us. I try to show, based upon their historical establishment and formation, those systems that are still ours today, and within which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting a critique of our own time, based upon retrospective analyses. (Simon 1971: 192)

34Foucault’s usage of genealogies deploys historical discourses to critically engage with the present (see Garland 2014). If we take into account how discourse does not only include scientific discourses like that of psychiatry, but also literary discourses such as fiction and poetry, then we can consider developing a genealogy of Mad Pride literature as a method to critically engage with the present of the movement. For this reason, the narrative tactics of resistance analyzed in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper can be fruitful for critical approaches to Mad Pride culture that can be used both by writers and theoreticians of the movement. This literary genealogy is relevant due to the central role of creative writing in Mad Pride, where poetry readings and storytelling have been present since its inception. Therefore, Foucault’s lens provides arguments to account for how reclaiming Gilman’s tactics in the present can, first, strengthen the grounds of Mad Pride by imbricating it deeper in the literary and intellectual history of the States and, second, provide tools to open spaces of resistance for contemporary authors who identify as psychiatry-survivors. It is nevertheless important to distinguish the game of distances inchoated in this double goal. The first role is historical and requires a more severe critical distance to avoid cluttering Gilman’s denounce of the rest treatment with the complex commitments of Mad Pride, because each of them are part of distinct overarching strategies with specific contextual goals. In other words, recruiting Gilman into the genealogy of Mad Pride does not entail a reductive approach that merges each particular movement. However, there is indeed an alignment to the extent that both subvert their contemporary psychiatric discourses, and this lining up enables us to detach Gilman’s narrative tactics from their historical moment and appropriate them into Mad Pride actions. When framed in current Mad Pride strategies, and together with a myriad of poetics resistance tactics borrowed from other liberation movements, Gilman’s genre indeterminacy, appropriation of good literary form, and play on pronouns still have a resistant potential. This potential to furnish subversive resistance lies on how duality, ambivalence, and irresoluteness can still operate as challenges to the governing either/or dichotomies in current psychiatric discourse, still dominating not only the medical industrial complex but also institutions of knowledge like our own research community. To conclude, I want to recover a passage from Jersey Cosantino’s recent Mad Trans manifesto, which acquires a new gravity when considered together with Gilman’s tactics:

Seeing myself and not yet knowing myself was an experience of feeling wholeness, a wholeness so massive, so vast, that it was spacious enough to hold all of the absences, all of the longings, the dreams, the desires of being one with that which dominant society perpetually seeks to erase, pathologize, stigmatize, and destroy [] what more is left to be destroyed if you already inhabit the cracks, the crevices, the interstices between the real and the unreal, the whole and the broken, the sane and the Mad, the world as we know it and the liberatory futures we desperately need to come? (Cosantino 2022)

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Notes

1 I use the capitalized identity-first convention of Mad to emphasize the systemic oppression and sociopolitical structure that defines subjects as Mad. “Bodyminds” is a term coined by Margaret Price which resists Western body-mind dualisms and is used to “emphasize that although ‘body’ and ‘mind’ usually occupy separate conceptual and linguistic territories, they are deeply intertwined” (Price 2011: 240).

2 “Psychocriminalization” is a term used in Disability Justice and Harm Reduction programs, which echoes a long history of moral prejudice that links mental illness with “evil,” leading to dehumanizing treatments and systemic oppression (see Knoll 2008; and Dvoskin, Knoll & Silva 2020).

3 Here I use “dementia” according to its nineteenth-century usage, that is, as an umbrella term for mental health conditions within diagnosed “madness” that entail a divergence from hegemonic rationality into so-called nonsense logics or irrationality – which in writing would amount to subverting discursive order and grammar structures. Concerning the history of mood disorders’ medical terms see Jansson 2021.

4 This existential spirit would also link Gilman’s standpoint to the lineage of feminist pragmatists who anchored their anthropology in the writings of Husserl and Sartre, like Maxine Greene (see Pérez Casanovas 2022)

5 For a further development of the characteristics of the One as an inauthentic persona, see Bolea 2016.

6 Farber connected Mad Pride activism with crucial periods of cultural revitalization in America, specifically “the Second Awakening of the early nineteenth century and the 1960s’ period of countercultural ferment and New Left activism” (Farber 2012: 8).

7 Since 2020 renamed Fireweed Collective.

8 As narrated by Farber, “Mad Pride was officially launched in England in 1999 with the foundation of the organization Mad Pride, which soon spread to the United States. The movement found institutional embodiment with the formation of The Icarus Project. It subsists alongside of the psychiatric survivors’ movement” (Farber 2012: 9).

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References

Electronic reference

Àger Pérez Casanovas, On the Borderlands of MadnessEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XV-1 | 2023, Online since 06 May 2023, connection on 18 November 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/3250; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.3250

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About the author

Àger Pérez Casanovas

University of Barcelona
ager.perezcasanovas[at]gmail.com

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