Introduction
After the first reading of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we can note that the narrator seems to be undergoing a form of depression, or hysteria – “a slight hysterical tendency”. Her husband, John – a valued physician, diagnosed this illness. In the excerpt used to analyse in this essay, it is not specified but the supposed depression is the aftermath of her main character’s child’s birth. To recover from this, her husband prescribes her a lot of rest, so they rent a summerhouse. As previously mentioned, since her husband is very respected in his job, she will naturally go along with his words. During her convalescence period, the woman is kept away from her sole escape – which is writing. Little by little, and because of spending most of the time in her room, the main character will start to see a woman attempting to escape from its yellow wallpaper. At the end of the story, the woman will be so ravaged that she will end up tearing the wallpaper down.
Thus, since The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the point of view of this woman whom as previously said, does not appear to be sane, we can already sense that the narrator will be one of our main concerns in this analysis; would it be for the narrator itself or for the linguistic tools used in order to achieve a certain form of narrative. This is one of main reasons why I have decided to consider, essentially, the position of this narrator regarding the diegesis; that is to say that I will quite often refer to Genette’s theories of narratology, as well as both Fowler’s and Simpson’s works.
Analysis
To start with, it might be important to specify what diegesis means. Gerard Genette — a French literary theorist — describes it as the “pure narrative” of a story (1980: 30), implying what is written down; as opposed to the mimesis, which is “perfect imitation” (1969: 30), or what is shown rather than told. This excerpt is essentially narrative as the narrator is omnipresent and the story is told by this entity. A narrative is composed by the story (which is the deep level of a story, the sequence of events in a chronological order) and the discourse (which corresponds to the surface level, what is presented to the reader. It is how the events are sequenced and presented to the narrator). Here, I have used Chatman’s terms (1978) (as opposed to histoire and discours for French Structuralists and fabula and sjuzhet for Russian Formalists) and I am going to stick to this specific definition throughout this whole essay.
In this diegesis, or dietic universe, the narrator of this story is a first person one, and as a consequence, an unreliable one. Commonly, first-person narrators are always unreliable because their perceptions of the world that is never unbiased, as it is their own personal perceptions and beliefs. Having a first-person-narrator in this particular story is tremendously important.
As explained in the introduction, the narrator and protagonist will gradually descend into madness; and having her telling us the story allows us to witness in every detail how her fall will happen. As Genette explained, such a narrative “authorises the narrator to allude to the future and in particular to his present situation, from this to some extent from part of his role.” (1969: 65). To put it another way, this choice allows the reader to go along the ride and follow the diegesis as it takes place inside the protagonist’s mind who is slowly sinking into madness. This is noticeable through the constant use of the pronoun “I” in “I would say” or “I feel”, the use of “myself”; or even the use of possessives such as “my mind” or “my condition”.
Owing to the fact that this narrator is a first-person one and following Genette’s way of thinking, the narrator is more than just homodiegetic (or “internal” (1980: 54), it is an autodiegetic one. That is to say that instead of being just one character of the story, it is the main character. This explains the use of the first person and possessives.
Another important piece of information about the narrator is its focalisation. As defined in Peer F. Bungaard’s work, Means of meaning in literary art, the focalisation is “the view point from which things are seen” (2010: 66). David Lodge — an English author and literary critic — in The Art of Fiction, declares that the choice of focalisation, or point of view is “the most important single decision (…) for it fundamentally affects the way the readers will respond, emotionally and morally to the characters and their actions.” (1992: 25-26). Here, and following Fowler’s — a British Linguist and professor of English at the University of East Anglia — definition of types of narrators and explanation of points of views regarding the schematic knowledge, it appears that we have a type A narrator. The type A narrator is an internal one, or in Fowler’s words, it is when the narration occurs “from a point of view within a character’s consciousness, manifesting his or her feelings about, and evaluation of, the events and characters of the story.” (1996: 170). Therefore, the focalisation is fixed through the main of one character only and we can perceive her thoughts, opinions, and views on and about the world in which her husband seems to be treating her like a child by keeping her locked in the bedroom of the house. Since we are confronted with a story about change, the internal focalisation is more than justified. It is fundamental to get the full picture of the narrator and main character’s consciousness. With the inner focalisation and first-person narrative, the perception and evaluation of surrounding cannot be altered by an outsider point of view, but solely by the narrator itself.
Hence, what is very important and interesting to analyse is now is how, despite the fact that the focalisation is onto her, we do not know much about her illness. We often read about it through what everyone else thinks of her. As an illustration, it is visible when mentioned that her husband does not take her seriously “he does believe I am sick”, or when he describes her condition as “a slight hysterical tendency”. All these details and many more can refer to the concept of modality discussed in more depth in the next part of this essay. Still, I can mention that the fact that her husband seems to be, not only making most of the decisions for her, but he also treats her like her child, leading her to feel frustrated, and thus, seeking for liberation.
The oppression that leads her seek freedom is significantly important in the speech that used by the narrator is very significant as well. With the sentence [her husband]“assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression”; here, the word “that” leads us to believe that is a reported speech, and thus, indirect speech. It is also noticeable with the repetition of “he said”. Indirect speech is used usually to verbally report a conversation without the use of the exact speaker’s words, nor quotation marks. On the other hand, if we go along Ullmann’s definition of the free indirect speech discourse, it conveys “dreams, hallucinations and other such as mental states, moving in the direction of the stream of consciousness” (1957: 101-102). This latter perfectly fits this excerpt as our protagonist has her own particular way of seeing the world and she will slowly dive into it her own stream of consciousness.
Now that we are precisely aware of what type of narrator is used in The Yellow Wallpaper and what purpose does it serve regarding the storyline, I can focus on analysing more linguistic and stylistics features deployed and their impact on the narrative.
One element that is present in every story is the sense of time, and most precisely – duration. Regarding the time of the narrative, we are faced with a present-tense-narration. This is noticeable through verbs such as “he does not believe that I am sick”; or with descriptions such as in the case of “there is a delicious garden”. The use of the present tense allows us, readers, to follow second after second – and to live – each and every thoughts, actions, details that the narrator goes through. The actions and thoughts are reported as they happen in the mind of the character. This does echo the notion of the stream of consciousness. J. A. Cuddon gives a definition of this term in his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory and says that it “refers to that technique which seeks to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind” (1984) of whoever narrates the story. It is an inner monologue, a sort of unbroken flow of thoughts.
The narrative tense is always linked to the duration of a story. Genette defines it as the “connections between the variable duration of these events or story sections and the pseudo-duration of their telling in the narrative” (1980: 35). This connection between story duration and discourse duration as mentioned by Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 51) has five possible types: descriptive pause, ellipsis, scene, acceleration and deceleration. Despite their differences, they all aim to shape the reader’s approach to the speed of the narration. The one type that is present in this excerpt is the descriptive pause. Rimmon-Kenan describes it as the “minimum speed” or “where some segment of the text corresponds to zero story duration” (1983: 53). When narrating using a descriptive pause, the story is suspended in discourse in order to let description take place. In this incipit, there are no dialogues. It is only a long description of the protagonist’s life and actions – or consequences – that led her to spend the summer in that peculiar house.
As I have briefly mentioned above, the ill woman sees herself more or less locked in the room that used to be a nursery. A couple of details that are to be known are that the windows of the room have bars on them, as if she was in jail; and this is not the room in which she originally wanted to sleep in. In the last paragraph, we can read that she wanted the room downstairs with roses instead of bars on the windows. Nonetheless, since her husband is a high-standing physician, she says it herself “what can one do” about it? Believing that it is the best for her recovery, she obeys. This, somehow, form of submission is a strong representation of modality in this excerpt. Bob Hodge — an Australian academic, theorist, critic and author — alongside Gunther Kress — a Professor of Semiotics and Education at the University of London — defined modality as something referring “to the status, authority and reliability of a message, to its ontological status, or to its value as truth or fact” (1988: 124). Now, following Simpson’s (1993) modality markers, we can note modal auxiliaries such as “would” or “could”; or verba sentiendi (which are verbs denoting feelings, thoughts and perceptions) such as “I think” or “I feel”. These precise words do not specify the type of modality, but its degree.
In this case, we are faced with a rather weak modality since the degree of truthfulness is rather low — the woman does not believe in what her husband thinks of her. Moreover, nor does the husband believes in her wife’s illness. When she reports what John thinks of her mental instability, he qualifies it by using the adjective “slight (hysterical tendency)”. This adjective is a strong indicator of doubt and scepticism.
In addition, we can talk about boulomaic modality, which is the one related to the narrator’s desire towards one element or another. Here, the narrator and the woman in the wallpaper seem to slowly turn into one single person; she is trapped and seeks liberation, assertiveness. Such a choice does perfectly fit the story, as it is a very personal experience of someone wishing to be freer that we are being told. It gives us this impression of being trapped in a life that one cannot change, and “what can one do” about it? Over and above, it strengthened the link between the main character and the reader, too.
Consequently, another thing that does bring the reader and the main character closer is the choice made to include a narratee in the story. As defined by Prince (1971) and Barthes (1966), the narratee refers to a fictional reader or entity to whom the narrator is directing his or her narration. The narratee is not obviously a part of the story, but it is a part of the diegetic universe. In this excerpt, the narratee is mentioned twice. The first mention is rather implicit when the narrator says, “I would not say it to a living soul (…) but this dead paper”. In this sentence, even though it is not very clear, we are the narratee. We are the ones reading the paper, and somehow, we become this paper. The following sentence emphasis this point as it starts with “You see (he does not believe that I am sick)”. The thing that was just a paper and a relief to her mind is now personified into someone she openly talks to. Thanks to this linguistic feature, we, readers, become more intimate with the narrator to the point that we actually become a part of, not only the story, but similarly a part of her madness.
Conclusion
After analysing the incipit of The Yellow Wallpaper, we can conclude that the woman is, indeed, slowly falling into an abyss of hysteria and madness. In addition, each reader has a front-row seat in this downward spiral since Charlotte Perkins Gilman has cautiously chosen to tell her story using the focalisation of an autodiegetic first-person narrator that is clearly unreliable because of everything that is going through her unstable mind. The powerlessness of this wife confronted with the authority of her scientist husband is expressed by the use of modality. Not only she appears to be submitted to her husband’s words, but she also strikes one as defenceless in regard to her own condition. By the end of the reading, and thanks to all the means cited above, there is no more room for doubt, the main character and narrator is definitely and unwillingly going mad and there is nothing she seems to be able to do against it.