The Character of John in The Yellow Wallpaper -- The Yellow Wallpaper E

The Character of John in The Yellow Wallpaper Johns fascination with sight his wife can be attri merelyed to a physicians distorted interest in the body. We can certainly speculate that, as physicians at the turn of the snow were beginning to explore the female body assisted by developments in gynecology, John may have been equally interested in these sweet techniques of viewing the female body. More so than ever, the patient and her body became put forward to the physicians privilege to intimately observe and diagnose her. Ostensibly, the narrators illness is not physiological, but mental. John concludes that his wife is well except for a temporary sickening depression--a slight psychoneurotical tendency, a diagnosis that is confirmed by the narrators protest physician-brother (Gilman 10). Johns profession, and moreover his diagnosis, is a license to closely observe, scrutinize, watch, gaze upon, seek out, and enquire his wife and her ailments, which consequently perm its him to deploy seemingly inexhaustible (medical, scientific) means for (re)formulating and (re)presenting the hysteric female--not only for the purpose of giving her discursive representation, but in crop to de-mystify her mystery and reassure himself that she is, finally, calculable, harmless, and non-threatening. To speak of John in psychoanalytic terms, his immersion with his wife, her body, and her confinement, reveals unspoken anxieties the fear of castration and the lack the female body represents. in that location are, as Mulvey explains, two ways a man can potentially escape castration anxiety. One is a voyeuristic route in which the man is concerned with re-enacting the original trauma. Here the man is concerned with asc... ...ican Fiction. 17 (1989) 193-201. Haney-Peritz, Janice. Monumental Feminism and Literatures Ancestral House Another Look at The Yellow Wallpaper Womens Studies. 12 (1986) 113-128. Kasmer, Lisa. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper A Sy mptomatic Reading. Literature and Psychology. 36, (1990) 1-15. Jordanova, Ludmilla. intimate Visions Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the 18th and twentieth Centuries. London Harrester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Mulvey, Laura. Pandora Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 53-71. ------. Visual recreation and Narrative Cinema. Screen. 16 (1975) 6-18. Wigley, Mark. Untitled The Housing of Pleasure. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 327-389.