[In the following essay, McGowan observes that recent historicist readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” provide key insights into the relationship between female subjectivity and the ownership of private property.]

Fredric Jameson begins The Political Unconscious with the mantra, “Always historicize!,” calling this an “absolute” and “even ‘transhistorical’ imperative” of radical thought.¹ Historicizing, in Jameson's vision, is attractive because it gives us access to trauma; it facilitates a traumatic encounter with the contingency of the present, thereby freeing us from the present's awful weight. It does this by revealing that the present doesn't owe its hegemony to transcendental necessity but to concrete historical determinants, determinants that might have been—and might sometime be—different. In short, historicizing offsets the power of the status quo. Insofar as it does this, who among the progressively minded could be against it? In the years since the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981, however, another kind of historicizing has emerged: a vision of the social order without discontinuity, a regime of power without points of failure. Whereas Jameson's historicizing helped to free us from the power of the status quo and opened us to the possibility of trauma, the “new” version condemns us to the prison-house of historical continuity and closes us off to trauma. For it, there is no breaking out of the trap that history lays for us; its history is history without fissure. And a history without fissure is a history without the possibility of trauma.

Recently, criticism of “The Yellow Wall-paper” has taken up the imperative of this kind of historicizing, a historicizing that makes clear that where early feminist critics once saw a traumatic disruption of the social order, we should now see the power of the social order itself.² A criticism that cannot grasp the possibility of the social order's failure cannot, clearly, see the feminine “No!”—itself a traumatic suspension of that order. Today, in the epoch of this historicism, the trauma of “The Yellow Wall-paper” has receded. Perhaps it is Walter Benn Michaels who inaugurated this approach to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story, when he stated, “if ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ is for me an exemplary text, it is not because it criticizes or endorses the culture of consumption but precisely because, in a rigorous, not to say obsessive, way, it exemplifies that culture.”³ Michaels, however, was only the beginning.

Julie Bates Dock provides a more recent instance of this historicizing, when she rejects the idea that “The Yellow Wall-paper” had an “oppositional” status within the culture. Dock asks rhetorically, “Why do critics need oppositional myth-frames in literary history to legitimize the study of a remarkable piece of writing? What is gained by identifying “The Yellow Wall-paper” as a hitherto victimized piece of literature?”⁴ Though Dock rightly points out that critics have exaggerated the degree of the story's unpopularity, she ends up downplaying the story's radicality (and the fact that it was largely ignored by publishers, critics, and readers by fifty years). Here, opposition, a moment of trauma for the social order, is consigned to the category of mythology—what Dock calls “oppositional myth-frames.”⁵ In this vision of the social order, gaps in that order are not really gaps, but simply another aspect of social relations of power. This vision can explain everything, everything except the emergence of new subjects within the social or the emergence of the social itself, what Joan Copjec in Read My Desire calls society's “generative principle, which cannot appear among these relations.”⁶ Just as the vision of a closed social order does not permit anything to leave this order, neither does it permit anything to enter. Without the idea (and the possibility) of a moment in which the incompleteness of the social structure becomes evident, we can explain neither how society itself begins nor how it integrates new subjects.⁷

This failure, however, should not lead us to reject out of hand recent historicist readings of “The Yellow Wall-paper” and to return nostalgically to the early feminist readings that celebrated the story as, in the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their ‘speechless woe.’”⁸ The historicist readings have provided three key insights, revealing the limitations of interpretations such as that of Gilbert and Gubar. First, Dock has shown us that early readers of the story did not “misread” the feminist theme of the story. As she points out, contrary to the claims of many feminist critics of the story, “evidence indicates that [reviewers] saw Gilman's feminist message” and understood it.⁹ What Dock's research tells us is that it is not simply the feminism of “The Yellow Wall-paper” that troubled readers and kept the story in obscurity for decades, but something else. Thus, Dock tells us to look beyond just the confrontation with feminism itself for the traumatic effect of this story. Second, Dock, Susan Lanser, and others have shown how feminist critics of the story have been influenced by biography—both that of Gilman and themselves—in interpreting the story. This biographical influence has produced readings that see the story as a battle of (male and female) discourses, enabling critics to extract from the story a model for feminist writing and reading.¹⁰ Third, historicist readings have also revealed the connection between private property and the narrator's subjectivity in the story. According to Michaels, “The story of “The Yellow Wall-paper” is a story of the origin of property and, by the same token, of the origin of the self.”¹¹ It is the great achievement of Michaels to have discovered this link between property and self, but his great failure as well, because he insists on reducing self to property. What “The Yellow Wall-paper” makes clear—and this is what historicism misses—is that finding one's self is not a process of acquisition, but one of loss. The narrator finds her self, in other words, only as it loses its status as property. The self that she discovers, because it is not property, cannot be reduced to discourse, even a feminist discourse. Rather than being a battle between two kinds of discourse or a battle to own one's self, “The Yellow Wall-paper” is a story about the emergence of a subject beyond discourse and property, at the point at which both discourse and property fail, and it is this aspect of the story that has made it troubling to its readers.

The importance of property is present from the first line of the story: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”¹² The narrator goes on to describe this ancestral hall as “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate,” which her and John have leased “cheaply” (29). This focus on property in the opening of the story not only establishes its centrality in the struggle for identity that ensues, but also suggests a particular relation to property in which John and the narrator exist. Because they are “mere ordinary people,” they don't own the property, but are just tenants. And they occupy the property only because the natural order of things has been upset. Something supernatural has occurred—the narrator suspects it is a “haunted house” (29)—and the couple is able to live there only because its “natural” owners have abandoned the place. Thus, Gilman begins the story by stressing that the couple is in an unusual and alienated situation in their role as occupants of the property. They are not the “natural” residents; they have not inherited the property. In fact, the narrator writes that “There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about heirs and coheirs” (30). Their relationship to property is not at all proper; a gap exists between them and it. Whereas an aristocratic couple would have a “natural” relationship to the property—there would be no gap between them and it, and in a sense, the property would be a part of them—John and the narrator have an alienated, or bourgeois, relationship to it.¹³ (All of the narrator's terms for referring to the property have aristocratic connotations—“ancestral hall,” “colonial mansion,” “hereditary estate”—suggesting further her and John's alienated relationship to it.)

Just as the couple's relationship to their house is alienated, the narrator's relationship to her self is haunted by a non-coincidence: she does not properly possess her self because it is alienated in—or, more precisely, beneath—the yellow wall-paper. In other words, at the beginning of the story the yellow wall-paper possesses the narrator's self; her self is reified in property (in the yellow wall-paper), which means that it has the status of a thing. This state of reification, which affects the identity of both characters, has its roots in the logic of capitalism and the predominance of private property. Reification creates an alienated identity, an identity that is out of joint. As Marx famously says in Capital, in the process of reification, “a definite social relation between men […] assumes […] the fantastic form of a relation between things.”¹⁴ Reification also affects the self's relationship to itself as well: one's identity acquires the character of a thing that is to be possessed. But the narrator, as the story opens, doesn't possess her self properly (just as the couple doesn't properly possess the house it occupies). This is the source of her “problem,” because reification, if it is to be successful ideologically, must function unobtrusively, unbeknownst to its subjects (or, in short, it must convince people that they really are people, not just things). The narrator's “illness”—what necessitated this “rest cure” in the first place—is thus a sign that with her the operations of ideology aren't functioning smoothly.¹⁵ The story establishes two alternatives for the narrator: she may, following the advice and example of John, attempt to possess her self properly, or she may, following her desire, attempt to break from this property-logic.

John preaches proper self-possession: overcome reification simply by making its processes once again inconspicuous. He is the perfect capitalist subject, because he tries to live the coincidence between property and identity, always preaching (and trying to exhibit) proper ownership of the self. The status of this ownership, however, is much more tenuous than John lets on. His sense of proper self-ownership—as does everyone's—depends upon repressing the impossibility of complete ownership, that there is always a part of the self that escapes one's control. John is even, on one level, aware of this, which is why he insists that the narrator abandon her desire and model herself on him. The narrator's efforts threaten to destabilize John's own self-ownership, thus making evident its problematic status, even in someone as seemingly self-assured as John. Because he recognizes the danger, John must insist unrelentingly on proper self-possession. In this sense, John's occupation is integral to the role he plays in the story: as a doctor, he works to constitute his subject—the narrator, in this case—as an object of the rationalizing gaze, within a discourse of rationality. We can see Foucault's clinician in John. John's treatment of the narrator exemplifies the way in which, as Foucault says in The Birth of the Clinic, “clinical experience” attempts to effect an “opening up of the concrete individual […] to the language of rationality, that major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to things.”¹⁶ John's prescription for the narrator is for her to become like him: exhibit self-control, become the rational bourgeois subject, develop a strong and healthy ego. The narrator records this: “He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me” (35). The narrator's only problem, in John's eyes, is that she refuses to possess her self properly.

In advocating proper self-possession, John preaches the fundamental tenets of American ego psychology: a strong, autonomous ego and adaptation to the social order. Buying into this psychology is, as John makes clear, a good investment. The payoff is clear: one obtains a valuable self about which one can feel upbeat. It requires only a simple choice, the choice of submission to the law—that is, adaptation—over one's desire. Because it demands submission to the law, the acquisition of a valuable self necessitates the sacrifice of desire. Thus, in presenting this alternative to the narrator, John inadvertently reveals a truth not of ego psychology, but of psychoanalysis. As Lacan points out in “Kant with Sade,” “the law and repressed desire are one and the same thing.”¹⁷ If the narrator takes up John's investment advice and chooses adaptation, she must give up her desire. This is a price, however, that the narrator isn't quite sure she's ready to pay.

Thus, we might see the battle for the narrator's psyche that ensues as a struggle between ego psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, between the path of adaptation and the path of desire.¹⁸ The narrator's increasing awareness of John's malevolence indicates her movement toward the path of desire. Even near the beginning of the story, the narrator sees that John—and his insistence on self-control—might be “one reason I do not get well faster” (29). As she continues toward her desire, the narrator's suspicion about the truth of his concern becomes more concrete. At the outset she feels that “he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more” (30). Near the end of the story, however, she is able to articulate fully her doubts about John:

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn't see through him!

(40)

What the narrator sees is simply the underside of rational self-control. This control serves only to mask an absence of freedom, a complete acquiescence to the superego's law (a law that comes, of course, from the social, the big Other). The narrator reveals John's prescription for the subject—and the demand of self-control it makes on its adherents—to be both tyrannical (it despotically governs both the self and others) and impotent (it confines one to a symbol position and thus renders agency impossible).

John's ego psychology and corresponding philosophy of identity, which view self—and wife—as property, mirror the fundamental logic of capital: both are grounded on an idea of ownership which is constantly seeking to take possession of new things. After stating that she sees through John, the narrator makes a statement that should give us pause. She guesses at the source of John's behavior: “Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months” (40). She sees John in the same situation that she's in: the yellow wall-paper affects both of them. Here, the narrator reiterates the connection that informs the entire story—that between property and identity. Despite his rationality and self-control, John's identity, just like the narrator's, has been subjected to the processes of reification. The only difference is that in his case the guise of self-control has deceived him and allowed him to continue to believe in the autonomy of his ego. The narrator puts this difference in her own terms: “It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it” (40). The narrator's “illness”—that is, her ability to feel reification as a crisis, rather than as a tolerable state of affairs—separates her from her husband and his sister Jennie; John and Jennie are content to live as things, without bothering to notice.¹⁹ They are content with reified existence precisely because they are convinced that they are really human and not just things. The narrator's radicality consists not in her being less subject to reification than John, but more so. Unlike John and Jennie, she is not plagued by the illusion that she is, deep down inside, truly human. She sees herself as a thing—as a figure in the wallpaper—and is a constant threat to reveal John and Jennie as things as well.

In fact, John's treatment of the narrator reveals that all along he has—consciously or not—been aware that the narrator's desire, if followed far enough, would reveal the way in which his rationalism has, in actuality, only a tenuous hold on his identity. Thus, John refuses to allow the narrator to reflect on herself, convincing her that “the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (30). In a sense, John's warning here is correct: if the narrator follows the path of desire, it would be the “worst thing” for him. John grasps that if the narrator follows the path of desire, she would take him along with her, rendering his fantasmatic self-possession completely untenable. In his discussion of Antigone and Creon in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan points out that because Antigone follows her desire to the zone that one of Lacan's students christens “the zone between-two-deaths”—the zone of freedom—she automatically takes Creon there as well: “The hero bears his partner into that zone along with him. At the end of Antigone Creon henceforth speaks loudly and clearly of himself as someone who is dead among the living, and this is because he has literally lost all other goods as a result of the affair. As a consequence of the tragic act, the hero frees his adversary too.”²⁰ If the narrator frees her self, she frees John, against his will, as well (and the fact that John faints when the narrator does finally free her self indicates that this is the case). John's warning to the narrator is thus an attempt to save himself from the horror of his own freedom. The narrator, however, in her acquiescence to this warning (or order), doesn't give up her desire; she simply makes an ostensible change in object. She writes, “So I will let it alone and talk about the house” (30). As it turns out, the house is, as the rest of the story illustrates, more the narrator's self than she is, and probing the mystery of the house is not an abandonment of her desire, but an intensification of it.²¹ Thus, by prompting the narrator to give up thinking about herself, John actually pushes her further down the path of desire, the path that, ironically, he is trying to block.

What follows from this turn toward the house is the narrator's attempt—which occupies the rest of the story—to free her self from its reified state, to break its connection to property. The narrator's refusal to name herself indicates her desire for a subjectivity that is not her property, that is not merely a position within the symbolic order. The narrator's reflection on the house and the wall-paper is her attempt to complete this break, to follow the path of desire. In a discussion of the narrator's relation to her own subjectivity, Georgia Johnston argues that “Through the narrator, [Gilman] shows how the woman creates herself as text. Through her body and her authorship, the woman becomes the subject, instead of the patient.”²² If this were true, then the thesis of Walter Benn Michaels—that “The Yellow Wall-paper” is “an endorsement of consumer capitalism”—would surely be correct. This way of viewing subjectivity—as textual “subject position”—misses the nature of the narrator's attempt to constitute her own subjectivity: she does not seek a positive subjectivity, but wants to dispossess herself, to become a subject without any positive content.²³ It is a path on which the texts of one's subject position are systematically exposed and stripped away, in order to reveal the way in which one's subject position—a positive marker of identity within the symbolic order—is a prison.

The narrator's initial descriptions of her room show it also to be prisonlike: barred windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and walls covered with a “horrid” yellow wall-paper. The room also forces her into the role of a child; it served as a nursery for the previous occupants of the house. And during the narrator's stay in the room, John begins to treat her more and more like a child: “‘What is it, little girl?’ he said. ‘Don't go walking about like that—you'll get cold’” (36). Both John and the room, as ideological forces, attempt to infantilize and imprison the narrator, but it is the wall-paper that has the greatest effect on her. Her disgust with the wall-paper begins with her first description: “I never saw a worse paper in my life” (31). The paper is “repellent, almost revolting” (31). The color, the pattern, and the condition of the wall-paper all repulse the narrator, but what most disturbs her is its human quality. She notices “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (32). The wall-paper, for the narrator, is not simply a dead letter, but something capable of expression. Further, she claims, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!” (32). The wall-paper is, in a word, uncanny—or, as Marx puts it, “a mysterious thing.”²⁴ Marx explains that, to understand this mystery,

we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.²⁵

The fetishism of commodities humanizes things. When the narrator sees human life in the wall-paper—and in “inanimate things” in general—she displays her awareness of a process that John endures unknowingly. The narrator's awareness of the humanity of things corresponds to her awareness of her own status as a thing. These are the processes she sees in the wall-paper, and it is in her relationship to the wall-paper that we can find the key to the story: her struggle against reified identity.

To understand the narrator's relationship to the wall-paper, we must understand the nature of the wall-paper itself: the yellow wall-paper has all the qualities of the symbolic order. The symbolic order is characterized by its patriarchal and discursive structure. Readers of the story have noticed both of these aspects: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see in the wall-paper “the oppressive structures of the society”; Janice Haney-Peritz sees in it “man's prescriptive discourse about a woman”; and even Catherine Golden, who sees liberatory possibilities in wall-paper, sees it discursively, as a “palimpsest” through which “the narrator comes to express herself.”²⁶ Not only is the structure of the wall-paper both patriarchal and discursive, but its color also indicates this connection to the symbolic order. The symbolic order, too, is yellow, rather than, say, green, because everything submitted to it is necessarily petrified. As Lacan points out, “the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing.”²⁷ Or, as Joan Copjec puts it, no “form of life [has] ever been found to survive within the dead structures of language.”²⁸ Presence within the symbolic order is a Real absence, the presence of absence in the symbol. The “revolting” yellow of the wall-paper is likewise the yellowing of death, which is why it repulses the narrator at first: “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (31).²⁹ Though it requires the present absence of both—like the symbolic order—the wall-paper brings people and things in relation with each other. The wall-paper is a layer of mediation—literally, paper (a text) on the wall (property). It mediates and makes possible the relationship between the subject and property. It is the site of reification, the site at which people and property are linked, the site at which relations between people have the character of relations between things and things have a human quality. Though reification affects everyone, everyone does not respond to it in the same way. The narrator's relationship to reification differentiates the narrator from the other characters in the story. It is a peculiarity of the narrator's psyche, at once her “illness” and her genius, that she sees the human presence in the wall-paper and other things of the room, that, unlike the “normal” characters in the story, she sees that, in a society constructed around capital, things have more humanity than human beings do.

This ability to see what Marx calls the “mystical character” of things is, according to the narrator, an ability that she has had since she was a child. When she sees the humanity of the wall-paper, she says,

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.

(32)

In the midst of her description of the human qualities lurking within the wall-paper, the narrator has recourse to a childhood experience, in which inanimate things—things created by human labor—have the characteristics of human beings (she remembers, for instance, a chair that was a “strong friend” to her [32]). These past relationships to humanized things are, in fact, the only childhood memories that the narrator relates. Her only childhood memories are of her relationship to things, which had the character of a relationship between people. Even in childhood, even in her deepest memories, there was no time prior to her seeing things with human qualities—no “human” past that has been lost.³⁰ The narrator does not romanticize her own childhood by positing it as a time of essential selfhood, a time of unalienated unity. Though she seeks subjectivity, this narrator is no essentialist. For the narrator (as her reflection on her childhood makes clear), things, and the relations between them, provide the model for relations between people; the relationship between things does not represent a fall from some primordial human relationship.

The narrator attempts, through her meditation on the wall-paper, to extricate her self—the “human presence”—from it.³¹ She sees something human trapped within it: “But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (33). What she sees in the wall-paper is the “ghost in the machine,” the leftover of humanity existing only as a specter in a reified world. The narrator can see this specter because the wall-paper—and the symbolic order—is not whole, but incomplete, split. Certain junctures—“places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so”—make possible an insight into the human form that is hidden in the wall-paper. Furthermore, the patterns of the wall-paper “destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (31), contradictions that indicate that the wall-paper does not have a smooth and even surface. The narrator sees the human presence precisely because the symbolic order is not smooth, not a closed loop. Instead, it gives rise to doubt, to speculation about the possibility that its hiding something. Once again, we can see the clear link between the wall-paper and the symbolic order. Both cannot but offer us the illusion that they are hiding something real, something truly meaningful. As Joan Copjec points out, “Since signifiers are not transparent, they cannot demonstrate that they are not hiding something behind what they say—they cannot prove that they do not lie. Language can only present itself to the subject as a veil that cuts off from view a reality that is other than what we are allowed to see.”³² Language, in other words, can never say that it's not hiding anything—that it's telling the truth—because such a statement always seems to be hiding another, deeper truth, even when it isn't. It deceives insofar as it pretends to deceive, which is precisely what the wall-paper does to the narrator. The wall-paper is a lure, which is why it attracts the narrator's desire. The wall-paper convinces her that there is a substantial human presence within it, but as she comes closer to this presence, the narrator comes to recognize that it's not all that substantial, which gives her second thoughts. At first, however, the recognition of the human presence triggers the narrator's desire. In a moment of almost complete reversal, she says, “I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps because of the Wall-paper” (34, Gilman's emphasis). She changes her attitude toward the wall-paper because she begins to see in it the object of her desire.³³

After days of attention to the wall-paper, the figure(s) contained within the pattern becomes clearer: “Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day” (35). This increasing clarity, however, horrifies the narrator, prompting her once again to think about leaving the house. She states, “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here” (35). Clearly, the narrator no longer desires to discover the secret of the wall-paper, but it is less clear what occasions this dramatic change in attitude. When the form behind the wall-paper becomes more evident, its possibility of its emergence becomes more traumatic. Following the path of desire is not an easy road, because it weakens our sense of symbolic support.³⁴ As she begins to free her self from the wall-paper, the narrator begins to feel the weight of this break. The idea that the woman behind the pattern will escape now becomes threatening: “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (36). The narrator, as Lacan would say, begins to “give ground relative to her desire,” to try to escape the trauma of her desire. Though it is a prison, reified identity within the symbolic network of the Other is also a respite, providing a structural support for identity that allows one to not see the emptiness of subjectivity. As she sees the human form in the wall-paper more clearly, it becomes apparent that it is not the figure of her “true self,” her “human spirit,” but a senseless, traumatic form. On closer inspection, the imaginary lure—an object that would make her whole again—gives way to a figure of the Real, a terrifying form stripped of positive symbolic content. The narrator, in short, begins to see her self in its Real dimension, and she doesn't like what she sees.

The narrator sets out on the path of her desire expecting one thing—reconciliation, completion, freedom—and what she gets is something else altogether. If the narrator had known what was really lurking for her in the wall-paper, she would never have embarked upon her desire in the first place. But the wall-paper seduced her with the imaginary lure of a substantial self, of weightless freedom. Though she initially sought out a comforting identity in the wall-paper, the narrator soon discovers a traumatic one. In this sense, we can again see how close the narrator's experience is to that of psychoanalysis. With psychoanalysis—as with the wall-paper—the analysand never gets what she initially bargains for. The analyst doesn't provide what the analysand demands—relief from trauma—but rather facilitates a more thorough encounter with trauma. As Bruce Fink points out, “In therapy the therapist sidesteps the patient's demands, frustrates them, and ultimately tries to direct the patient to something he or she never asked for.”³⁵ A subject comes to analysis, for instance, to solve marital problems, and ends up discovering that the marriage is itself the problem. We come to analysis for relief from trauma, but analysis forces us to take up the trauma as our own. The encounter with the wall-paper puts the narrator in exactly the same position. When she gets close to the traumatic emergence of her identity, the narrator has second thoughts, which is not to say she lacks courage. She gets further than most of us do. But it is not so easy for the narrator to give up on becoming subject, because she doesn't call the shots. She begs John for permission to leave the house, but he refuses—forcing the narrator back to the wall-paper.

On more than one occasion in the story, it is John's refusal to renovate or to leave the house that triggers the narrator's continually deeper attention to the wall-paper. These refusals are driven by what John considers to be economic exigencies. After the narrator's initial plea to change the wall-paper, John responds, “Really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental” (32). And later, when the narrator first begins to discern the form of the woman behind the wall-paper, John says, “our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before” (36). In both cases, economic factors—and John's patriarchal authority that invokes them—force, or make possible, the narrator's following the path of her desire. In other words, it is the law itself that helps to push desire along. The power of John to compel the narrator to remain in a situation that constantly horrifies her—the power of patriarchy itself—is simultaneously the impetus for her attempt to free her self from the wall-paper. Because of her situation in this socius, the narrator has fewer opportunities to flee her desire. The horror of the rest-cure—the ostensible theme of the story, according to Gilman herself—is also the source of its potential as an engine for desire: it bars the path to the banalities of what Heidegger calls “everyday-ness,” which often serve as pretexts for flights away from one's desire. The horror of the rest-cure ironically creates the possibility of the narrator's break from reified identity.³⁶ John's refusals of the narrator's requests for relief, the manifestations of both patriarchy and the culture of capital, make possible the very thing they are attempting to prevent—the emergence of the narrator's desire.

The fact that John's obstinacy and frugality sustains the narrator on the path of desire also reveals the contingent nature of this project. Had John been a bit more sensitive and agreed to leave the house, the narrator would have been denied the decisive break from him and his world that she makes at the end of the story. Her feminine “No!,” her rejection of symbolic identity, is, in other words, something that is (at least in part) forced on her by her situation. This makes clear just how far the feminine “No!” is from Sartrean freedom. For Sartre, of course, we are condemned to freedom, unable to get away from it. As the story makes clear, the narrator has not freely decided to continue her struggle against reified identity. Her “choice” is, strictly speaking, not free: if it was up to her, she would have already given up, but the situation forces her to continue. Nevertheless, the narrator's “No!” does effectively free her from reified identity, despite the fact that it stems ultimately from a series of contingent factors. The “No!” itself, in other words, is not hers, in the sense of being her own “free” decision.

After John refuses to permit their early departure, the narrator realizes that the pattern of the wall-paper, at night, “becomes bars” (37), and she sees the woman behind them clearly for the first time. This occasions another change in attitude; the narrator no longer wants to flee the room: “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be” (38). She once again takes up her desire, as she describes the stultifying effects of the symbolic order on the self imprisoned within it:

And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!

(39)

Like ideology, the wall-paper imprisons the human subject, and this imprisoning produces multiple subject positions—“I think that is why it has so many heads”—points at which the subject is forced into a particular ideological role or symbolic identity. The narrator realizes that this explains why she had alternately seen “a great many women behind, and sometimes only one” (39). When she grasps that there is a self imprisoned beneath the wall-paper and that she “gets out in the daytime” (39), the narrator decides to tear away the wall-paper and free this self entirely.

Life outside of the wall-paper, however, is not exactly human. When one is outside of the imprisoning effects of the symbolic order, one is also outside of its constitutive effects, which means that beyond the wall-paper the woman has no symbolic network of support for her identity. Thus, the woman must move about like a shadow, like the living dead—“creeping”—because when she moves beyond the wall-paper she moves beyond the world of meaning. And because the act of creeping is the move of a subject without any positive content, the person who creeps can never be fully captured by the gaze:

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at a time.

And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!

(40, Gilman's emphasis)

To creep is to abandon the wall-paper, to abandon the world of symbolic meaning, and at this point the narrator wants to wholly take up creeping, which is why she is attempting to strip the wall-paper off completely. Once outside of the wall-paper, the subject becomes an empty subject, having severed the tie to property. The move outside the wall-paper is the final culmination of the narrator's “No!”—her refusal of the satisfactions of symbolic identity.

At the end of the story, the narrator finally succeeds in freeing her self from the wall-paper. Outside of the wall-paper, we can only imagine what the narrator looks like from the effect that she has on John: confronted with a Real presence, he faints. In the narrator's last statement, directed toward John, she makes clear where she has gone. She tells him, “I've got out at last […] in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!” (40). The narrator here dissociates herself from her own name—her designation within the symbolic network, the mark of her ideological interpellation.³⁷ The name and the symbolic mandate that it entails is precisely what the narrator has moved beyond, if only momentarily. Annette Kolodny has called the narrator's final move, not wholly inaccurately, a “liberation into madness.”³⁸ The point is, however, that any break from a symbolic identity always has a “mad” dimension, in which one achieves a symbolic death. In Enjoy Your Symptom!, Slavoj Žižek discusses this escape, which he terms the “act”: “every act worthy of this name is ‘mad’ in the sense of radical unaccountability: by means of it, I put at stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity; the act is therefore always a ‘crime,’ a ‘transgression,’ namely of the limit of the symbolic community to which I belong.”³⁹ The narrator's escape from ideology is an act of madness—and in this sense Kolodny is correct—because through it she abandons the symbolic network of support that had sustained her identity. However, unlike the psychotic, the narrator begins from the standpoint of symbolic identity and then goes beyond it. The psychotic rejects symbolic identity a priori; the narrator dies to it, and in this sense the term “madness” is misleading when applied to her.

The narrator commits herself to creeping, to a living death, which is something quite different from real death. In fact, the narrator rejects actual suicide as a means of escape after realizing that it would leave her within the symbolic network:

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.

(41)

This rejection of suicide does not indicate a last-second eruption of conformism on the part of the narrator, an indication of the narrator's concern for propriety (or for her self as property). As an “improper” gesture, actual suicide is the reverse side of propriety, and as such, it can be integrated into a proper world of signification. It can be made sense of—or, rather, “misconstrued.” The narrator, however, aims beyond the world of construing and misconstruing, through a repudiation of even the constitutive dimension of ideology, that which secures meaning. Her break at the end of the story is, for this reason, nonsensical. Actual suicide remains something done for the Other—it sends a message to the Other, whether one leaves a note or not—whereas the narrator's symbolic suicide, her escape from the wall-paper, gives up the support of the Other altogether. It thus indicates that she has followed her desire to the point at which it becomes pure drive.

This is the point at which Gilman ends her story, the point at which the narrator completely breaks from her symbolic identity, where even her own name—Jane—is someone else. And because the story ends at this point, we have no way of knowing what the final result will be, or whether she will live out her life with John in a changed relationship, or whether John will move out of the picture altogether. In one sense, whatever happens next is unimportant, which is why Gilman stopped the story when she did (and all attempts to extrapolate an ending beyond the ending, and judge the story based on this, constitute refusals to embrace the radicality of Gilman's own ending).⁴⁰ The narrator has renounced the network supporting her symbolic identity, and in doing so, she has committed herself to an encounter with the trauma of an empty identity. This emptiness, however, is visible only when we are able to abandon the historicist vision of the social as a closed loop. Only when we see the failure of the social to constitute itself completely can we also see the narrator's achievement of emptiness—and in this way attempt to rediscover the trauma of this story, a trauma that once manifested itself in a fifty-year-long repression.

Notes

1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9.

2. For some of the recent historicist readings of the story, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Susan Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 415-441; Janice Haney-Peritz, “Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” Women's Studies 12 (1986): 113-128; Mary Jacobus, “An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Reading,” in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 229-248; Julie Bates Dock, et al., “‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” PMLA 111 (1996): 52-65; and Wai-Chee Dimock, “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader,” American Literature 63 (1991): 601-622. Wai-Chee Dimock seems at first an exception to the other historicist readings, in that she professes her desire to synthesize the historicist reading and the earlier feminist readings. She argues that “I want to challenge not only their supposed disagreement but also their presumed distinction, to show that the discrete entity imputed to each in fact impoverishes both” (Dimock, “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader,” 602). First, Dimock, qua New Historicist, traces the link between “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the culture of professionalism and discusses the power relations implicit in this connection; then, Dimock, qua feminist, notes “a nonidentity between the ideal reader invoked by the story and the actual women reading it,” which creates a “dialectical agency,” because “professionalism and feminism might be said to be in contact only through the mediated space of a temporal lag” (Dimock, 613, 614). This conception of agency, however, is entirely conformist. The task of the feminist reader becomes one of only “catching up” to the professionalism of the ideal reader, from whom she is distanced by a “temporal lag.” Thus, Dimock's synthesis—as syntheses tend to do—strips one side (feminism) of its overriding principle—oppositionality.

3. Michaels, The Gold Standard, 27, his emphasis.

4. Dock, “The Legend of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” 60.

5. The primary effect of Dock's essay—and the gesture in this direction has become increasingly common—is to say: “we have wrongly thought ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ to be something that ideology could not contain and had to exclude or repress, but now we can see that it has been included all along, without our being conscious of it.” This consignment of the outside to the status of the mythological, however, fails to see its own performative dimension. In his book on Marx, Jacques Derrida notices a similar thing in all the statements circulating today about the death of Marxism. These statements are exorcisms, according to Derrida, and “effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. It wants to be and it must be in effect. It is effectively a matter of a performative” (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], 48, his emphasis). The “purely constative” statement—opposition is mythological—works performatively to bring about mythologizing of opposition that it has declared to be already the state of things. This parallel between statements about the mythology of opposition and the death of Marxism is perhaps not fortuitous. Should we not see the former as the resignation of the Left in the face of the latter?

6. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 9.

7. For Lacan, this is precisely the limit of the symbolic order: its inability to explain creation and individuation. He describes this limit in his Seminar III: “There is nevertheless one thing that evades the symbolic tapestry, it's procreation in its essential root—that one being is born from another. In the symbolic order procreation is covered by the order instituted by this succession between beings. But nothing in the symbolic explains the fact of their individuation, the fact that beings come from beings. The entire symbolism declares that creatures don't engender creatures, that a creature is unthinkable without a fundamental creation. In the symbolic nothing explains creation” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: Norton, 1993], 179).

8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 89, their emphasis.

9. Dock, “The Legend of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” 60.

10. Paula Treichler, for instance, sees the wall-paper as “a metaphor for women's discourse” through which the narrator attempts to escape John's prescriptive discourse (his “sentence”) (Paula Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 [1984]: 61-77). Judith Fetterley calls it “a war between texts” (Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murderers in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, eds. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweikart [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], 163). For other views of the story as a conflict of discourses, see, among others, Gilbert and Gubar; Georgia Johnston, “Exploring Lack and Absence in the Body/Text: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Prewriting Irigaray,” Women's Studies 21 (1992): 75-86; and Catherine Golden, “The Writing of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’: A Double Palimpsest,” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 193-201.

11. Michaels, The Gold Standard, 4. Given Michaels's stress on the parallel between the development of capitalism and of the individual subject, it should come as no surprise that the predominant American Marxist, Fredric Jameson, would find much to admire in Michaels's project, despite its wholly anti-Marxist bent and explicit refusal to interrogate the culture it analyzes—“the project of interrogation makes no sense” (Michaels, 27). Though Jameson does attack Michaels on this point, his enthusiasm is not dampened: “Few recent works of American criticism display the interpretive brilliance and intellectual energy of Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism” (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991], 181).

12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook, ed. Julie Bates Dock (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 29. Though there are a large number of editions of “The Yellow Wall-paper” that are widely available, I will cite Dock's edition because it is the first (and only) critical edition of the story available. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically.

13. In one sense, the “naturalness” of the aristocratic relationship to the land exists only retroactively, after it has been lost. That is, it exists in the mythology of those who live in a world of universalized private property. In another sense, however, there is a concrete difference in the attitude toward property between the precapitalist and the capitalist worlds. Robert Heilbroner illustrates this difference with his colorful example of the precapitalist attitude: “Although land was salable under certain conditions (with many strings attached), it was generally not for sale. A medieval nobleman in good standing would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island” (Robert Heilbroner, The Wordly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992], 28, his emphasis).

14. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 165.

15. The narrator nicely demonstrates the radical kernel of hysterical neurosis, which consists in a refusal to be satisfied with the ideological comforts that satisfy the “normal” subject. As Breuer points out in defending the hysteric against the common charge of “degeneracy” or “weak-mindedness,” the hysteric becomes ill simply because she cannot tolerate the “monotonous life and boredom” that normal subjects endure daily without incident (Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 1955], 242).

16. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973), xiv. John S. Bak interprets John's treatment of the narrator in light of Foucault's ideas on surveillance developed in Discipline and Punish. According to Bak, the narrator's room is “not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon” (John S. Bak, “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 [1994]: 40). In imprisoning the narrator in this room that resembles a Panopticon, John functions like a “penal officer” (Bak, “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye,” 42), perpetuating a constant state of surveillance on the narrator. Though Bak doesn't say as much, the fundamental importance of this connection between the prison and medicine is clear: both work to constitute the individual as a subject (on the model of self-possession) through subjection to a gaze.

17. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” trans. James B. Swenson Jr., October 51 (1989): 68.

18. In this way, Gilman's story makes clear the connections between American ego psychology and the logic of capitalism. The project of strengthening the ego is directly homologous to increasing the worth of one's commodities. The status of the ego is that of a commodity—a thing to be owned—which is why the entirety of Lacanian psychoanalysis is directed against the ego, toward the achievement of a subject without an ego. As he says in his Seminar II, “There is never a subject without an ego, a fully realised subject, but that in fact is what one must aim to obtain from the subject in analysis” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli [New York: Norton, 1991], 246). This is why in acting against John's prescription for self-control and trying to free her self from the wall-paper, the narrator enacts a project akin to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

19. Though both John and Jennie become interested in what is beneath the wall-paper after the narrator has begun to strip it away, this interest is merely an expression of what Heidegger terms “curiosity,” which is why the narrator so jealously keeps them out of the room. For Heidegger, curiosity, like that exhibited by John and Jennie, “seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty […] curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the possibility of distraction” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962], 216, his emphasis). John and Jennie seek out the woman behind the wall-paper because it is a novelty, a new source of distraction. The narrator, on the other hand, seeks out this woman (her self) because she wants to avoid distraction, to “tarry alongside what is closest”—hence her need to keep John and Jennie outside of the room.

20. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 320.

21. The ability of the narrator to turn her attention from her self to the house and then to the wall-paper indicates desire's indifference to its object. What matters is not the object but the path of desire itself.

22. Johnston, “Exploring Lack,” 79.

23. Ibid. Because one's subject position, as Johnston conceives it here, is textual—the narrator writes herself into it—it fails to transcend the symbolic order, and hence indicates an abandonment of desire. In addition, because it is wholly symbolic, a textual subject position can't be the site of agency that hopes to challenge the symbolic order.

24. Marx, Capital, 77.

25. Ibid.

26. Gilbert and Gubar, 90; Haney-Peritz, 116; Golden, 193. Janice Haney-Peritz also points out the similarity between the yellow wall-paper and the symbolic order. However, she sees the narrator's “identification” with the woman in the wall-paper as an indication that “the register of the narrator's reading and writing begins to shift from the symbolic to the imaginary” (Haney-Peritz, 118). Following from this shift, the narrator's final break from the wall-paper at the end of the story becomes a complete regression into the imaginary and, as is consonant with the imaginary realm, indicative of an attitude of aggression toward the other (John). By focusing on the symbolic-imaginary axis rather than the real-symbolic axis, Haney-Peritz mistakes a Real break from the symbolic order for an imaginary regression. This is clear in the narrator's attitude toward John after her break from the wall-paper: rather than acting aggressively toward him (as Haney-Peritz suggests), the narrator creeps over him as if he weren't there. In the imaginary, where every other is either a rival or a site of identification, this indifference to the other is unthinkable.

27. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 104.

28. Copjec, Read My Desire, 225.

29. For an alternative reading of the yellowness of the wall-paper, see Lanser, 425-436. As Lanser and Mary Jacobus both point out, criticism has almost completely ignored the significance of the adjective in the title of the story.

30. Because Gilman's story inverts the causal relationship within the concept of reification, it effectively bypasses Louis Althusser's critique of the concept as “humanist.” For Althusser's sustained critique of humanist Marxism, see Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1969).

31. The term “meditation,” with all its Cartesian resonances, is the most appropriate term for what the narrator attempts in this story. Though she is no rationalist, she assumes, like Descartes, in her attitude toward the wall-paper, that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me” (Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 15). Her project of peeling back the layers of wall-paper represents a modern variation on the Cartesian theme of “radical doubt.”

32. Copjec, Read My Desire, 54, her emphasis.

33. The fact that the narrator sees the object of her desire in the yellow wall-paper—“her relentless pursuit of a single meaning on the wall” (Lanser, 420)—is, for Susan Lanser, the indication of a reductive interpretive strategy (which has been reproduced by feminists reading the story). Lanser argues that the wall-paper is an “unreadable text” (Lanser, 420) and “immensely complicated” (Lanser, 421), in which the narrator finds a single meaning—what she desires. Lanser offers us, in effect, a version of the Derridean critique of Hegel: Gilman and Hegel sublate difference, reducing the contradictions and complexities of a rich text into a single story, the story of the subject. Lanser's critique of Gilman misses the mark, however, in its suggestion that what the narrator finds beneath the wall-paper is something substantial. What the narrator finds is a self, but a self bereft of predicates, an empty, unsubstantial self. Discovering the emptiness of one's self, in this sense, amounts to a confession of the failure of the attempt to discover meaning, rather than the triumph of a single meaning over the complexity of the text (which is exactly what occurs in Hegel as well).

34. The vacillations of the narrator demonstrate the ambiguous relation of the subject to her desire. As Lacan points out in the Ethics seminar, the subject “does not have a simple and unambiguous relationship to his wish. He rejects it, he censures it, he doesn't want it. Here we encounter the essential dimension of desire—it is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire” (Lacan, Seminar VII, 14). The key for the narrator is her ability to desire her desire, rather than to desire to retreat from it.

35. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9. Because the analyst never gives the analysand what she bargains for, Fink argues, psychoanalysis can't be reduced to the provider/client contractual arrangement—I give you this in exchange for that—on which so much therapy is modeled today. Psychoanalysis thwarts the contractual model, insofar as it never gives us what we go into it expecting. This is an important way in which it is antithetical to the logic of capital and exchange.

36. The narrator is in a similar position to the slave in Hegel's master/slave dialectic. Because the slave experiences “absolute fear,” a fear that individualizes, she, unlike the master (who knows no fear and whose consciousness is utterly dependent on the slave), attains “independent self-consciousness” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 119).

37. Jeanette King and Pam Morris see the narrator's position at the end of the story as ‘the finality of the ideological process” (Jeannette King and Pam Morris, “On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’” Studies in Short Fiction 26 [1989]: 31). For them, this final act represents the narrator's defeat: “When the woman behind the paper ‘gets out,’ […] this is an image not of liberation but of the victory of the social ideal” because this woman is the narrator's “conforming self—the creation of social convention” (King and Morris, 31). Such a reading leaves two questions: If the escape from the wall-paper is the triumph of the narrator's “conforming self,” why does John faint? And, why, after she escapes from the wall-paper, does the narrator—for the first time in the story—speak of her own name as if it belonged to someone else, a clear sign that she has moved beyond its symbolic mandate?

38. Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 459.

39. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44, his emphasis.

40. For a thorough summary of the many critical positions on the ending of the story, see Elaine R. Hedges, “‘Out at Last’? ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ after Two Decades of Feminist Criticism,” in Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Joanne B. Karpinski (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 222-233.