Breaking the Mold: The Role of Gender Instability in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

and Jane Eyre Maddie Coburn

In many respects, gender norms work to create the very foundation of our social behavior and interactions. With an individual’s identification as male or female comes a set of normative gender standards that heavily, though often subconsciously, influence our behavior as well as our judgment of others’ behavior. In literature, authors can call attention to such social behaviors and institutions through either adherence to or deviance from the norms. This authorial tool is particularly compelling in the Gothic genre, which constitutes the “literary grotesque” by focusing on “incongruous, abnormal, ‘monstrous’ characters, situations, and events” (Bailey 270). The emphasis on the abnormal is created largely through the defiance of normative social behavior, and the disruption of gender norms is a particularly powerful tool in influencing the subconscious perceptions of the reader. In Gothic characters, inversions of masculinity and femininity and behavior that are perceived as being inconsistent with assigned gender establish an inherently uncomfortable and strange experience for the reader as they attempt to navigate the textual instability of our foundational social constructs. In the nineteenth century Gothic texts “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jane Eyre , Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Charlotte Brönte, respectively, utilize the unconventional heroine and the abject to manipulate the social constructions of normative gender performances. Through such distortions, Gilman and Brönte influence the reader’s perception of their unorthodox characters by marking them as strange or “Other,” thus contributing to the abnormalities that make Gothic texts so chilling.

One method Gothic authors use to manipulate gender roles is the inclusion of an unconventional heroine. This female protagonist is often of lower financial or social standing, but is independent, intelligent, stands as a challenge against the patriarchal authority of the male protagonist, and “does not fully adhere to conventional sex-role stereotypes” (Radway 143). Utilizing this heroine’s strong personality, Gothic authors juxtapose her role in the relationship with that of the male, thus creating conflicts in the relative masculinity and femininity of the pair. These conflicts are representative of the smaller, more subtle changes authors make that challenge the patriarchal social foundations within the text, thus disrupting the reader’s internal understanding of gender norms and contributing to the eerie feeling caused by Gothic stories. In Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brönte explores the distortion of gender roles through her unconventional heroine, Jane. Like the archetypal Gothic heroine, Jane is independent, desires to support herself, and navigates her rather tumultuous relationship with Mr. Rochester by striving for a position of power through the “conventional stance of passive resistance” (Kahane 49). Internally, she contemplates the validity of the socially established gender norms when she asserts that “women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer” (Brönte 63). Her longing for independence and social equality is demonstrative of more general overarching Gothic elements that “suggest the inescapability of the past and of inheritance,” as these freedoms have been socially withheld from women on the grounds of patriarchal protection throughout history, and as an extension point to women’s social exclusion (Bailey 271). Jane’s determination to obtain self-sufficiency through her strong personality and actions contributes to her abnormalities — consequently exposing the abnormalities of the narrative as a whole — and thus enables the novel to adhere to the characteristic Gothic inclusion of peculiar characters, lending to an equally peculiar and often horrific plot.

In addition to including Jane’s willful personality, Brönte also establishes an inversion of gender roles between Jane, who often acts more masculine, and Mr. Rochester, who often displays stereotypically female traits. The main contribution to this instability is Jane’s firm belief in equality, as she rejects claims to superiority based upon gender, age, or experience, instead seeing superiority in terms of intelligence and compassion, as well as one’s social standing and monetary status (Brönte 79). This belief drives her interactions with Mr. Rochester, with whom she believes she is an intellectual equal and over whom she feels “an inward power; a sense of influence” (Brönte 180). The power she holds over him contributes to the instability of gender roles in their relationship, with Jane taking the masculine role and Mr. Rochester assuming the feminine role in many of their interactions. One notable example of gender instability between the pair is in their first meeting, when Jane is walking to Thornfield and helps Rochester after his horse slips on ice. During this interaction, the gender roles of the first meeting in the archetypal historical romance are reversed to accommodate the Gothic romance, with Jane acting as the hero to help an injured Rochester, the “damsel in distress.” He initially asserts that he does not need help, but Jane refuses to leave him “at so late an hour, in this solitary lane,” and so he succumbs to her insistence and lets her help him to his horse (Brönte 66). Jane’s assumption of the commanding, powerful role in this instance continues throughout most of their interactions, while Rochester often takes the more emotional, submissive role often attributed to women. Indeed, Jane is often more calm and levelheaded, with a sense of authority in perilous situations such as the fire in Rochester’s bedroom, in which she saves his life and remains abnormally calm and logical as she locates a basin of water to douse the flames (Brönte 87). In stark contrast to Jane’s levelheaded demeanor, however, is Rochester’s confused and angry outburst in which he demands, “What have you done with me sorceress? Who is in the room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me?” (Brönte 87). This quick succession of questions and demands highlights Jane’s composed replies, and as an extension accentuates the reversal of stereotypical sex roles in the hazardous situation. For the reader, the continual inversion of gender roles seen between Jane and Mr. Rochester continues to cement disruption of gender roles within the text, and thus establishes a subconscious apprehension for the characters’ future actions and heightened sensitivity to the other abnormalities in the story.

In addition to including an unconventional heroine, Gothic authors also manipulate gender roles through the female abject. As explained by Julia Kristeva and John Lechte, “There is, in abjection, one of those violent and obscure revolts of being against that which threatens it and which seems to it to come from an outside or an exorbitant inside; something that is thrown next to the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It is there, very close, but unassimilable” (Kristeva and Lechte 125). The acceptable ideas contradicted by the abject, thus eliciting the response described by Kristeva and Lechte, are determined by cultural and social constructs, and can result from instability in normative gender performances. Far from the socially unconventional heroine who rejects gender norms on the grounds of logic and independence, however, is the mentally unstable female who unwittingly tests the boundaries between the self and the Other as she navigates mental illness. By characterizing the insane individual as female, Gothic authors open the door for questions regarding a woman’s control over their self-expression, specifically, the extent of self-expression allowed, how much control should be granted, and how a quest for such independence blurs the lines of gender performances. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates the inclusion of the female abject as she tells the story of a woman’s descent into madness after struggling with postpartum depression. While the narrator adheres to gender norms early in the story and consents to her husband’s directions, as her mental health deteriorates — and she begins to move across the border between self and Other — her willingness to obey him deteriorates as well. This shift is most striking at the end of the story when the narrator seemingly embraces her insanity. Most conspicuous during this scene is her blurring of the boundary between the self and Other binary through her animal-like behavior, as readers learn that she has been habitually destroying the room in which she is kept, noting that the “bedstead is fairly gnawed” and that she “can creep smoothly on the floor” because her shoulder “just fits in that long smooch around that wall” (Gilman 9). By moving across the human/non-human binary in this way, the narrator elicits an abject response in both her husband, who faints, and the reader, as this scene acts as the culmination of her non-normative behavior. The rapid deterioration of her mental health and her consequential actions evoke this response because they “perturb an identity, a system, an order; that which does not respect limits, places or rules” (Kristeva and Lechte 127).

Similarly, the narrator’s perversion of normative gender performances, through her assumption of the position of power and through her defiance towards her husband John, calls further attention to her unorthodox behavior and contributes to the eerie, shocking conclusion. Indeed, the abject response and her rejection of gender norms go hand-in-hand at the story’s end, when that narrator complains that John fainted “right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time” (Gilman 9). By crawling over him after he displayed a stereotypically female response and fainted, the narrator gains power over John, which is demonstrative of the stark role reversal as John held the power over her earlier in the story (particularly in terms of her physical and mental health). Additionally, she begins to employ the same condescending language John used with her, calling him “young man” to compliment him calling her “little girl,” accentuating the reversal of what was originally considered normative masculine behavior when attributed to John, but is incongruous when attributed to the narrator (Gilman 9, 5). Her insanity and animal-like behavior are a culmination of a long period of mental degradation during which she progressively defies gender norms, and is thus representative of a larger Gothic theme in which “the heroine seems compelled to either resume a more quiescent, socially acceptable role, or to be destroyed” (Kahane 54). Here, the latter appears to be the applicable case, as she accepts her masculine role and her seemingly irreparable mental health, and fully moves across the boundary between the rational, ideal female and the insane, more masculine female. As such, this movement elicits a “massive and abrupt irruption of a strangeness” for both the other characters and the reader, as the narrator assumes the role of “a ‘something’ that [is] not recogni[zed] as a thing” in terms of both her human/non-human identity as well as her female/male identity (Kristeva and Lechte 126). Thus, her descent into madness and the abject response it creates is further emphasized by her increasing masculinity, constructing an eerie, uncomfortable situation for the readers as the other characters attempt to cope with the questions that arise regarding their own identity and place in the binary crossed by the narrator. In this way, Gilman utilizes the abject female to further establish instability in the gender roles in the narrator’s relationship with John, creating the strange and unnatural atmosphere characteristic of Gothic texts.

Questions of potential feminist implications arise from an analysis of the instability of gender roles in Gothic texts, though literary scholars disagree on “whether the stories are conservative reaffirmations of ‘the cult of domesticity’ and the ‘feminine mystique’ or covert feminist protests at the subjugation of women” (Radway 142). Those that believe that Gothic texts work to cement social norms look to the progression of the narrative itself and assert that “achievement of it comes only with submission to traditional gender arrangements and assumption of a typically female personality structure” (Radway 155). For example, proponents of this idea argue that Jane Eyre is consistent with patriarchal themes because despite Jane’s independence and pluck, she becomes more willing to accept submission to patriarchal authority — namely that of Mr. Rochester — as the narrative ends in marriage and compliance with gender norms. In contrast, while Jane becomes more willing to accept traditional gender roles, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” becomes more apt to reject them, and her narrative ends in a broken marriage. Scholars who maintain that Gothic texts serve a feminist purpose point to the heroine, “who is either wrongly abused by men or who remains unusually independent” for the majority of the story, and as such allows the reader to identify with the heroine and become discontent with patriarchal oppression (Radway 143). This is true of both heroines in Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as they are subjugated both by the men in the story and by the more general patriarchal social institutions. So, while some texts, like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” may be seen to have more explicit feminist messages than others, like Jane Eyre , analyzing these texts provides insight into women’s subjection to gender roles established by the patriarchy, which inherently creates a female Otherness. As such, the reversal of gender roles can be seen to empower the female, and analyses of an author’s reasoning behind such distortions calls attention to the patriarchal ideas that place the female in the Other position, regardless of whether or not the text provides explicit feminist arguments. Both the unconventional heroine and the abject female call attention to this phenomenon, as they demonstrate how “certain forms of femininity are rendered abject by a patriarchal society that requires their repression to reproduce itself” (Margree 430). Indeed, some scholars have noted that this fear of the female Other is the foundation of the anxieties created by Gothic texts: “The Gothic fear is revealed as a fear of femaleness itself, perceived as threatening one’s wholeness, obliterating the very boundaries of self” (Kahane 59). This assertion has startling implications for the female’s place in a patriarchal society, despite the fact that women are largely growing to share Jane’s sentiment that they should be allowed “to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (Brönte 63). In this way, the perceived incompatibility of identifying as female in a patriarchal society is utilized by Gothic authors like Brönte and Gilman to elicit this inherent fear of the female Other in their stories, contributing to the more overt fear of the supernatural that we associate with Gothic texts.

In conclusion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Charlotte Brönte establish instability in the gender roles within their respective stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jane Eyre , to construct abnormal characters who in turn contribute to the strange, eerie atmosphere of the text. Charlotte Brönte accomplishes gender instability through her unconventional heroine, Jane, who frequently defies gender norms with her willful, independent personality and through her more masculine behavior in her relationship with Mr. Rochester. In contrast, Charlotte Perkins Gilman includes the abject female who acts as the narrator of the story and documents her descent into madness. Over the course of the story, the narrator moves progressively across the boundary between the human/non-human binary, eliciting an abject response in her husband and producing a shocking, terrifying conclusion for the reader. This digression into an almost animal-like state is emphasized by her rejection of gender standards, with the gender roles between her and her husband becoming fully reversed at the end of the story and amplifying her incongruity as she not only adopts insanity, but also masculinity. In Gothic texts such as “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jane Eyre , the fear that accompanies the disruption of socially normative behavior is accentuated by the fear of femininity, which is seen as Other in a society where the behavioral norms were established by a patriarchal social foundation. In this way, Gilman and Brönte take advantage of the pre-existing social fears surrounding instability in gender roles and femininity to establish the peculiarity and horror associated with the Gothic genre.

Works Cited

Bailey, Peggy Dunn. “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic.” The Mississippi Quarterly , vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, pp. 269–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor. org/stable/26477320.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre . 3rd ed., Harper & Brothers of New York, 1848.

Gilman, Charlotte P. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Small & Maynard, 1899, web.archive.org/web/20130704052511/ http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/ yellowwallpaper.pdf.

Kahane, Claire. “Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity.” The Centennial Review , vol. 24, no. 1, 1980, pp. 43–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23740372.

Kristeva, Julia, and John Lechte. “Approaching Abjection.” Oxford Literary Review , vol. 5, no. 1/2, 1982, pp. 125–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43973647.

Margree, Victoria. “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction.” Women’s Writing , vol. 21, no. 4, 2014, pp. 425-43. Humanities International Complete , https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2014.9201 36.

Radway, Janice. “The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and ‘Feminist’ Protest.” American Quarterly , vol. 33, no. 2, 1981, pp. 140–62. JSTOR, https:// doi.org/10.2307/2712313.