What Cannot Be (Re)written: Disentangling Panoptic Structures in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” and Herland
Heather Fox
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 4
Abstract
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was an architectural response to an eighteenth-century problem, positioning inmates’ bodies relative to the watchtower to perpetuate a sense of constant visibility. But the Panopticon’s design is not dependent on a prison setting; it can be evoked in any setting that constructs a panoptic relationship between the observer and the observed. The paper argues that the settings and patriarchal ideology locate protagonists’ bodies within panopticon-like surveillance in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland. They are subjects without agency who, despite resistance, perpetuate the design they attempt to overturn. Whether structured as a prison (Bentham’s Panopticon), a nursery (the narrator’s room in “The Yellow Wallpaper”), or a utopia (the all-female society of Herland) the psychological effects of the infrastructure remain intact. The paper concludes that it is impossible to eliminate the Panopticon within the shadow of the Panopticon because its design perpetuates its effect. Until ideology is revised the narrative, despite its repositioning, remains strikingly similar.
Keywords: Panopticon, Survelliance, Patriarchy, Bodies, Women’s Literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jeremy Bentham
Heather Fox (Heather.Fox@eku.edu) is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, USA. A Frances S. Summersell and Phi Kappa Phi award recipient, her research engages interdisciplinary approaches to American literature (particularly women’s literature and the literature of the American South), writing and rhetoric studies, and archival studies. Her current projects include a monograph that situates women writers’ narrative arrangements as social commentary and a collaborative article on recovery-based archival research as a pedagogy for student investment.