Week 2 Discussion Board Assignment
While the initial gothic literature is often looked at as sensationalist literature Dependent on characters type and a repetitive plot, the later literature uses gothic of political and social issues. From the four stories, I found Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers and Gilman’s The Yellow Paper as the stories that best exemplify the use of female gothic. In this discussion post, I will extensively examine how these two stories use female gothic as well as the other elements of gothic that are explicit through these stories. By evaluating the heroines of each story, which forms the basis of this post, there is a gendered power dynamic, which is crucial in analyzing the story’s message.
Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a female gothic tale expressed through psychoanalytical and psychological imagery with a powerful feminist message. The author uses the traditional gothic literacy device of the folding mansion, the potent repressive male antagonist, and distraught heroine to explore her indictment of patriarchal marginalized women and issues of women. “…nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (Gilman 31). Moreover, the indication of the narrator’s growing paranoia shows her declining mental state as she feels trapped and says being trapped is undesirable.
In Susan Glaspell’s short story A Jury of Her Peers, female gothic is candid through the women’s way of being discriminated against, terrified, and laughed at by the authorities of men such as husbands, the police, and the police officer. Men think women cannot be helpful in the investigation because they “women are used to worrying over trifles” (Glaspell 87), as Mr. Hale said. To prove that women are terrified and worried over trifles, Mr. Peters, the police offer laughed when women found destroyed fruit preserves in the terrifying kitchen, and they are worried about them. “But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” (Glaspell 89) again, it is pointing out the triviality of the women.
While the stories qualify as the best two examples of female gothic, the stories also contain other gothic elements. In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, John in shock after breaking in on his insane wife and becomes unrecognized by his wife, who calls him “that man” and complains about having to “creep over him” when making her way along the wall. Moreover, by John treating his wife as a “case” and not as a person with her own will, the imprisoning relationship destroys him is apparent in the novel’s chilling finale.
On the other hand, Glaspell’s short story A Jury of Her Peers, John Wright, is unceremoniously murdered by his wife Minnie Wright while he does not exhibit any of the negative traits the other characters frown upon such as excessive drinking and failing to pay debts. Besides, male gothic is evident when Mrs. Hales worries that her husband may reveal his tendency to “say unnecessary things” and make things more challenging for Minnie Wright when telling the story of his recovery.
Conclusively, there is a gendered power dynamic from the heroes and heroines from the two selected stories, which is crucial in literacy analysis for contemporary contextualization. In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the female’s gender power is expressed through the patriarchal marginalization of women through the narrator, while feminism is candid through how the narrator treats her husband when he faints on her site. On the other hand, Glaspell’s short story A Jury of Her Peers female gothic is expressed through terrifying and discriminating women, while male gothic is candid on how Minnie Wright treats and eventually kills her husband John Wright in a terrifying situation.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ” The Yellow Wall-paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-text Critical Edition. Ohio University Press, 2006.
Glaspell, Susan. “A jury of her peers.” Images of Women in Literature (1917): 370-85.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The handbook to gothic literature. NYU Press, 1998.