Hysteric Aesthetics : The Gendered Aspect of Narrative Form in "The Yellow Wallpaper"(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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  • Hysteric aesthetics: the gendered aspect of narrative form in "The yellow wallpaper"

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This paper attempts to reconsider the aesthetic aspect of Charlotte Perkins's Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." By aesthetic aspect I mean certain formal and rhetorical features that not only convey the narrative plot but present some significant values of their own. I submit that the feminist hermeneutic community, generated in process of the three decades of critical analyses of "The Yellow Wallpaper," tends to draw its boundary by excluding the stylistic analysis of the text. Style, understood as various modes of presenting written materials including punctuation, typography and arrangement, becomes the constitutive other in this hermeneutic community. I will first examine the curious relationship between the aesthetic elements of the text and their feminist reception, and then proceed to present my own reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper," focusing on the shifting nature of the narrative voice that can be intimately connected with the exacerbation of the heroine's nervous dementia. By so doing, my analysis of "The Yellow Wallpaper" will pay close attention to the particular process in which certain modes of expression may come to be repressed by the gendered conventions of narrative development. In my course of analysis, I intend to attribute various symptoms of hysteria to the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the story. This does not mean that I will diagnose the story's style as pathological, but rather I would like to consider how the hysteric symptoms can be turned into the aesthetics of a certain kind of literary form.

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