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Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

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From: Studies in Short Fiction
Date: 19940101
Author:Bak, John S.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' can be read as a feminist assertion of freedom. The story has been read as feminist in its criticism of men and their efforts to control women. However, earlier criticism has interpreted the narrator-wife as having been destroyed by the experience of being confined in a room. Michel Foucault's theories about Jeremy Bentham 's Panopticon helps understand the wife's experience. The yellow wall paper becomes a symbol of constant surveillance like the tower in the Panopticon. This paranoia makes the wife schizophrenic. However, this ...

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