Madness and/or Language — Or Why Does ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Haunt Us? Cover Image

Madness and/or Language — Or Why Does ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Haunt Us?
Madness and/or Language — Or Why Does ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Haunt Us?

Author(s): Nóra Séllei
Subject(s): Gender Studies
Published by: Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara

Summary/Abstract: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a haunted and haunting text. It is haunted not only because of the narrator’s creepy feeling that she is in a haunted house; not only because of the ending, i.e. the ghostly and ghastly madwoman tearing off the yellow wallpaper, shaking the bars of the attic room, and climbing over her fainted husband; or not only because of the other women creeping all around the house; and not only because of the mechanism of how the plot and the symbolism of the text can be described in the Freudian term of “the uncanny effect”.

  • Issue Year: 2003
  • Issue No: 02
  • Page Range: 10-21
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: English