"White Women are only one step away from White Men"

Carol Margaret Davison was rude to Greg Johnson.

 

Her 2004 essay, Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, opens describing Greg’s Gothic allegory reading of  “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as “a fairly satisfactory general overview”. She goes on to declare that her essay “acts, to some degree, as a ‘corrective’ to Johnson’s essay and to the numerous studies that have read [“The Yellow Wallpaper”] exclusively as a light and nonpolitical horror tale or as a politically charged feminist piece that explores the ideology of femininity(48).” Her tone is dripping with patronizing superiority as she grants him the allowance of not having had access to several ground breaking studies made after his 1989 publication.

 

Carol, still, however, calls into question, and rightfully so, the restrictive bounds of perspective in the Gothic novel. She agrees with Greg that the short story contains several of the most familiar Gothic themes, such as “confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and irrational fear, the distraught heroine, the forbidding mansion, and the powerfully repressive male antagonist”, but completely disagrees with his claim that the story functions “as a Gothic parody”. To Carol, the suggestion that the story is a parody, a “literary composition… being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect”, is seemingly offensive, as it asserts that women are an unlikely subject for the short story as a Gothic novel, despite having been present in the nineteenth century, where the story takes place.

 

Davison outlines the parameters and nature of the Female Gothic, as incredibly complicated and continually debated and expanded, creating a pastiche of critics to construct the general narrative arc of a female Gothic narrative:
“Female Gothic Narratives may be described as cautionary, ritualistic, travel-adventure novels that involve the testing and emotional growth of a heroine on the verge of womanhood and marriage. These texts… do not limit themselves to promoting marriage as a woman’s primary goal… but frequently advocate a woman’s financial awareness of monetary and estate matters. The protagonist’s trials commence on the heels of receiving an education promoting benevolence, Christian faith, and moderation in all things, “the capacity for fine emotion”, and a quickness to display compassion for suffering Assuming the genre’s starring female role as a persecuted maiden, she is transported to, and virtually imprisoned in, an ancestral castle or manor home by the text’s other star- the enterprising, unyielding, ruthless, and attractive Gothic hero-villain who threatens the young woman’s maidenhead and inheritance. The Protagonist’s exploration, involves confrontation with mysteries whose ultimate unravelling signifies a process of self-discovery… [T]hese texts conclude with a more mature, sensible heroine, whose marital expectations have been rendered more realistic. The heroine’s virtue, in the form of her unshaken faith and fortitude, is usually rewarded by way of an inheritance and companionate marriage, a union that is figured as both practical and emotionally fulfilling.”

 

Published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a fictional secret journal of a woman who failed to relish in the joys of marriage and motherhood, and is sentenced by her doctor to a country rest with her husband. Forbidden to write, she explores the intoxicating pattern of the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of her cell, and the ghosts that lay beneath-or inside of- it. A complicated  feminist reading of the story shames Greg’s simplistic suggestion that the female Gothic subject is “unlikely”.  It is a sexist and rude assumption, inviting Carol’s rude response, I understand her desire, her frustration at the lack of acknowledgement of the difficulty of gender oppression, the assumption of white male omniscience. I understand. I’m a woman, too. Ain’t I a woman?

 

While reading Beloved again this week to write this paper, I’ve been thinking a lot about Carol; that I wonder if she’s read Beloved, that I bet she’s white, and that we share an abhorrence for assumptions.

 

More specifically, though, I’ve been thinking that Carol made an assumption of her own.

 

The short story very much falls in line with Carol’s own definition of  “The Female Gothic” mode, as, a form“distinguished from the traditional Gothic mode as it centers its lens on a young woman’s rite of passage into womanhood and her ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology, especially the joint institutions of marriage and motherhood.” Her entire argument is built on the assumption that this narrative is “The Female” Gothic experience.

 

It is not.

 

While the “married woman of the period was frequently commodified and became a femme couverte under established law- a woman whose autonomy and identity were denied”, the nineteenth century wasn’t all that great for Black women either/in particular- married or not.

 

Before I get into how Carol, ironically, engages in the same erasure for which she condemns Greg, I want to mention that I didn’t want to continue to assume Carol is white, so I looked her up.

 

She is.

 

And so, this essay, acts, to some degree, as an addendum to Carol’s essay, and to the numerous other writers who use the term “The Female Gothic” to describe the lived experience of the white woman.

 

According to Carol’s outline of the classic Gothic novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, is without a doubt a Gothic novel. Sethe, the distraught heroine, is confined both in the forbidding “mansion” of 124 and Sweet Home, rebelling against both, while “irrationally” fearful of the many powerfully repressive, often male, antagonist(s) of her story.

Her narrative would also qualify as a Female Gothic narrative, as it contains many of the concrete elements of the genre. The book switches between many perspectives, seeing three generations of women in this ex-slave family become the “persecuted maiden” at some point throughout their lives. Most literally, Baby Suggs speaks of her “trials commencing” after witnessing the “benevolent act” of being freed from Sweet Home. In her description of Sweet Home, she details, “The Garners, it seemed to her, ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching what they wanted known. And he didn’t stud his boys. Never brought them to her cabin with directions to ‘lay down with her’, like they did in Carolina, or rented their sex out on other farms.” Another benevolent act, Halle’s decision to buy Baby Suggs out of slavery is seen as benevolent of the Garners, that Mr. Garner “let” Halle buy her was more than he had to do. All three of the main “persecuted maidens” of the novel, Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Denver, all embark on large travel missions in their youth that change them, from Sethe’s escape from Sweet Home, Baby Suggs’s movement from  Sweet Home to 124, to Denver’s trip to the outside world looking for work. Each, at some point, becomes tied, imprisoned, in 124, an ancestral home to the Bodwins, a house “too big for [Suggs] alone” and

 

Letter to the editor

 

Dear anne, 

okay it's really not done yet, but here's where I'm going 

...finish detailing the formal elements of the "female gothic narrative" as described by the pastiche

 

1. Carol's own argument falls flat
   1. "rite of passage"
   2. differing definitions of womanhood
   3. reltionships to marriage and motherhood anything but ambivalent
   4. employs the supernatural for political ends
2. Gothic Villain also shifts, literally all characters, including us, the voyeurs
3. the big institutional villain of slavery
4. national character
5. white women not exempt from the oppressor
6. fitting to use beloved, which discusses that as a main theme. 

getting there, hope you can see my vision thus far, and hoping you dont really see this before i fix it anyway, lol.