Protection as Imprisonment: Male Authority and the Erosion of Female Agency in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Abstract

This paper will analyze the two prominent short stories, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1966) by Joyce Carol Oates. The purpose of this analysis is to illustrate the way in which male protection functions as a psychological mechanism that breaks the female protagonists down and destroy their identity. The husband's profession as a physician enables him to use his medical authority to lock the narrator up in a house, under the guise of treating and curing her in the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. This supposed protection is exactly what contributes to her insanity, even if it is not the sole cause. In Oates's text, Connie has no agency or empowerment given to her from her family or society. This lack of protection from home and society makes her susceptible to the psychological attack from the stranger. The words and actions of the stranger are attempts to grasp at power, under the guise of knowing and caring for Connie. Drawing on feminist, Michel Foucault's (1995) theory of power, and the psychoanalytic theory regarding the impact of physical constraint on the self, this paper will argue that both stories illustrate a general contradiction in patriarchal society. The institutions meant to protect women such as marriage, medicine, home, family, etc. are the very institutions that make women vulnerable. The protagonists' declines into madness or physical destruction are not the result of the protection system failing, but rather the inevitable outcome of it succeeding. This paper will also argue that both authors employ spatial imagery as well as narrative structure to represent the regression of female identity under patriarchal power. Through images of rooms, houses, and locomotion, the authors demonstrate the physical and psychological constriction of the female self.