Between Silence and Narrative: Disciplinary Space and the Construction of Female Subjectivity in The Yellow Wallpaper

Authors : Gülistan Avşar

Pages : 503-515

Doi:10.47777/cankujhss.1736466

View : 79 | Download : 554

Publication Date : 2025-12-29

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This study critically examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as a narrative that exposes the gender-based domination of modern medicine over women and the spatial strategies of disciplinary power. The research employs a qualitative literary analysis and critical discourse analysis approach, drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power and panoptic surveillance as well as Elaine Showalter’s concept of the discourse of female madness. The findings indicate that the fixed bed, barred window, and enclosed space in the story not only keep the narrator’s body under constant observation but also function as instruments that devalue her subjectivity through the diagnosis of madness. While the prohibition of writing produces an epistemic silence that prevents the articulation of experience, the narrator’s secret journaling creates a fragile form of resistance that rejects the role of the suppressed subject. According to the results, the language of the narrative, initially coherent, gradually transforms into a fragmented and contradictory discourse reflecting psychological disintegration. The text reveals how Victorian patriarchal medicine, combined with domestic hierarchies, institutionalizes control over the female body and demonstrates that writing becomes a subjective space of protest against the modern surveillance society.
Keywords : Disciplinary Power, Panopticism, Female Madness, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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