Madness and the Fractured Psyche in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Authors : Begüm Sude Mızrak

Pages : 27-40

Doi:10.46250/kulturder.1751965

View : 292 | Download : 395

Publication Date : 2025-12-10

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Framed through Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, The Yellow Wallpaper reveals madness as both fracture and form, exposing a paradoxical state where repression and resistance coexist. The narrator’s psychological disintegration, catalyzed by enforced silence and infantilization, transforms into an act of symbolic rebellion. The yellow wallpaper becomes a psychic mirror, reflecting not only internal conflict but also an unconscious strategy of survival. Freud’s concept of repression unveils how language, or its absence, distorts emotion into obsession. Lacan’s theory of the split subject locates the narrator’s crisis in the unstable space between desire and identity, a conflict shaped by the collision of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Narrator’s fixation on the trapped woman and her eventual identification with her suggests a failed attempt to bridge this gap. What begins as a slow mental collapse becomes a desperate quest for coherence within a system that denies her agency. In this analysis, madness is explored as not simply pathology but a language of the silenced, a final, fractured means of self-assertion. This paper aims to examine how The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates the coexistence of repression and resistance through psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, to posit how madness operates as a fractured form of subjectivity and symbolic expression.
Keywords : Charlotte Perkins Gilman, psikanaliz, delilik, bastırma, kadın özneselliği

ORIGINAL ARTICLE URL