Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

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• Pulped and Reduced, Dried Out and Flattened: the Horrors of Aborted Agency in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Simon C. Estok (bio)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” pushes its readers to see beyond what is visible, both metaphorically and literally, at the same time calling into question what it means to see the unseen and what it means not to see it. Haunted by pasts that refuse to remain in the past, the ecogothic dimensions of the story become more pronounced the deeper the reader peers in. At the center of the story is paper, and obviously it is the visions the narrator has from the paper that generate the plot. These visions and the plot they generate in turn reveal to the reader things that might otherwise be unseen—including, most obviously, the subjugation of the narrator under patriarchal authority. They reveal far more than this, however. Like the images in a 3D movie or a stereogram, there are things in this story that are in front of but not easily visible to the reader, at least not the way that the narrator’s suffering is—experiences that bob and float in the long stream of sexism that returns and haunts the narrative. Indeed, the story exposes more than simply human relationships and histories, relationships and histories that reside in the very paper itself. This essay builds on the foundational work of scholars such as Dawn Keetley, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Elizabeth Parker, and Michelle Poland¹ on vegetal agency while exploring the explicitly entangled complexities of the truncated agencies of nature and women in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I argue that this story pushes the reader to think beyond the convenient anthropocentric and ecophobic notions of a vengeful nature toward a more balanced understanding of vegetal agency, an understanding of plants on their own terms. It is in our continuing failure to do so and through our thwarting of the agency of the vegetal world that the magnitude of ecogothic horror takes form in this story. [End Page 75]

Defining the ecogothic is a relatively new endeavor. Arguably, the first volume to explore the ecogothic was the 2013 collection Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. This impressive collection does indeed provide “a starting point for future discussions,”² as the editors hope it will, and it does so as much by what it omits as by what it covers. The most notable and surprising omission is any serious discussion of ecophobia. It is one thing to follow Timothy Clark in “tracing different conceptions of nature and their effects throughout the history and cultures of the world,”³ but it is quite another to misperceive (or, worse yet, ignore) the roots of the ecogothic. To be perfectly clear: no ecophobia, no ecogothic. Tom Hillard’s dismissive response to theorizing about ecophobia is as clear in his 2013 “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch” as it was in his 2010 “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature,” where he suggests that to start analyzing ecophobia, “we need look no further than the rich and varied vein of critical approaches used to investigate fear in literature.”⁴ To look “no further,” however, seems—to use Hillard’s own words, originally aimed at calls for critics to address ecophobia—“overly proscriptive, potentially stifling, and, let’s be honest, unlikely to happen.”⁵ Nonetheless, Hillard is perhaps the first scholar to have made the connection between ecophobia and Gothic nature. In their “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic” in their edited collection entitled Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils offer a more nuanced and, in many ways, more honest discussion of the roots and scope of the “ecogothic,” explaining at the very outset that “efforts to characterize the term ‘ecogothic’ arguably began with Simon C. Estok’s provocative 2009 essay ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’.”⁶ They explain that “at the broadest level, the ecogothic inevitably intersects with ecophobia, not only because ecophobic representations of nature will be infused, like the gothic, with fear and dread but also because ecophobia is born out of the failure of humans to...