Graduation blues

Ah, graduation. Not so far away now. I wish I could stop making mental lists.

(Image via What Makes The Pie Shops Tick?)

This list is anything but subjective

Everyone’s doing it right now, so I thought I might as well. This can be anything but all-encompassing, for obvious reasons; these are my favourite 15 records of the decade. I may not listen to some of them as much now as I did in the past, but their significance is undeniable in my opinion. So expect, I guess, some overlaps with everyone else’s lists. Some records are just that good. (In no particular order:)

• The Strokes - Is This It
• The Libertines - Up The Bracket
• Maxïmo Park - A Certain Trigger
• Field Music - Tones of Town
• Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now Youngster
• Adam Green - Friends of Mine
• Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock & Roll
• Electrelane - No Shouts, No Calls
• Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender
• Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
• The Arcade Fire - Funeral
• The White Stripes - Elephant
• The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby
• Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out of This Country
• Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People

the monotony in patterning

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’

Lewis Carroll

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famed short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, is a first-person account of the time the protagonist and narrator spends in a country house with her doctor husband in order to recover from what the reader suspects to be a postpartum depression. What she is prescribed, both by her husband and brother, also a physician, is rest: she must be away from society, she must not read, she must not write, for the excitement would be too much for her in her condition. Instead, she must spend her days in a room –an old nursery- covered in a yellow wallpaper which comes to occupy her entire reality.

Both the plot and the general atmosphere of the story do not fall far from the Gothic tradition, in which it was inscribed by most at the time of its publishing: the haunted house, the ghostly figure and the madness within the human psyche made its contemporary readers regard “The Yellow Wallpaper” as yet another gothic tale. Something in the setting of the story points, however, in a different direction for, as Kolodny has pointed out, Gilman “daringly projects mental derangement on to a middle-class wife and mother and makes the home, the sacrosanct sphere for dutiful women, the source of madness.” (Golden, 2004, 92) Another reading of the story, made by feminists at the time and hitherto, on the other hand, emphasizes the social and economic conditions which drive the narrator –and potentially all women- to madness.

Woman’s “sexueconomic condition” is that which leaves her financially and socially dependent on her husband and, by extension, bound to the home and to her duties as wife and mother. Virginia Woolf said many years ago in her 1929 essay A room of one’s own that “one only has to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face […] for women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force” (Woolf, 1993, 79). And so it happens in the story: it is in the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her that the nameless protagonist finds liberation and identification, even if they come at a cost. It is behind its intricacies that it appears the image of the woman fighting to break free; and it is also worth pointing out that that woman starts out as a mere shapeless stain, and it is the narrator’s highly imaginative mind (either going through an epiphanic process of sorts or simply going mad, or both) that will make her out to be the woman she will eventually identify with. This speaks plenty of the wallpaper’s symbolic significance, which has been taken to be, by different critics, the narrator’s own mind, or her unconscious, as well as, more generally, the “pattern” of social and economic dependence which reduces women to domestic slavery.

Fashion and interior decoration were considered more than acceptable topics of interest for women, but they were still mainly designed by men and, thus, can also be considered an expression of male aestheticism; in that sense, the wallpaper could be a metaphor for patriarchal discourse which design –because they construct- women just as the artist William Morris did the tapestry he was so renowned for. Both in life and in cultural production, phallocentric discourse attempted to enclose woman in definitions of her person and her potential which reduced her to extreme stereotypes: those of the angel-woman –pure, ethereal, fragile, dutiful, obedient- and the monster-woman -inconstant, irreverent, intransigent, autonomous, undefined. Enclosed both literally –for they have been enshrined within the walls of their homes- and figuratively in the architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, women have been “trapped in the specifically literary constructs of what Gertrude Stein was to call ‘patriarchal poetry’.” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984)

Language creates as well as reflects reality: “a set of linguistic signs whose representational claims are authored by society and whose power to control women’s fate, whether or not those claims are valid, is real. Representation has real, material consequences. In contrast, women’s power to originate signs is monitored: and, once produced, no legitimating social apparatus is available to give those signs substance in the real world.” (Treichler, 1984, 74) Women in patriarchal societies have been reduced to mere properties, to mere characters and images imprisoned in male discourse as in male works of art, they are the otherness designed: they exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and as sensual objects (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984, 8), according to men’s expectations and designs.  Following Gilbert and Gubar’s metaphor, they are killed into a perfect image of themselves (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984, 15), just as they are killed into art.

A good example of this is the cult of female frailty that came about in the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States as result of patriarchal socialization, inasmuch as it was a response to the ideal of beauty it produced. Girls learnt how to become a beautiful object according to the standards of the age and “to be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health”: “patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally.” (Gilbert & Gubar, 2007, 455)  Female invalidism became fashionable among the upper classes, and the medical discourse was far from objective: the diagnosis the woman in Gilman’s story gets –“a slight hysterical tendency”- not only names reality as fact, but has a considerable power over what that reality is to be from that point forward. Let us not forget that Gilman specifically said in her 1913 article “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” that she had written the story “[not to] drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy” (Gilbert & Gubar, 2007, 119), that is, as an evidence against the treatments women –including herself- had to endure to cure conditions like depression; those treatments forbade them from engaging in almost any kind of intellectual activity and secluded them in their houses, which in the author’s experience, only made things worse. Medicine can also work as a legitimizing element in the construct of women’s image and identity, and that is clearly exemplified by the theories prevailing at the time, which deemed men’s superior and women’s inferior social positions a result from habits of body associated with males and females throughout the animal kingdom[1] and thus linked women’s reading, for instance, to infertility, neurasthenia, insanity and even premature death. (Golden, 2004, 12) As Threichler puts it: “[diagnosis] stands in the middle of an equation which translates a phenomenological perception of the human body into a finite set of signs called ‘symptoms’ […] which are in turn assembled to produce a ‘diagnosis’; this sign generates treatment, a set of prescriptions that impinge once more upon the ‘real’ human body.” (Treichler, 1984, 69)

Women’s plight -the plight of the woman behind the wallpaper in Gilman’s story and of its narrator once they identify- is to “escape the sentence”, as it were, to recognise the artificial and the constructed in the so-called natural and be freed from the limitations of stereotypes, which makes the woman in the wallpaper, “the representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak.” (Treichler, 1984, 64) The ending on the story is interesting seen in this light, for it makes it both triumphant and horrifying, it makes madness both positive and negative: the narrator goes through an epiphanic process that leads to her identification with the woman behind the wallpaper, who can be seen as her double; together they rip the wallpaper, and creep over their doctor husband, who has fainted at their sight: they have left the voice of diagnosis in shambles at their feet, they have escaped the sentence. She remains, however, physically bound by a rope and locked in a room; surely her husband will wake, and thus her victory is a temporary one. The material conditions of social life will have to change radically before there can be a “real way out of mankind’s ancestral mansion of many apartments” (Golden, 2004, 98), before other women can be really free; her triumph is to have sharpened and articulated the nature of women’s condition: the story only hints at possibilities for change, and so its ending is complex, ambiguous: “woman is both passive and active, subject and object, sane and mad. Contradictions remain, for they are inherent in women’s current ‘condition’.” (Treichler, 1984, 74) As Humpty Dumpty put it in Through the looking glass, the master of words, of utterances, of phrases, “can manage the whole lot of them.”

[1] Like that of Dr Patrick Geddes, for instance, who explained man’s constitution –the “katabolic” constitution- as characterized by physical stamina, intelligence, independence and courage; woman’s “anabolic” constitution, on the other hand, meant she had to conserve energy for survival and reproduction. (Golden, 2004, 12) This is clearly a theory made possible by the pre-existent stereotypes of the age about both men and women, which, in turn, it helped legitimize.