Analysis Of John S. Bak's The Yellow Wallpaper

In his article, “Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism”, John S. Bak begins his analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" by investigating the author's own life. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written as a critique of S. Weir Mitchell's "Rest Cure" which Gilman went through to be treated from "nervous prostration." The narrator's physiological and emotional health is harmed by her husband who follows Mitchell's treatment plan. Bak explores the imprisonment of the narrator, and ties it with an eighteenth century surveillance method called the Panopticon. The constant surveillance in the Panopticon bred paranoia; Gilman went insane by the "two bulbous eyes" that watch her from the wallpaper. Bak does not see Gilman's character as destroyed by her imprisonment. He believes that the narrator destroys the Panopticon by tearing down the wallpaper, and that she frees herself from patriarchal society through her descent into madness.

There is no doubt that the description of the room in which the woman lived could have easily made the person mad. The mental failure of the narrator can be attributed to the psychical imprisonment which was expected to treat her mental illnesses. The narrator is confined in an isolated place three miles from the villages in a room with barred windows and walls covered with yellow papers. Bak describes the psychical imprisonment as a situation that stripped the woman’s humanity. According to Bak, “The Panopticon‘s directive would be to ‘induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’” (Bak, 1994). Bak suggests that this form of observation had a detrimental effect on the person upon which it was inflicted. This theory is proven as we watch the narrator descent into