 All right, well, welcome. Thanks for coming on a Wednesday to a new location. I know it's not quite as plush as our new Allard Hall location, but I think it'll work just fine. And thanks for being here. For those of you guys who don't know me, my name's Derek Gladwin. This is my first Arts One lecture. So I'm happy to be here doing this. And today we're talking about sort of a, I guess you could say it's kind of framed as a family, although it's sort of an unhappy family at times. But nevertheless, there are some relations between the characters in play here. Of course, we have Simonda Bavar. We have Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And a little bit of where Mitchell is going to find his way in here. Just a very minor character, though. And then, of course, the woman in the wallpaper is always sort of a presence that we need to recognize. And she's in this. So maybe the way to get us started, get us sort of thinking about things and getting us warmed up, is I'm going to sort of throw out a bit of a brain teaser, I guess you could say. So if you've heard this before, don't say the answer. But we'll assume that you haven't heard it before. So there's a boy and a father. They are going to a soccer game on Saturday morning. Father's trying to get all the food, the water for the day. The son is getting all the soccer equipment. They get in their little presa. And they're zooming across Vancouver. And they go across a large intersection. As they're going across the intersection, a bus hits them right into the side. Wham! Kills the father instantly. It's not a happy story, folks. I'm not saying that. But it kills the father instantly. And the son, fortunately, is alive. So the ambulance comes. The ambulance rushes the son to the hospital. He's being wheeled into intensive care, emergency, waiting for the doctor. The doctor comes in, pulls back the curtain, and says, I can't operate. He's my son. Who's the doctor? Who's the doctor? Yeah, the mother, exactly. Simple, simple answer. But be honest. How many people immediately thought mother? Immediately, that question. No, we didn't. We didn't think mother immediately. Could have been a stepfather. Could have two dads. But we didn't necessarily think immediately. We didn't go there. Now, if I asked the question, can women be doctors, he would say, of course. But in that sort of little scenario, it points out a bit of the sort of flawed logic, a little glick in our brains. Because of the social context in which we're in, our brains don't immediately just say, of course, give you the mother. So that's sort of an intro to kind of get us warmed up to where we're going today with Gilman and de Bois. And in thinking about how, really, how we're constructed in a way to think certain ways about gender, specifically about women today. So I should also say that I'm not moving chronologically. If I were moving chronologically, we'd probably start with Dr. Weir Mitchell. And then we'd go to Gilman. And then we'd go to de Beauvoir. But I'm actually starting with de Beauvoir. Then I'm going to Mitchell. And then we're ending with Gilman for reasons because, say, in general, today's lecture is about feminism, broad picture. It's also about oppression of women. And really, to get at the heart of that thinking, we need to actually go to de Beauvoir first in order to sort of be reflective of the other writers we're looking at today. So let's see if this is working. So Simone de Beauvoir, a very fascinating figure. I don't know how many of you had read or heard about her, at least, before you had to read for this Arts I. How many would you say? So what is that, like a fourth, maybe? A third? And to my mind, she's one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. But unfortunately, we don't often have this exposure to a lot of her work. So it's very good that we're spending time with her today. So we're going to focus a little bit on her biography because it is quite unique and quite interesting. She was born in 1908 in sort of a Paris middle class bourgeois family. She was very well educated. Her parents were very interested in her education. In fact, her father, as a hobby, edited the classics, as it turns out, which is kind of an odd thing. Hamlet wasn't really well written, so you sort of have to go in there and see what you can change in the play. So it's a bit odd, but nevertheless, this was sort of her environment in which she grew up. She became an atheist at a really young age because she sort of saw the flaws of truth and religion. Felt like religion was interested in the pursuit of truth, and she felt like religion was a bit of a hindrance in that way. But what's maybe really interesting about her is her education. Before she was 21, she actually achieved some really remarkable feats. She got her baccalaureate in math and philosophy with certificates in French and Latin. And then she went on to study philosophy at the Sarbonne, which is, of course, one of the most famous universities in the world in Paris. And some of the people that she was in class with were, again, some major thinkers of the 20th century, Merleau-Ponty, who's a phenomenologist, and Lévi-Strauss, who's an anthropologist, and, of course, her long-term sort of partner, which I'll talk about in a minute, Jean-Paul Sartre, who's a French existentialist. So while there, there's a test that they all have to take called the aggregation, and it is a very complex test. It's kind of similar to sort of getting your doctorate, you could say, and it was an oral exam. And this was something that everyone had to do before they got out. And Simone actually finished it before she was 21, and she was the youngest person ever to finish it that quickly. She was also actually the ninth woman to have finished it at that point. But anyway, she finished second overall in the exams, and her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, finished first. But he failed it the first time around, and through her tutelage, over about a year, he ended up getting first, and she didn't really study much for it. She did it on the weekends here and there. She didn't go to the prep schools to prepare you to do very well in the exam, and she still took second, and many to this day thinks there was some sort of, you know, something behind the scenes didn't really give her the first place prize in the end. But anyway, all this before 21. She then, well, and then I guess we'll talk a little bit about Sartre because this is important. So early on as well, she and Jean-Paul Sartre decided to have a relationship for long term, but they decided to contract the relationship because they were very against the idea of institutionalization, which they felt marriage was a part. So they signed a contract for their life to agree that they'd never get married, they'd never have kids, they could see other people, so it was an open relationship, and the only stipulation was they just had to be honest about everything. Really the relationship was one of an intellectual relationship. It was very tumultuous in other ways, and that contract may have sound great from the outside, it really was very difficult on the inside because in fact in the end Sartre ended up leaving, ended up leaving all of his intellectual property to a young girlfriend he had at the time when he died, not Simon du Bavard, who you think would be the rightful heir of this work. So clearly there was some issues along, so it wasn't a perfect situation, but again it speaks to some of what we're gonna start to get in her philosophy, and this background is very important because as a latter point that is down here, what's interesting about Gilman and Du Bavard is they interject a lot of themselves into their writing. She is a philosopher, but she's a philosopher who uses herself as an example a lot, which is not very common, and something that wasn't very common at the time. Gilman was the same way with her writing. She didn't believe she was writing literature, she felt like she was writing more of a social statement in that way. So she taught at the Sorbonne from 41 to 43, and then during the 40s she was writing the second sex, and it finished and came out in 1949 in France, and this was really what established her eminence in philosophy and sociology as really a feminist existential, and feminist existential text. She went on to write a four volume autobiography, which again is very personal and philosophical, it's very good, it's very long, but worth reading. She wrote a book on basically how society neglects and institutionalizes the age, is it sort of translated or the elderly, and this has a lot of residence with the second sex because she looks at this population as also being othered as being sort of a second to the mainstream. And then finally she ended up writing a book about Sartre as he was dying, he died in 1980, she died in 1986, she kind of was with him as he was dying, and there's some revealing things in that book, we could just say that, she did not pull any punches, she was pretty a matter of fact, but when interviewed about it, she just said that's just how it was, it was nothing personal, it's just that's the way it went. The little people know. So anyway, died in 1986 in Paris. So we're here because of the second sex, we're talking about that, this is where we're at. It's a book of over 700 pages long, it's two books really, put into one book now. It's very long, it's very complicated, there's lots of examples, there's lots of stuff happening, we're clearly not gonna cover that today, especially with having to deal with Gilman as well, but what my hope is is I'll certainly outline the introduction and parts later in the book that the introduction kind of speaks to, so we leave today with a sense of sort of overarching philosophy. We'll incorporate a little bit of the biology section in there, only because it is part of her, it is part of the introduction, I mean even though we're in the science part, I feel that periodic chart, I kind of feel like I need to go into the biology chapter now, but you don't wanna see that, we don't wanna do that. At the cycle analytic chapter, I'm not really gonna touch on, you can certainly do that in your seminars if you want, I think we've had Freud already a fair bit, so we might sort of go elsewhere if that's agreeable with everyone. So the second sex, it's the classic feminist book, it's not the only feminist book clearly, but this is one of the most monumental ones in history. Others that preceded it that certainly are valuable and important are of course, are Mary Wilson crafts of indication on the rights of women, 1792, as well as John Stuart Mills, the subjection of women in 1861, and then of course, certainly we can throw Austin in there, right? Very important figure, very important writer for discussing issues around, especially issues around institutionalization, the women's being second, women's being othered, but the war sort of lays us out in a very understandable philosophy, which is what establishers really is kind of a major thinker of this. And to sort of contextualize her, this came out in 1949, of course this was post-war period, France was quite tumultuous time anyway, the 1950s in France was not a great decade to come out with a book like this, it was very conservative, the leader of France at the time was sort of the Catholic father figure, Charles de Gaulle, who was not somebody who was looking forward, he felt France would be better if they went back to the 1870s, because that was a very comfortable time, better time for everybody, better time for men maybe, but it certainly wasn't where Bevoir was thinking, she was trying to go forward and society was sort of thinking backward. So that's sort of the context, it wasn't received very well, let's start there. It's also, I want to outline, because it's important to situate her in sort of the history of feminism, and I put an S up there, because feminism is really, there wasn't just one period of feminism, there are many periods of feminism, or sometimes they're called waves. And certainly this isn't the only way to look at this, and there were other feminisms outside of Western culture, but since we're talking about this book within Western culture, and as an impact of Western culture, I'm kind of focusing on that period of history right now. So there are debates around this, fully admit that. So the first wave of feminism really took place more or less 1890-ish through the 1920s. And this was really a period where legal rights were the focus, legal rights, economic independence, because if you have legal rights and you have economic independence, that's the beginning of trying to find freedom. It's a beginning, because that's not where it ends, but that's where you can start to have freedom if you're a woman. So these were the battles being fought. They were battles predominantly by middle-class white women at the time, with some means. That's also sort of important to see the later waves that are coming along. And of course, this was the suffrage movement that is quite famous, and we've all heard about. Question, does anyone know, except for my class, we talked about this already, does anyone know when we were allowed to vote in Canada? What year? And thought, guesses for this point. Earlier? Earlier? Google, how fast can you Google? You guys are all right. What's that? Close, it's 1918. And in the US it was 1920, I believe. And that's the date we usually know. And in England, I think it was, I can't remember the exact date. I think it was a year before Canada, because of course they had voting rights, so of course Canada was not too far behind. So again, there was success in this period, and that's kind of when we kind of block it between the 1890s. But there was still work in the 1920s, so it's not like just because they got voting rights, they called it a day. That wasn't, you know, it kept going. So the second wave was maybe the way we tend to most associate with feminism and women's rights. And that is the 60s and 70s. Now a lot of these waves coincide with other social and political upheavals. So what else was happening in the 60s and 70s that were monumental things in society, politics? Anyone? Yeah, well it's certainly part of the wave. Part of that was because of this work, yeah. Yeah. Free love, right, but what was free love attached to? Why do we want free love? What was free love in response to? Any thoughts? We're actually gonna be talking about it in a couple of three or four weeks in a film called Apocalypse Now. Any thoughts? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean the specific war was Vietnam, although there are other conflicts going on in the world. That was the big one. But it was really anti-war period. But also right, the civil rights was happening. So these were movements that were going on, and so this was a time where it was sort of rich in protest and trying to redefine. And so this wave really focused more intellectual, theoretical, philosophical improvements. Asking questions, like DeVore's doing in the second sex, why have women been oppressed for so long? Why is this occurring? Why are women, what is woman? How does this function in society? How do we think through these issues? So that was more of sort of the revolution at this point. And really, even though you take second sex, 1949, 60s and 70s, not really the same period, but many argue that the second sex really was the reason the second wave happened. Because the second sex is a second wave feminism. It's a theorization. It's trying to ask difficult questions, trying to look throughout history and sort of disseminate this in the public in a way that we can actually start reprogramming the way we think, not just laws. But socially, how we change. So then the third wave was the 1990s and 2000s. And this wave was more about questions about the body, questions about gender. Gender isn't just man and woman anymore. There are other types of genders. Sexuality, what is sexuality? What about the body? What about reproductive rights? How does the body function in the world? How do bodies plural function? So more of these kinds of questions. And then, so the verdicts, as these things go, we're maybe still a little bit too close, but there's some talk that we're sort of in the fourth wave or the fourth wave's recently started. And I think because there's been some maybe, I don't know if a tax is probably the right word, but I would say maybe challenges to legal rights for women recently. So there's been sort of a backlash and there's been more responses. But a lot of these responses are happening over media. So they're kind of saying that maybe the fourth wave is a bit more of a media revolution in the way how do women respond over media? How do they promote or resist oppression in these platforms in which we're so constantly a part of? As I was joking about Class of the Day, you ever look at the comments? Like when you're reading on Yahoo articles, if you want to see the underbelly of the world, read the comments. Because if you have an article about a woman writing about feminism, you read the comments and you can see that a misogyny is live and well right there on the comment board. So media is a place where this is a major battlefield, is I guess what I'm trying to say. Okay, so that's kind of the history and it's important because it really demonstrates how sort of monumental and original Du Bois was and where she came and how she doesn't really fit in these categories, but how in many ways she's drawing on the first wave, but certainly reflecting many other waves. I mean, we're still going back to Du Bois in some way. She's dated, the writing is dated some ways and certainly the biology is dated in some ways, but much of it is very much still happening, very relevant. So it's not a text that we visit and say, oh, it's only relevant in its period, it's relevant now. Okay, so the big question, right? Well, I guess the quotes are good one to say. One day, she said, one day I wanted to explain myself to myself. I am a woman. And so this whole push to write this book has asked this question, what is a woman, right? What is a woman and why are women oppressed? Why have they been repressed? So I guess one of the questions she asks is when did this begin? What's the origin? Was there a moment this happened? Was there some point in time where we can point to in history and say, here is the beginning, here is when it started? And there really isn't. And this was sort of confounding to her to say, well, why isn't there a point of origin? Why are we not finding a period in time where we can visit and sort of find a starting point? So I guess what I'll say too right now is that, so there are three major issues that she brings up. Issues of biology, issues of socialization or social construction, and ultimate freedom or existential freedom that she talks about. And those are sort of the three concepts I'm gonna be talking about today. But I'm actually gonna start with social construction because I think it's easier to, in some ways, understand the biology and the existentialist part if we start to understand sort of the history of how we've begun, the history of why, when I ask you who's the doctor, we can't immediately say, well, some mother, of course, what are you getting? Like, yeah, why wouldn't it be? So we'll start there. So if we had to sort of concentrate her argument into one takeaway, as it were, then we could say that the argument is that women is defined as man's other, right? His companion or appendage, and thus not properly human in her own right. So a woman, the idea, the name woman, is different than being human. They're not the same thing according to the second sex in what she's trying to draw out here, right? So this sort of begins the exploration. Man is equated to human, and because man is considered the one, the subject, the absolute subject, right? The essential, whereas women are the other, the object, the inessential, the inessential other. These are the sort of the contrasts. And we are all an other to each other, but layers of cultural mystification turn an other into this essential other. And we'll talk a little bit more about cultural mystification in a minute. So otherness is a fundamental category of human thought, right? This is what she believed, that we're naturally inclined to think in terms of other. But why do we place women as other? And why have they consistently been that other? So she says, no subject will readily volunteer to become the object. The inessential is not the other who in defining himself as other establishes the one. The other is posed as such by the one in defining himself as the one. But if the other is not to regain the status of being the one, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view once this submission, once come this submission in case of women. I'm gonna cut off there. I might have to look at this. So how many others are there in there? A lot, right? Not the clearest, cleanest quote, but the idea is the other is aware of, the one is aware of the other, right? And the other is always in relation to that one. So what I mean by that is what she says in response that I would say is she is defined, the woman is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her. She is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, right? He is the absolute, she is the other. So she is constantly, woman is constantly being defined in relationship to man, not in relationship to herself as a being, as her own. Okay, so humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as a relative to him. She is not regarded as an autonomous being. She's an appendage, right? She's a second. And so she spends a lot of time giving lots of examples of this because we can talk about it theoretically but sort of looking at it in concrete terms of how maybe fundamental and how rooted society is in this line of thinking is maybe an easier way to really understand this and see this concept. So there are a number of examples here that I'll go through very quickly that she also talks about. And one is, of course, you guys read Genesis at the beginning of this. If you hadn't read Genesis at the beginning of the term, you're probably familiar with Genesis anyway. This is one particular origin story, what she would call a mythology in this, a way of mystification, a way of sort of constructing a line of thought. But this is a classic example, of course, women came out of Adam's rib, which is really a useless bone, right? Adam could live without that rib. It wasn't even necessary. It wasn't even like his life was dependent on that rib. And she was created for him, not in and of herself. She wasn't created to be herself. She was created to be a companion for Adam, right? So she wasn't free to define her own existence, in other words. So she can't define her own existence through herself-chosen projects since she was created for that purpose and that's to serve. So again, this idea of an appendage. The second skeleton, up until the 19th century, I wasn't even aware of this, but up until the 19th century, apparently, we only looked at men's skeletons. We didn't look at women's skeletons. In part because I think there was no thought that they might be different, but I think more in part because they felt like if they were gonna learn anything from human anatomy, it was certainly gonna be from the male skeleton, not the woman's skeleton, right? This was the go-to. This is the place for science. This is a place to learn. And of course, I think, of course, once they did find, of course, they did examine women's skeleton. They realized it was different than men's, so for years they were diagnosing women on men's skeleton. Right, so words. The old English word for woman comes from the old English word with man, which means wife of man. So the actual word means wife of man. In other languages, such as French and German, wife and frau and femme, or just mean wife, and German is a frau and French is femme. And again, so even in language, women is defined as a wife of man as a second, an appendage, a relative, right? Not in and of herself. She doesn't have a name that means her own. In contrast, the word man does not mean husband, actually. You would think maybe the opposite might be true, but it's not. Man is his own kind of being, right? He may or may not take on the role of husband. That's his choice. He's not given that role in the world. That's his choice, but women don't have that choice. Right, they're here to be man's wife, even through linguistics. All right, so marriage, names and marriage, right? For a very long time, and it still happens now, although it's certainly less common, but it still happens where when a woman gets married, she takes on not only the last name of her husband, but his first name too, right? Mrs. Fred Jones. And so she has no identity or name independent of his. She is his name. He has never called her name like Ms. Sally Smith, right? Because he's defined through his own choices, not through his affiliation through her. Similarly, women were often known, of course, by their husband's profession, the doctor's wife, the pastor's wife, the blacksmith's wife, whichever, right? Not by her own name and not by his work, by his chosen projects, right? Not by her own. So we're seeing many examples of this as we go through. I'm not spending too much time with them because they're pretty obvious. And then in Simone de Beauvoir's case, and that is that she's, I mean, I say always, but almost always considered to be Sartre's companion, lover. That's how she's associated. Whereas the flip side is not so much true. Oftentimes people don't associate Sartre with being de Beauvoir's companion, right? They associate him, his identity, as defined through his writings and his career, not through his connection to him. And this is something that she even discusses a little bit in the book. And I wanna thank actually publicly Miranda Burgess for giving me this picture, or at least showing me this picture of the two dogs because they're golden retrievers because it does have some resonance of the idea of companion, right? Right in the photo. Although he's a dog too, maybe if it was perfectly accurate, he wouldn't be, but I'm sure that would, yeah, anyway. Right, so we see examples of how women have been othered throughout history. These are still very common, still things we don't really think about until we actually look at them. It's like one of those puzzles where you don't see what's happening until someone shows you the deers in the trees or something and it's a painting and you finally see the deers and then you can't not see the deers from then on out. But before that, all you saw were the trees. It's kind of like once this sort of opens up, you start to understand, wow, there's a lot going on here. So now we move a bit to biology. We looked at sort of the social process, how women have been socialized in a certain way, how society has defined women, because women are not defining themselves this way, society's defining them this way. So one of the questions is, goes back to origin. How did this all begin? How was this originally constructed into a system which we now live and often never question? So first you have biology. We come into this world, it has nothing to do with us. We're born, we're born with what we have. We break it up into sexes. We have different issues in biology that differ, but it's something we have. It's not essential to us, it's not a part of us. But what our bodies mean is social, and this is the crucial distinction for de Beauvoir and what's really important to understand is how we define ourselves as based on the social context, not based on our biology. So when we apply that meaning, and she talks about these as myths, mystifications, histories, then they become social. But we only become social, not by being born, we become social by being in the world and being subject to the definitions of the social. And in this case mostly controlled and written by men, hence the issue here. So two helpful quotes here. One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. And this is the most famous quote from Simon de Beauvoir. And the key thing, the key word is the becomes, right? The idea of becoming, the verb here, is really the indicative part about this, that it's a process, right? One is not something, one becomes something. It's turned into something. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society. It is a civilization as a whole that produces this creature. Intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine, only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as the other, right? So she's answering some of her questions about what is woman, right? How did this all happen? He sifts through biology and then it takes us immediately back to the social. The term female is derogatory, not because it emphasizes woman's animality, but because it prisons her in her sex, right? Shouldn't be in prison in her sex, that's what you're born with. But it becomes a prison because of the social definitions. And if the sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical, even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless, he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment, right? Because if you can find a justification in biology, then it can be a fact. You can turn it into science, right? But it's not. Another way she looks at this relationship is to view man as a positive or neutral charge and woman as a negative charge. Again, another sort of scientific metaphor. So in actuality, the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general, right? Man equates to human being, woman doesn't equate to human being. Whereas woman represent only the negative defined by limited criteria without reciprocity. And then she goes on, in the midst of an abstract discussion, it is vexing to hear a man say, you think thus and so because you are a woman. Actually, this translation isn't great, but basically, another translation just said, the only reason you think that is because you're a woman. That's how we would sort of hear it come out. But I know that my only defense is to reply, I think this because it's true, right? I don't think this because I'm a woman. I think this because, like how has gender gotten into the conversation in other words, right? I'm thinking this because I'm a being. I'm having these thoughts. Thereby removing a subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply, and you think the contrary because you're a man, right? Because when you're the one, when you're the essential, you don't need to think of yourself in these terms. You're the starting point, you're the positive, right? You're the neutral. For it is understood that the fact of beings is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man. It is the woman who is in the wrong. Again, the negative versus the positive and the neutral. So just many different ways to sort of imagine this relationship. So that leads us to freedom. Women's independence. How do women become free? How do women deal with the situation where they're socialized a certain way? And so there are a number of things, but first, de Beauvoir believes that legal rights are absolutely necessary, right? They have to be there. And economic opportunity has to be there because without those two, you can't move on to what she's talking about now. And this is why I talked about the first, the ways of feminism to kind of understand sort of the progression of thought throughout history. But you need the legal rights, you need the economic opportunity, but that still does not equal freedom from freedom or to do away with oppression, right? And that's the ultimate goal. So what she proposes is really basically an existential feminism. So if you're familiar with existentialism, it's not too far off, but she sort of builds on it. So the basic existential formula, this is very nutshell, to be human is to be free, and to be free is to make choices for yourself, right? So a lot of it's about choice. And, or the famous phrase that you guys might have heard, existence precedes essence, right? We're not essentially something. We actually have choice in this process. So the problem comes in, and that sounds great. So you say, well, what's the problem then? Why are women oppressed? Because don't they have choices? Can't they, you know, don't they have freedom through this process? Well, the problem that she brings up is that the social codes create problems. So, yes, that may be true, but we come into a world in which, we come into a world in which there are many myths that define who we are before we even know what, before we even know what's happening. We're already being defined. We're already being socialized into this context. And then we have a whole life of swimming in those waters without necessarily being conscious of it. So, I guess this is a good quote here. So the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself created. And, you know, another kind of way of looking at this is the whole idea of, you know, winners write histories, this type of thing, right? So you, there's a certain way of thinking. There's certain mythologies that are in place, and you're sort of subject to them. So, one of these is what she talks about is sort of the eternal feminine. And she brings this up very briefly in the introduction. Doesn't really talk much about it. Talks a lot about it later. But the eternal feminine, right? We all know this stereotype. We all know this mythology. And that is that women are purity, they're chastity, they're honest, they're polite, they're weak, they're passive, they're dainty. I mean, suddenly it feels like we're back in the 19th century. But that's certainly a big part of where we see a lot of the eternal feminine being played out in culture. But it still is there now, right? We still have other ways of thinking about the eternal feminine. The great mother is something she talks about is a very sort of proper noun of a way of thinking about the eternal feminine. But her argument is that it's a patriarchal myth that relegates women's objects. That's the problem, right? This isn't, women aren't essentially some eternal feminine, right? This isn't how it is. This is a myth that's been constructed. And maybe a good contemporary example of this actually, and I was chatting about this in my class yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. And that is, I don't know if you, has anyone read that article recently about sort of the gender breakdown on rateyourprofessors.com? Anyone familiar with this? Yeah, exactly. So they came out with a study recently and they, at I think 14 million, I believe, entries, they basically saw what the most common words were associated with women professors and men professors, right? And well, first off, men professors got much higher ratings. So whatever that says, clearly we see this sort of social process even happening within that, right? And in addition to that, the words associated that they plucked out, the word intelligent and genius and smart, came up much more with men. The words, I think it was bossy, nurturing. Do you guys remember? I think they were nice, helpful. They were associated with women. So not only were women rated less on average than men, the words associated with them were much more derogatory, right? Much more playing into the idea of this eternal feminine, right? We have a stereotype. We have a way of thinking about these things that are so ingrained that we may not consciously be aware it's happening. But then studies like this come up and they make us very aware of what's happening. Yeah, right. Who got what? It's not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, ratings, exactly. Ratings would be more about aesthetic value of if somebody's beautiful or not, versus their intelligence. Yeah, right. Can you read the comment? I couldn't endure it. I had too much bivouar of, wow. I've had more in addition to a greater variability of male IQ, which apparently is an established feature of IQ testing in the male of the species, and not the female of the species. And you said to indicate perhaps there are more male geniuses and also more men who are not genius because while women cluster up, no. So I just kind of wonder how we would answer that given these four million ratings of the ways that Easter is done in the classroom. In the case of that kind of attitude. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, and that anecdote is really all to say that, you know, this is still occurring, right? We're still in this system of defining women a certain way. And the bivouar actually talks a little bit about her own situation as the myth of the good daughter, right? She wanted to be a good daughter, right? She wanted to make her parents happy, but she asked, why do I need to get married? Why do I need to follow that myth? Why should I have children? Why do I need a profession? Or why should I not have a profession? I want a profession, right? She wanted these things, but of course, this is going against the myth and her family. And, you know, she wanted, so there's that contrast where you want to please people. You want to be a part of something, but you're also going against a very strong mythology. So in other words, women are not yet free, even though there's advances in legal rights and economic opportunity and that's improving, still it got a long way to go. And there is much more choice. There's still not complete freedom. And the key is to challenge and redefine our myths. That's sort of the answer here. And as she says, if women seems to be the inessential, which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. So what we need to do is challenge these layers of mystification. We need to reinvent our own narratives. We need to tell our own stories from an existential standpoint, especially as what she's kind of coming from. You know, and maybe you disagree with this and that's certainly something to talk about in seminar, but the idea is that we can redefine those narratives. We don't have to follow the myths and the narratives that are defining us in the social, right? Remember, the social gives us meaning, but we can redefine that meaning for ourselves in the ways that we want it redefined. That's where we're gonna find, that's where we're gonna find the freedom in the way out. Okay, so because of time, I'm just gonna maybe quickly move through this and then we'll move on, but really the ultimate goals to decrease oppression is really to not be other person based on his or her group membership, right? To allow individuals to express that freedom and to create resistance to social forces and try to define people based on group memberships, right? Whether it be race or gender and what we're gonna see when we come back from reading break actually with friends Fanon's book is a very similar idea of othering, but in a racial context, in the colonial context. So this is gonna seem very familiar if we apply it just to race, I mean if we look at it through the racial lens, not just through a gender one. So kind of keep that in mind. And then of course to think of women not as subjects or not as objects, but we're all first, right? There's no second. There's not that duality, that doesn't exist. Okay, we started about 10 minutes late so I'm gonna go I think till about the top of the hour and then we'll take a quick break and then we'll come back. So the next figure is semi-minor but I think it's important because in many ways he exemplifies what we just talked about and it also gives us the historical and social context for the next story which is important. And that is Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. S stands for Silas if you're curious. Great name actually, but I don't know why he didn't use Silas more than we're about it anyway. So Silas Mitchell came up with a cure for an ailment known as neurasthenia which was invented by George Miller Beard in 1881 and this was a diagnosis of sort of a nervous disorder which included anything from migraines to digestion, to nervousness, right? An array of issues just kind of got thrown into neurasthenia and the big thinking behind it was that modern lifestyles created this, right? This was all created because people were working too much. They're too busy in the modern world and this was kind of wreaking havoc on the system. It predominantly emerged in Americans since George Miller Beard and Mitchell were both American Mitchell, was a prominent Philadelphia doctor at the time and what's interesting about this is although they say that this can happen to men too, really most of the cases were women, right? Most of the diagnosed cases of neurasthenia were mostly women. So immediately we should be suspect, right? If it's all happening on one side, not the other, but there are some cases where it did happen to men but that's not the norm. And so Mitchell's solution to this neurasthenia, right? He didn't create it but he came up with this cure known as the rest cure and I know it might sound like a holiday and we all want a rest cure but it really wasn't a holiday. It was sort of framed as what it sounds like a rest cure but as we see in the story, what it really amounts to is doing nothing for three months at least. No intellectual stimulation, right? Not much social stimulation, not physical stimulation, nothing. It's basically solitary confinement, right? I mean this is unethical in prison now and it's essentially what the rest cure was, was a form of solitary confinement, right? For women, wasn't for men and we'll get to that. So Gilman, Gilman wrote the yellow wallpaper because she experienced the rest cure. This is, as I said, she considered herself sort of a social commentary more than a literary author. Her autobiography, her own biography was very much implanted into her literature when she did write literature. So the story is her account, really, and admittedly and she wrote this to express this is what happened. So she said, for many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown leading to melancholia and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went into that faith and some fainter of hope to noted specialist in nervous diseases. The best known in the country and that was where Mitchell. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure to which is still a good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much that mattered with me and sent me home with solemn advice to live as domestic a life as far as possible to have but two hours of intellectual life a day and never touch pen brush or pencil again as long as I lived. Now she was a writer, right? So that was clearly not exactly an option. And this was in 1887. So she went home, she followed the directions and we of course know the outcome. It arguably drove her mad or almost mad, right? So she wrote this article in 1913 to hopefully save other women from going through this and Mitchell did end up reading this and apparently changed his cure a little bit so that this didn't keep happening. All right, so this is way too small. I think you're not gonna be able to see this but basically this is an ad for the rest cure in the late 19th century and they have on the left cures for women and then they have the right cures for men and we kind of know the cures for women so I'm not gonna read it because we just discussed it a little bit but isolation, right? Basically isolation, no intellectual stimulation, no any sort of stimulation but what's curious is the cures for men. It's very funny. So men suffering from neurostenia were prescribed vigorous, even strenuous exercise in natural areas away from pernicious influences of modern life. They were ordered to travel to remote areas such as cattle ranches of the American West or the European Alps and undertake rugged outdoor living laborious treks through the western plains of the Dakotas or in the Rocky Mountains would replenish men's nervous energy. I mean it sounds like an ad for a holiday, right? This does not sound like any sort of cure at all. So, you know, we see sort of the breakdown here. You see what's happening. Don't need to really explain it too much. All right, so I don't know if you guys got a chance to read the, we did have a small excerpt from Weir Mitchell's Doctor and Patient that came out in 1887 and there is two excerpts in that that I think are telling and speak both to what we just talked about with DuBovar but also speak to what we're gonna look at with Gilman. So, Mitchell says, for me, the grave significance of sexual difference controls the whole question, right? So immediately it goes to biology and immediately it recognizes biology is there's a difference, right? So could we see that contrast with what DuBovar is trying to get us to think differently? And if I say little of it in words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is I am sure making mischief for it is my belief that no length of generations of, sorry, yeah, belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics. She is physiologically other than the man. So we see even in this, right? The competition with man to assume his duties, the desire to be on his level, right? We see this idea of the socialization at work right here and we also see the fact that he's completely othering woman on just the biological level, right? She is essentially different. And he goes on and I think I'm just gonna read the last little paragraph here since we're short on time. I am concerned with how her now as she is only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more helpful fashion. What I believe her maker meant her to be and to teach her how not to be that which her physiological construction and the strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies of man's career threaten in like measure of the number of feeblest of the masculine sex. So again, we see the idea of how she's meant by her maker which is a course of decision as to construct her that way. She's constructed as how she's meant to be by her maker and her maker. Ironically, he's referring to sort of the divine but ironically, he's referring to himself, right? The maker is the man and the teacher that in this physiological construction, right? The eye going back to biology. So it's interesting because we go back to Bavar here. She says in providing women's inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy and theology which we sort of already went through with the Judeo-Christian sort of mythology of Adam's rib and that sort of thing but also upon science. And of course, the 19th century, there's a lot of flourishing in new science. This is a period Mitchell would certainly be in the middle of and experimental biology, experimental psychology, et cetera. At most, they were willing to grant equality and difference to the other sex. This so-called equilitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination. And this equality and difference is really another word for it if we think of civil rights as sort of separate but equal. The idea that there's equality as long as we don't say we're the same. We're kind of equal but we're not the same, right? And the Bavar has said this was the most insidious form of discrimination in a way, the most oppressive form of discrimination in a way because in a way you're recognizing that we're biologically all the same but you're admitting that socially you've oppressed and separated us and that's okay and that's a system that needs to keep going. So that's a major issue and of course that's in some ways what Mitchell is doing in those two quotes in his attempt to understand this condition which again was very much of a gender diagnosis in most cases. Okay, let's take a break and then we'll get back to our last player with Gilman and the yellow wallpaper. Okay, welcome back. Hopefully you guys are all satisfactorily caffeinated. It's a bit later so this is actually the period that is the hardest to stay awake so I've not seen anyone nod, well done. 12 o'clock is much easier to stay present so I appreciate that. Okay, so now we're going to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Just out of curiosity, how many of you had read the yellow wallpaper before? Before. Usually a couple, usually a handful, right? How many of you have, well, had you heard of Charlotte Perkins Gilman at all before? No, she's not necessarily a major literary figure but in some way she is, in some way she is. Okay. So this quote on the portrait actually is really apt because she says that, of course, there's no female mind, the brain is not an organ of sex, might as well speak of a female liver. So again, exactly what the Bivora's saying, said it before, that the idea that body is not gender, right? In the sense that a brain is not specifically a woman or a man's brain, a brain is a brain, right? Liver is a liver. So that has relevance, of course, to her own story. So she's American, she's born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860, and she suffered from depression early in her life but a lot throughout her life. And in fact, as it turns out, Simon de Beauvoir also suffered from depression a lot throughout her life. It was, so they had that sort of connection and both had written about it. She was a self-educated intellectual, remember we talked about last week an auto-diadact, we talked about that with Jane Austen, well, Gilman is also an auto-diadact. She taught herself most of what she knows, very rigorously and interested. In 1884, she married the artist Walker Stetson and they had a daughter, Catherine. Now, as you can imagine, this was not happy marriage, most weren't at the time. After they had Catherine, she suffered from postpartum depression, which is what we would in part diagnose her condition as what she's suffering in the yellow wallpaper in part, is that. I mean, that's something that people have been saying that for a while, but it doesn't necessarily make the story any less poignant to know that fact. So that's why she had to go through this rescuer. Remarkably though, she ended up leaving, divorcing Stetson, oh, I guess legally couldn't divorce in time, but she ended up leaving Stetson and moved to Pasadena, California, where she began to actively campaign for women's economic freedom and started writing fiction. So we can see that this was in the 1880s. We know the first story of feminism, 1890s, and decades after that. So she's a very early proponent of pushing for legal rights and specifically knowing that if economic freedom is attained, then that's a very important step to getting those rights. So she wrote a very well-known book about this at the time called Women in Economics, it's a non-fiction, and, but she also wrote a novel, sort of a feminist utopian novel, if you're at all interested, called Her Land. And this came out in 1914, although much like the yellow wallpaper, wasn't all that, didn't make much of a splash. It wasn't a big impact at the time when it came out, sort of washed away. And it got re-released in 1979, so a new edition of it in a decade that also reclaimed the yellow wallpaper as a very important story that we need to be reading. So both of these works kind of became popular, not at the time they were written, but later on. In fact, in the day, Gilman was much more known for her non-fiction for her social activism than she was as a literary author. And she actually spoke publicly a lot as well. That was a big part of what she was doing. And she died in 1935, and the last three years of her life, she suffered from breast cancer. And she decided to euthanize herself rather than continually stay in pain and suffer. And she said this about it to, in order to, she left this note. And she said, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer. And what's interesting is, do you guys remember who else we've read recently that was dying, suffering, and, yeah, Freud. But he had somebody do it for him. He couldn't do it himself. She took matters into her own hands, did it on her own. What's also interesting is just this week, I don't know if you guys have been following the news, but Canada, Supreme Court, Canada ruled that physician-assisted suicide is now legal in cases of extreme suffering. So it's interesting to see her doing this way back at the time. Of course, illegally. And this is still a contemporary issue that we're talking about, sort of an offhand note. Okay, the yellow wallpaper. There are many ways that we can approach the story. There are many ways I hope you're approaching the story in your seminars, and I'm sure you are, and dealing with it in those ways. I'm gonna look at it from two different angles because that's just what I decided to do today. So the first one is narration and how narration works, generally in literary form, but also the narration in the story a little bit. But I'll spend more time actually on talking about how we might situate this book within a genre, a mode of way of understanding its sort of theme in literature, which is called the female gothic. It's an older term, so I prefer to call the feminist gothic now because I think it has more resonance, it means something more. So if we were to look at the short story, sort of generally, there are many different ways we can approach this and get a valuable reading out of this. Well, first off, it's definitely a realist story in some ways because as I said, and as I've given you the social and historical context already of why this story was written, this was a response. I mean, Gilman is a writer, and this was the best way she could respond and try to tell other people, and rather than just write an essay about it, she was able to make her point through a short story, through literature. So it's a realist story, and it's certainly examining these depictions of Victorian patriarchy in this social and historical context. So that's the area we could definitely go and explore. We talked a little bit about it, but we'll leave that rest, just so we're thinking about different ways of reading this. Certainly, we can look at all the symbolism in this story. There's a lot of symbolism in this. The title is a symbol, right? So some of the obvious ones, of course, her husband, John, could easily equal the patriarchy or reason or control, rationality, right? These kinds of things, equating him in this way. The wallpaper could equal freedom or it could equal an opposite, like confinement. It could equal prison, right? All these different things. The house, confinement, chains in the room could be chains in the marriage. So we can go through and just kind of pick out how all these symbols are actually making arguments in their own way and how they're representing other things. This is how we can approach this as a short story. Curiously, I'm not gonna talk about this at all today, but the symbol of the 4th of July. Anyone pick up on that? Was that significant in any way in the story, do you think, as a symbol? I know it seemed very small, but there was a little soiree, a little party on the 4th of July, and that was really all it was mentioned. Anyone sort of see the connection to the story? By chance? Yeah. Is she independent in the story? Yeah, it's called Independence Day. Is she independent in the story? Right, no, she's suffering. She has no freedom and they're celebrating this holiday that's all about freedom, right? So those things aren't just happenstance, right? Those little details are clues and cues for us to understand what's happening on many layers and many levels throughout the story. So anyway, things you can explore, maybe things you can bring up in your essays. Feminism, of course, this is a feminist story, absolutely. And we'll talk a little bit about that within the Gothic, definitely, but we could easily just start to apply and look at this story through a De Bavarian reading. We could say, well, how was she othered, right? How was she an appendage to John? How was she attaining her freedom? How was she not able to make choice because she no longer has a capacity to think, right? She's driven to a place where she can't even have agency in her own thinking, right? So there's all these ways we can sort of take that down. We can also look at this as a short story for him. And this is something I wanna spend a little bit of time with because as arts one does, we kind of bounce all over the place and are exposed in all these different ways, but I don't think we've read a short story yet this year if I'm not mistaken. So we approach a short story a little differently than we do a poem and we do a novel than we do a work of philosophy, right? Then we do a play and we've been exposed to all those other things this year. We haven't been exposed to a short story. So the short story for him is actually really interesting because it's something that really sort of started gaining momentum in this period that she was writing, but it still hadn't reached a real popular height until the 20th century. One of the progenitors of the short story is Edgar Allen Poe and he was also a progenitor of the psychological horror short story which both apply to this story. And he also said of the short story that he liked it. He liked writing in that medium and he chose that medium because he thought that it had a unity of impression he called it, right? This is a pretty well-known phrase when you start to look at short stories. A unity of impression because it's like a poem, right? But it's not, it's prose, it's a piece of fiction but you can do it in one sitting and this is what's really valuable because when you read a novel, you usually come and go, right? You don't usually do it all in one sitting but when you're reading a short story you have to keep the reader captivated in that moment of time that they're reading through it and you also have to focus on something very quickly. So detail is important. You don't have time to spend a chapter like Austin does, explaining things in depth, going into extreme detail. You don't have that time. You have to get to it very quickly so you have to minimize your words. You have to work with concision. So the prose style in and of itself we look at the writing, right? That's something that we think about of how writers are making the choices and what they're including and what they're choosing not to include. So within the short story form there's narration and voice. Kind of I'm lumping those two a little bit together today. And then there's, I guess we could say genre but really it's about how we situate the story within a certain theme, within a certain way of reading it. But then there are also characters. We can look at the characters in the story. We're not going to today. I'm not going to here but we could just examine the story based on how the characters are represented and seeing. Are they reliable? Are they unreliable? I mean if we're thinking in terms of a feminist criticism which characters are treated as subjects? Which characters are treated as objects? The setting, another really important part especially in Gothic fiction but in any type of fiction what is happening in the setting? But we have the external setting which is pretty obvious. We have this sort of estate, this mansion that's somewhat abandoned. We have really interesting rooms that are being described about, isn't an asylum? Was it a kid's playroom? What was this? We don't know but we're given these descriptions. So there's a physicality to the story that's really present and we could explore all those physical, external connections. But it's also a story about the internal. It's also a psychological story. We're kind of descending with the protagonist psychologically where she's going. And the reason I'm not very clear to say madness because I think it's debatable whether she's clearly insane in the end. I think that's certainly up for argument but we get that sense, I guess we'll say on the surface that we're kind of working with the protagonist to get to that end. So that's a whole other way of looking at setting, internal spaces, not just external spaces. So anyway, that's sort of the overview if we're gonna start now honing in a little bit more precisely. And this is just purely by choice what I'm doing is looking at different types of narration. And again because I'm assuming that some of you know types about narration, a little bit about narration, some of you don't know anything about narration so I'm gonna kind of talk a little bit about it because a number of types of narration are sort of played with in this story. And they help for us to understand it and read it with more clarity. So of course the first person narrator is a narrator as a participant, somebody in the story, known as the eye. So when you see an eye, somebody's narrating with an eye, it's a pretty clear gap away, probably the first person, right? A major character will be the protagonist if they're narrating a story and a minor character could be an observer or someone who is just a background in the story, right? It doesn't always have to be the protagonist to be a first person narrator. And then we have the narrator as non-participant, somebody who's not in the story, the third person. And there is a second person, it's very rare, I'm not gonna go into it but just FYI, I'm not skipping over second, but the first and the third are what's used 99% of the time. Omniscient narration, somebody who knows everything about the story, the character, the setting, may pass judgments, not necessarily objective, reassures the reader, editorializes. The omniscient narration always sounds like they know exactly, hence the idea of omniscient. They're all knowing, they think they're all knowing, right, doesn't mean they're credible, doesn't mean we should trust them. Not sort of the benefit of dealing with the omniscient narrator. Selective or limited omniscient reveals thoughts of one particular character while seeing other characters externally. So it's a little bit of a hybrid maybe between sort of the first and the third. And then a face narration is really just the absolutely objective point of view. So this is something that seems not to exist. You don't really notice the narrator. It's almost like a fly on the wall that's just reading structural information. So for example, not that it's narration, but like stage direction and a play is sort of an example of this, or even a narrator that has no judgments, that has no investment, but all you get is like a scene change, right? Carriage goes to mention, right? There's nothing subjective about that. It's just to give you a marker of where the action's happening, right? Okay, and then we have some different styles of narration. We have an innocent or naive narrator. So the character telling the story doesn't fully understand or comprehend the story. Any thought, I wanna ask, any thoughts on who might an innocent or naive narrator be in a book or a story? Yeah, children are usually almost always innocent or naive narrators. There are other innocent and naive narrators. Any other thoughts? Maybe in light of today. Yeah, women are usually, especially more historically, but women are usually put in this innocent or naive narrative context as well. Yep, there's a well-known novel you guys might have read or at least heard of by William Faulkner named The Sound of the Fury, and there's a character in that who has mental disability and he narrates one of the sections. And he also is kind of considered an innocent or naive narrator in that way. So essentially somebody right who, you almost question their credibility, right? So the idea of a naive narrator has its own problems that you might wanna dig into. It's not, you might question why is this woman a narrator? Why is she being put as a narrator or a child and so forth. Unreliable narrator is somebody that deceives the reader either purposely or not. So it might be a purposeful deception. It might be because you can't help deceive the audience. Could be deranged, could be deluded, whatnot, right? Stream of consciousness is just really random and uncensored thoughts and narration. This became really popular in the modernist period in the early 20th century. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are really major proponents or writers that use this a lot if you've read their work and so forth. And then interior monologue shows the character's thoughts as though he or she were speaking out loud. So you see a character's thoughts that are being narrated. I think we see that a bit more in film. Oftentimes we do in literature, but certainly there. So what type of narrator is in the yellow wallpaper then? Okay, so he said stream of consciousness a little bit but he said maybe more innocent or unreliable. Okay. Can we have multiple or do we need to pick one? Is she one or can there be many? What do you guys think? Yeah, there can be many, absolutely. We're not stuck with one type of narration. In fact, interesting story is shift narration, right? Because it makes it a more interesting read. So writers will use this convention and play with this style to make it more challenging, to make you question as a reader what's happening? Who can I trust? Who can't I trust? To put you in that place. What other types of narration is in this? I mean, I've heard some of these here, but what about the other things we've talked about? Any Sienotypes? Third person, first person, what do you think? Yeah, first person, right? She starts the story immediately with I, right? The first sentence or something is I. It's very much about an I. So, so yeah, it is first person. Is there a third person in the story? What do we call? So it's first person, we've agreed, we've sort of agreed that there could be unreliable, right? Might be an innocent, might be a little stream of consciousness. Why do you think Gilman would use multiple types of narration for this specific story? Sure. Yeah, it could reflect the settings, the environments in which they're in. Yeah, any other thoughts? Diagnosing the person that shows the perspective of the living being diagnosed. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, certainly empowering in that way, right? To have the woman as the first person as opposed to have sort of an omniscient, which tends to, the omniscient third person tends to create distance, right? Whereas the first person gives proximity. It makes us sympathize or even empathize, this is the hope, with the character. Whereas the third person, there's almost like a barrier between us and the characters, right? Whereas the first person, we feel like we're that much closer to what's happening in the story. We can relate almost. So we see a couple examples of this, maybe of the first person. Specifically, well, I think what I wanna talk about here is sort of how it shifts, how it transitions a little bit. So we see her talking about John, her husband. She says, he is very careful and loving and hardly lets me stir without special direction. And I would give you page numbers, but there weren't page numbers on the handout. So I could just like say, you know, the 54th sentence, but I didn't do that. So sorry about that, I would have posted them, but I couldn't. So the fact is I'm getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes and even Jeannie has an inexplicable look. And then, so this is for the beginning, the middle, we see the shift of how she's perceiving, right? And then we see in the end, of course, the ending that's sort of unforgettable. She's like, I keep creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. I've got out at last said I, in spite of you and Jane. And I pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did and right across my path by the wall so that I had to creep over him every time. So the important part here is when she said, I got out at last said I, in spite of you and Jane. Is this first person? Right, we have a shift to third person all of a sudden. Who's Jane? Did you guys ever have a sense of who Jane was? The girl that's initially talking about her condition. You mean? Maybe the first girl that's been treated. Okay, so like you mean the woman in the wallpaper or no, the one that's in the wallpaper or the one that might, okay, okay, fair. Any other thoughts on who Jane is? The sister-in-law? Could be. We don't know her name, do we? I don't think. Can't remember. Jeannie is the sort of caretaker that's helping in the house. Any thoughts on Jane? Do we know the narrator's name? No. No, so we call that an unnamed narrator. We don't know who the narrator is and yet we have this proximity with the narrator. So it's debatable who Jane is, right, who Jane is. I would argue personally that Jane is herself and she shifts to third person here to talk about herself in the third person, to kind of show the instability that she's presently at, right, and you play with narration in order to create effects in the story. So to shift from a first person to a third person in a blip like this is really effective when you're trying to demonstrate the instability, the insanity, kind of the, well, the climax in the end here that's happening. Okay, so the point is, I guess, with narration, it doesn't necessarily separate us from the ideas of setting, of character, symbolism, all of these major elements, literary approaches that we might bring in. In fact, it's just another part of them that actually speak to each other and allow us to sort of illuminate those in other interesting ways. So as you're working through it, maybe in seminar, try to think of all the different types and where narration shifts and why it's shifting, where it's going. Okay, so then we'll just end with the female gothic, the feminist gothic. This is arguably a gothic short story. She was trying to write in this mode. She, this is a, if you read this next to an Edgar Allen Poe short story, it's remarkably similar, right? So this is something she'd consciously tried to do. Again, it was sort of building. The gothic in and of itself was not a popular form at this time, in fact. So that's what's sort of interesting. Dracula came out in 1897 and that sort of reinjected the gothic into the 20th century with some popularity, but in the middle 19th century sort of had a bit of a die-out. So within that, and within this gothic tradition, I'm not gonna talk too much, I think, about this other than to say that some of the major themes that we wanna sort of think about is how it's a contrast between sort of the modernity progress, this form challenges ideas of modernity and progress, and it's sort of anti-enlightenment, anti-rational. So the enlightenment, of course, brought in rationality, science, thinking, sort of going against centuries of much more superstition, much more religious rule. So in many ways, the enlightenment's good, right? It created a lot of benefit, but the gothic is kind of responding to that by saying, but are we that certain? Do we really know? Does science really allow us to completely understand what's happening in the world, right? Is everything just broken down into biology, or is there a lot more happening? So there's this sort of contrast, this tension, this opposition. Opposition is a big one for the gothic as well. Lots of oppositions between sort of modernity and progress and non-modernity and progress. And this is something we saw the romantics sort of dealing with as well, right? They were sort of resisting speaking to the enlightenment in sort of an anti-enlightenment mode in many ways, to say rationality and science is in everything, right? There are things that we can't explain. So of course it's formulaic genre, or it started as a formulaic genre of terror and suspense that drives the story, usually isolated mansions and castles and abbeys and these kinds of things. I mean, we're very familiar with the gothic, so I'm kind of rushing through it because we were so exposed to it throughout pop culture. We more or less know, but the literary gothic does have a bit of a different flavor and a feel than the film, television, and other things that we usually get it now and exposed to. Some of the key elements, of course, are evil, paranoia. I say evil because how do we define that? Who is evil, that's the question. Not the dominant, I mean, oftentimes we reverse or flip who we think is evil. The priest is the one that's evil, not the trustworthy one. The things that we actually think are evil are the things that actually save us. So think of evil in that sort of opposite way. Paranoia, ambivalence, transgression, confinement, fear, we could apply any one of these words to this short story and find ways to look through it. Terror also reveals political or social sympathies of writers. So the gothic, like a lot of genres, is a way to push political sympathies through a certain form. So again, there might be symbols of something that seems just simple, it's a wallpaper, but there might be actually a very strong political undercurrent about that wallpaper, what's happening with that wallpaper. So there's a way to use these devices in order to have a political position, a social mouthpiece. And this is something that certainly gothic fiction you can do a lot with. What is a ghost? What can a ghost do in order to push your narrative that a character can't do? Doesn't matter if the ghost is real or not really, it's more of what it does, how it pushes the story. And then the gothic, of course, is a huge, right? One is national, there's national context of it, there's social context of it, and there's different genres of it. We break down usually gothic genres into locations. So there's the Southern gothic and the Southern United States, like sort of the South area there, we have Scottish gothic, the Irish gothic, the French gothic, the American gothic, the Canadian gothic, you pick a country, we have a gothic. So what that does is it forces us to focus on the social and historical circumstances of that specific nationality in order to sort of bring up histories. The gothic is also very interesting in history as well, and how we relook at history, what is history, the time, how time functions. Of course there are different social aspects, the feminist gothic, Victorian gothic, the modernist gothic, and then it's in many mediums, literature, film, media, TV, radio, you name it, pop culture, it's everywhere, right? But up until she was writing this, it was mainly literary, that's all it was, the 20th century has pushed all these other forms, obviously. Okay, so that was a quick run through. But that leads us to what the female or the feminist gothic is, and this is arguably, this short story fits very strongly within that tradition, a tradition that's debatable and in some ways, controversial, because when it first came out, Ellen Moore's coined the term in a book called Literary Women in 1976. And when, well, I can still go there. When it first came out, basically she was looking at a broad umbrella definition of this to say, what I mean by the female gothic is easily defined as the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that since the 18th century, we have called the gothic. So women writers, literary mode called the gothic. But it's actually much more than this. This is just sort of a beginning to start working with definitions. The female gothic is also about sort of the dissatisfaction of the patriarchal society and how women writers reclaimed the gothic form and representations of women in it. Because oftentimes the gothic form does not put women in a very positive light. So there's a way to reclaim that, a way to reform that. Moore's did talk a little bit about the yellow wallpaper actually in like a two sentences. And what she called it was a macabre postpartum fantasy. It's kind of perfect for a book jacket, too bad it, she wrote it after the fact. So a typical sort of female gothic plot is about a female heroine in flight from a male villain. It could be a father, it could be a priest, it could be a husband, whatever. That's sort of your general sense of the female gothic plot. They've gotten, of course, much more complicated. They're usually from a woman's point of view and usually by a woman writer. Doesn't mean it has to be that way, this is just the tendency. It reinforces that marriage or the idea of institutionalization of any kind, but we can say marriages, are not among equals. So oftentimes gothic plots have a marriage. There's usually a marriage plot somewhere in a gothic story. Whether it just be about a marriage, before marriage, after marriage, right, that's significant. But feminist writings use the gothic conventions of confinement and trapment, oppression, displacement, transformation, haunting and madness. All these things usually happen in particularly in domestic spaces for the female gothics. That's the key. There's spaces, like in a castle, right, there's many different spaces you could explore in a gothic novel, but female gothic would usually explore the domestic ones, the traditionally domestic places that some of these stories might play out. So, yeah, okay. So we're talking a bit about how this excerpt is the beginning of the story. And in the first couple paragraphs, we immediately have the context of everything I just talked about, immediately. It is very seldom that marriage people like John and myself secure an ancestral halls for the summer, ancestral hall, okay, we got that. Colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say, a haunted house, and the reach, and reach the height of a romantic felicity, but that would be asking too much of fate. Still, I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should I, why should it be less, so cheaply? And why have stood so long on tenanted? So, of course, a suspicion, immediately, a sense of question, a sense of doubt is placed into the story. John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage, right? So now we have marriage we're talking about. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. So here, of course, we have the opposition between sort of the anti-enlightenment, enlightenment, rationality, control versus experience, feelings, right? That's an opposition. So within the, within the beginning, we just basically summed up everything I've been talking about in the last 15 minutes. All right, so then we talked about the feminist writings, the domestic spaces, the links between gender and subgenre that came out in the 1990s. So what happened in that third wave of feminism as people sort of revisited the idea of the female gothic in the 70s and put much more of a third-wage slant on it? So there are more things like the women's gothic, the lesbian gothic, gothic feminism, the queer gothic, right, all these sort of taxonomies and different ways to break down within the female gothic. So female gothic is sort of a big umbrella and there's a lot of different ways you can read it, but maybe it's just better to say the feminist gothic so we don't get in the whole idea of female and the problems with that word that we've worked through with the Bavar and everything else. So one article that talks about the female gothic in the yellow wallpaper, there actually aren't that many people writing about this, this specific point. And this has a very feminist slant on the argument. So it's by Carol Margaret Davison and she says, Gilman's the yellow wallpaper as a work of female gothic acts to some degree as a corrective to the numerous studies that have read this story exclusively as a light and non-political horror tale or as a politically charged feminist piece that explores the ideology of femininity. Their common oversight has been to fail to consider the suitability and the implications of Gilman's choice of what ladder came to be classified as the female gothic mode, a form that is generally distinguished from the traditional gothic mode as it centers its lens on young women's right of passage. Right, we talked about that with Austin as well, the female Bouldung's Grumman. And then into womanhood, which is part of marriage of course and her ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology, especially the joint institutions of marriage and motherhood. So the idea that the story is often read in a gothic light is quite common. The idea that is read as a feminist gothic story connected actually illuminates different reading than just a feminist approach might or just a gothic approach might. And certainly what I'm suggesting is these two combinations are what actually allow us to get more out of the story, to understand more parts of it. So we see this and the relationship between haunting and history is what I was saying earlier is a significant preoccupation with gothic writing. Haunting and history, what is history really? What is history about time? Haunting sort of disrupts histories. It disrupts time. Ghosts don't live by time, but they're also bound by time. We're revisited by a past history in a present so time doesn't really function anymore because we can't escape from those histories. Histories haunt us, literally, and physically in form of gothic tales where ghosts are haunting us, of course, but sometimes they're just symbols of a history that are haunting us as well. So you don't actually have the actual ghost that's real. We could see the ghost, think the ghost is there. It's really just a symbol of history, but it could be the ghost. And that's sort of the dynamic that is played with like at the end of the story. Is there really a ghost? Is there really a woman in the wallpaper? Or is that woman just a history, a signal, a sign, haunting the protagonist at the moment? Does it really matter what it is if it's really a ghost or if it's not a ghost? Does that matter? So on a pattern, as she says, on a pattern like this, and this may be the most important part of the whole story, where she says on a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law that is a constant irritant to the normal mind. The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns back, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind that dim sum pattern, but now I'm quite sure it is a woman. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight. So anyone want to, does this resonate to anyone? Does anyone kind of feel like they know what's happening here, they want to take a stab at? How would you read this? Maybe in light of everything we talked about today, how would you read this? When you notice that that was in the irritating, then you sort of think that you think you've mastered it, so you think that it's sort of in and out, but then it turns out it's not. And it's like constant back and forth and irritation of living in such a society. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly, exactly. So on the surface, she's just talking about the wallpaper, right? If we just look at it at face value, she's talking about looking at this bloody picture all the time and not literally bloody, you know, actually I have to stare at this crazy thing and she hates the wallpaper and she's dealing with this. We could just look, we could read it that way, it's just purely part of the story. But of course there's layers underneath that. And the wallpaper is haunting because of this pattern that was just said so well. But the pattern in history has been such that this is coming out now. It's haunting the narrator. And it must be humiliating to be caught creeping by the daylight. Women can't be, women are socialized in the world to be a certain way. They have to creep. They can't be who they are in the daylight. They can only be who they are when they're not in a man's world. So in some ways, this protagonist, one could argue I suppose, that this protagonist although is in solitary confinement clearly unhappy and having issues, it is also a point of freedom for her because, and that's maybe in the way why she's creeping. There's a sense of what is the daylight, what is the night, and when is she comfortable and when is she's not. And it's humiliating either way, whether she's walking or whether she's creeping. It's still humiliating. There's no difference. So she might as well be. Feminist Gothic is also, as I said, a response to patriarchal oppression. So the subordinate other challenges notions of domesticity, battles between male authority, rationality, and female experience and knowing. So that's a big one in this story. We see that male authority constantly in conflict with woman's experience. And one is considered credible in the one, in the essential society. The credible one, of course, is the science, which is of course associated with man in this. But then there's the experiential part that is really sort of drawn out a lot in the story. And maybe I'm gonna go to the next quote instead. Yeah, so on many occasions, the protagonist, the narrator is telling John how she feels, right? You guys remember this? She's always telling John she doesn't feel good. This is uncomfortable for her. She doesn't feel like she's getting better. And this is going on and he's kind of placating her, but he doesn't really listen to her. He doesn't think that she knows what she's talking about. So her experience is clearly not valued by the establishment, the symbol of the establishment, but also of her husband as her husband. So there's the doctor, there's the man, and then he's also as their husband. So he's all these different roles, but their minds will be the same. So she says, I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him I was really not gaining here and that I wished he would take me away. The repairs are not done at home and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course, if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, you really are better, dear. Whether you can see it or not, I am a doctor, dear, and I know, right? This sense of credibility, rationality, science. You are gaining flesh and color and your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you. She replies, of course, I don't weigh a bit more said I nor as much and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away. So we see disagreement. She's telling her she's coming from an experiential standpoint. It's not being valued. She remains in confinement because of this. And so we see some of these things played out throughout the story. And then finally, another way to pull something out of this feminist Gothic is to look at how women's fears and desires and one of the big pre-occupations is with fear and desire. Again, a lot of contrasts. How fear and desire play on each other. What do we fear? What does that say about us? What do we desire? What does that say about us? But how women's fears and desires differ than men's. So if we're looking at sort of, I guess, what stereotypical fears and desires in society, are those really women's fears and desires or there's more men's fears and desires because that's where we get the most exposure to. So in this story, I would argue that one of the fears for the protagonist is maybe less about confinement in a way and more about intellectual confinement, right? Being forced to not think, being forced to not have an opinion, being forced not to write, being forced not to work, have a profession. These kinds of things, right? So the protagonist said, he says that was my imaginative power and habit of story making and nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tenancy, so I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little, it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try. It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. And actually, elsewhere in the story, she talks about how exhausting it is not because she's writing, she's exhausting to hide her writing from her doctor, from her husband. That's more exhausting than the writing itself that's supposed to be the thing that's exhausting her. She's having to do this in secret because she's obviously not allowed to do this public. The creeping, right? I guess is a bit of a metaphor. And she's a story maker, right? She's trying to create her own myths, right? She's trying to, as DeVora would say, she's trying to write her own agency and writing is her agency. This is something that's being taken away from her. So maybe the most significant impact in the story, I mean, there's a lot of them. Certainly the overt one is you don't want to trap somebody in a room forever. That's clearly not a good thing. But one of the less obvious things is that you take away something that's a part of somebody. They're intellectual abilities. They're ability to express themselves. That's far worse in some ways, right? Then just being isolated. Okay, so we'll stop here and I'll just give you a couple things to think about, I guess, before we go. Some questions you guys can explore maybe in essays. Well, part of this is written in seminars. But how does the second sex speak to contemporary history? Like how do we read this now? Something might be interesting. Are women free from oppression, right? Do women get to choose themselves? Do women get to define themselves through self-chosen projects? Does this happen now? Is it all better? How can we apply De Bevoir's theory of the other to the yellow wallpaper? Maybe specifically, how does biology, social construction, and ontology, or existentialism appear in the stories through the three points that we talked about with De Bevoir today? As readers, can we trust the narrator in the yellow wallpaper? Or are we supposed to trust or distrust the narrator? If we distrust the narrator, does that mean we're complicit with John in some way? That's a big point to think about how the narrator is and how credible or incredible throughout the story it might be. We might think in the end she goes insane, like I said. But what if she doesn't go insane? What if she gets the utmost clarity in the end? But we read it as insanity, because we're so entrenched in certain myths that we just immediately view that as that's got to be terrible. So really sort of rethinking ideas of evil. Again, what is evil? What is oppression? What is confinement? How do these things function? And what are creeping women? And why does Gilman use the verb creep? What are creeping women? It's important. OK, thanks, guys. We'll see you.