"Half-way up they closed in on me and started talking. The girl said, 'Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your mother." Wide Sargasso Sea pg.26
"If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?" The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman line 10
I couldn't help but read Wide Sargasso Sea as an echo of Charlotte P. Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper. In both cases we observe women descend into madness as they are confined by their marriages and held captive by their husbands. The pathology of this madness can be traced to a loss of voice. As we discussed in class, Antoinette's marginalization stems from her Creole background in which she does not belong culturally or linguistically to any of the white Europeans or black Jamaican groups that surround her. Antoinette's isolation is finalized when her husband relocates her to England where she has no sense of belonging. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper suffers for the lack of an audience that will take her seriously. She is heard only in a secret journal she keeps because her husband/doctor has isolated her due to a "hysteria"she has developed since the birth of their child. Even in brevity the feminist concern is clear here: Gillman and Rhys portray womanhood as marginalizing and marriage as isolating and disempowering. Moreover, having a voice, particularly through writing is presented as a gendered practice. Antoinette's voice is silenced in part two of Sargasso in exchange for the perspective of her husband- the reader must rely on Rochester's observations of her descent into madness. Gillman's narrator is communicating to the reader through a series of secret journal entry because she is not allowed by her husband to write anything. Both writers arrive in Bronte's attic, concluding that feminine experience, both gendered and sexual is one of marginalization and like Woolf, argue that women must find a room of their own outside of the patriarchy if they wish to have any voice at all.
Now for the real question: Has Beyonce read Gillman or Rhys? Doubtable...
Single Ladies- Beyonce
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