EDEN2004 A Transitivity Analysis of Agency and Power in The Yellow Wallpaper
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From Confinement to Creeping: A Transitivity Analysis of Agency and Power in The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is a cornerstone of feminist literature, renowned for its intense psychological depth. Beyond its compelling narrative, the story’s enduring power stems from Gilman’s deliberate and sophisticated stylistic construction. The plot is presented through the secret journal of an unnamed, upper middle-class woman, suffering from what her physician husband, John, diagnoses as temporary nervous depression following childbirth. Prescribing the “rest cure,” John confines her to a remote estate for the summer, isolating her in a former nursery room on the top floor. He forbids her from any work or intellectual stimulation, including her cherished writing, and dismisses her anxieties about the room’s peculiar features, most notably its chaotic, repellent yellow wallpaper.
The narrative traces the protagonist’s gradual psychological disintegration. Initially attempting to comply with John’s dictates, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the wallpaper’s intricate, oppressive pattern. As the narrator’s isolation and mental anguish intensify, on their final day at the house, she locks herself in the room and peels off vast sections of the wallpaper. When John finally breaks in, he finds his wife crawling compulsively along the wall.
He faints in shock at the sight, leaving her to creep over his inert body. This essay contends that Gilman’s linguistic choices are fundamentally instrumental in conveying the protagonist’s experience. Its central research question is: How does Halliday’s model of transitivity systematically reveal the construction of power and agency in The Yellow Wallpaper?
The analysis will specifically investigate how the shifting patterns of processes and participants grammatically encode the narrator’s progression from passive confinement to active resistance. By conducting a systematic stylistic examination, this essay aims to demonstrate that the protagonist’s entrapment and her subsequent, fragmented liberation are not merely narrated but are linguistically performed. The goal is to illuminate the inextricable link between form and meaning, arguing that the narrative’s critique of patriarchal authority is embedded within the grammatical architecture of the text itself.
2 Literature Review
Scholarly engagement with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has long recognized its profound critique of patriarchal structures. The existing critical landscape, however, reveals a notable divergence between thematic interpretation and rigorous linguistic examination. Thematic analyses have extensively documented…
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