Um grito de socorro de Charlotte Perkins Gilman: a loucura feminina e sua relação com o espaço no conto "The Yellow Wallpaper".

Abstract

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1892 and written by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has gained notoriety since its publication until the present moment. In the last decade of the 19th century, readers were captivated by the aura of terror and mystery that surrounded Gilman's narrative. In the second half of the 20th century, the short story was revisited by feminist criticism, for being the story of a woman who, subject to her husband, is isolated on a rural property without contact with other people, so that she can be treated for her nervous pathology. In this new ambiance, the protagonist narrator ends up spending most of her time in the nursery, on the top floor of the house, and this space is dominated by the yellow wallpaper, an element that entitled the short story, revealing how important it is. The yellow wallpaper ends up becoming the object to which the protagonist narrator dedicates all her attention, due to the intellectual leisure imposed on her during the treatment. In the three-month period in which she is isolated on the property, her relationship with the wallpaper deepens, and if she initially harbored a certain disgust with it, then she watches over it for hours and avoids leaving the nursery due to its powerful influence. When noting the prominent place that such an element of composition occupies in this short story, we perceive the study of space in this narrative as a fertile ground for the development of our research. Thus, our objective is to analyze the relationship between the construction of the narrative space and the psychic state of the protagonist narrator of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. To this end, we carried out a bibliographic study to verify the historical and literary context of the work's production from Cincotta (1994), Reidhead (2017) and Vanspanckeren (1994). To carry out the analysis of space we rely on the concepts of Bachelard (1978), Osman Lins (1976), Dimas (1987) and Borges Filho (2008). The essay by Antonio Candido, entitled Degradação do espaço: Estudo sôbre a correlaçãofuncionaldos ambientes, das coisas e do comportamento em L’Assommoir (2006), helped us in the selection of the analytical categories of this work (the garden, the house, the room and the yellow wallpaper). Finally, in order to study the symbolic elements linked to the narrative space, we used Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1996). Regarding critical feminist studies, we rely on Showalter (1991; 2009a; 2009b), Felman (1975) and Gilbert and Gubar (2000). Upon concluding our analysis, we verify the fundamental place that space occupies in the construction and development of this narrative. In Gilman's short story, space is not used merely as a point of reference for geographical location, space shares the central role with the protagonist narrator, in such a way that, if the space were changed or ceased to exist, the narrative action would not develop.