1 Cassandra McQuarrie Dr. Austin Riede English 2132 21 March 2019 Annotated Bibliography on “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 as an indication of the female condition during the late nineteenth century. Gilman’s short story challenged the social constructs of the patriarchal society she was confined to and her story is now viewed as an important feminist monument that helped shape the Women’s Rights movement. The central focus of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the patriarchal confinement of women and the consequences those societal constraints carry. Her story introduces a protagonist who is imprisoned by her husband due to her mental condition under the guise of treatment. As the story progresses, the narrator’s mental health deteriorates due her husband’s debilitating treatment that serves as a representation of nineteenth century society and its treatment of women. Through Gilman’s unorthodox depiction of female characters in her literature, she inspired many female writers and Women’s Rights advocates. However, in order to attest to the social significance of “The Yellow Wallpaper” one must first explore the larger socio-historical context it is indicative of and how its literary elements reflect this. This annotated bibliography focuses on the feminist significance of the story through a sociological and historical lens. Davison, Carol Margaret. “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” ​Women’s Studies​, vol. 33, no. 1, 2004, pp. 47-75. 2 Davison argues that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not exclusively representative of women’s literature but also Female Gothic literature. She highlights the Female Gothic elements in the story and lightly explores its prominent themes. This article serves as an argumentative piece focused on the middle ground between those who believe the story is exclusively a horror story and those who believe it is politically driven. Davison introduces the idea that it is both a horror story and a story about women’s oppression. She contends that it implements Gothic literary elements to highlight its feminist themes. She makes connections between classic Gothic literature and “The Yellow Wallpaper” to compare the similar themes such as confinement, rebellion, desire, and fear. However, Davison also points out Gilman’s dismissiveness of traditional domesticity, therefore putting the piece of literature in it’s own Female Gothic category. Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” ​Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal​, vol. 12, no. 2, 1986, pp. 113-128. Haney-Peritz writes an in-depth analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” focusing particularly on the husband-wife dynamic between the narrator and her husband John. She addresses Gilman’s writing through a masculine lens and how it effectively reveals the contradictions of men’s logic regarding women and in doing so she questions their authority. Haney-Peritz explains that the narrator establishes a rivalry between her and her husband at the conclusion of the story when she reaches the height of her mental decline and liberates herself from her husband’s constraints. She notes how Gilman’s accurate depiction of the confinement of nineteenth century women served as an important influence to the feminist movement. However, she contends that the 3 narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” should not be looked up to, but instead be seen as a warning to what could happen through the social confinement of women. Johnson, Greg. “Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Studies in Short Fiction,​ vol. 26, no. 4, 1989, pp. 521-530. Johnson begins his analysis with a real life comparison of Emily Dickinson’s mother and the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In an isolated act of defiance, Mrs. Dickinson wallpapered her room against her husband’s wishes. This incident is strikingly similar to “The Yellow Wallpaper” alluding to the story’s real world significance. Johnson focuses on the Gothic elements in the story including confinement, rebellion, desire, fear, and an oppressive male antagonist. However, he explains her use of these Gothic elements are parodical and only meant to emphasize the unjust confinement of nineteenth century women. Johnson notes that the humor and sarcasm used in the story serve as a way to represent the narrator’s suppressed anger and defiance towards her husband. He concludes that the story is representative of “a paradigm of feminine anger”. Quawas, Rula. “A New Woman’s Journey into Insanity: Descent and Return in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” ​Journal of the Australasian University of the Modern Language Association​, vol. 105, 2006), pp. 35-53. Quawas introduced the term “True Womanhood” and described the role of women during the nineteenth century. She explained how Gilman rebelled against the patriarchal ideas of how women should behave with her introduction of “New Women” in literature. The complexity of Gilman’s female characters was unheard of during her time and Quawas traced Gilman’s influence as a great female literary figure during her time. She contended that Gilman’s “New 4 Woman” characters in literature demanded independence and self-discovery. She described Gilman’s short story as a rebellion against the “rest-cure” and the misogynistic views of women. Suess, Barbara A. “The Writings on the Wall: Symbolic Orders in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Women’s Studies,​ vol. 32, no. 1, 2003, pp. 79-97. Suess emphasizes the psychiatric aspect of “The Yellow Wallpaper” focusing particularly on the story’s relation to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. She recounts prominent critics analysis’ such as Gilbert and Gubar had of the short story and describes the feminist and linguistic analysis. Suess explains that the common theme of patriarchy is important in every analysis of the story no matter the focus. However, she argues against both modern and early analysis’ of “The Yellow Wallpaper” due to the blame in both cases being placed on the narrator of the story. She believes the narrator’s mental condition is not her fault and, instead, a normal consequence of the mentally debilitating environment she was put in. She finds the narrator’s attempts to liberate herself admirable. Nabil 1 Feminist Linguistics in "The Yellow Wallpaper" Language is a vehicle for conveying thoughts, not an enclosed entity. It does not only reflect the user's ideology, but also affects one's perspective of the world and his position in it. Gender has been one of the crucial themes dealt with in relation to language, for language had been thought of as a phallocentric phenomenon which is to be constructed according to the user's gender role. For many centuries, it was believed that men's use of language is associated with their rationality and organized abilities of thinking while women blunder in their emotional irrationality and nervous disorders. Therefore, this perspective gave men the priority in conducting language and establishing its standards accordingly. Women, on the other hand, were deprived of their rights in expressing themselves properly and are to be locked up in their houses, instead. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", different forms of female oppression are demonstrated; yet exploring the language of the text through prose and dramatic elements contributes in giving a shape to feminist issues particularly those related to speech and self-expression. As related to feminist issues, the approach in dealing with "The Yellow Wallpaper" is within the linguistic framework tracing pragmatic elements and discourse analysis in the short story in relation to cultural and social contexts. "Many theorists, both feminists and anti-feminists, have attempted to prove that women speak in a different way from men… women’s speech is thus seen as a deviation from the norm: the human, i.e. the male" (Mills 2005: 34). Biological sex was to determine the traditional gender role; men are rational and strong whereas women are submissive and weak. Consequently, language is influenced by the gender role even from a feminist perspective. As a prose in form, the short story is to be analysed in regard to the point of view, which is the major factor in determining the use of other elements such as schema-oriented language, introducing given or new information, Nabil 2 the value-laden expressions and deixis. Including some dialogue and monologue elements, interpersonal relations are to be highlighted in the light of linguistics. Turntaking and speech acts are to be looked at, as well as breaking conversational principles, all from a feminist perspective. Written by one of the most prominent American feminists in the late nineteenth century, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story, the best notable work by its author, which discusses social inequality between men and women as well as different social means of suppressing women. In pursuit for a rest cure after giving birth of her child, the protagonist's family moves to a rented mansion to spend the summer. As a physician, her husband, John, takes care of her though most of the time misunderstands her condition which adds to her suffering. The protagonist experiences psychological depression which grows in due course causing her hallucination. The protagonist is the narrator herself, which puts her narration in a suspicion zone. Of many queer things in her room: the nailed bed, the barred windows and the scratched floor, there is nothing like the faded yellow wallpaper with big patches to enthrall the protagonist's mind. Not very sure about the reason behind the damage in the room, she attributes this damage to children previously inhabited it. Later on she discovers there is a crawling woman locked inside the pattern of the wallpaper. In order to free her out of the pattern, the protagonist locks herself inside the room, and starts striping the rest of the paper. As her husband arrives, she refuses to unlock the door, but after many attempts her husband manages to get in. However, as he sees her in a horrible state, crawling on the floor, he faints. The protagonist carries on in her crawling behaviour and steps over her husband each time she crawls. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story in eleven sections written in journal entries form. The story is narrated from an I-narrator perspective, a sick wife, who is never named, in contrast to the rest of the characters in the story who either have titles or mere names. Narrated in the past tense, the narrator provides a vivid reportage-like Nabil 3 description and a recall of the events happening at an earlier moment. The events are thus seen only through her eyes which puts her authenticity under suspicion. "Firstperson narrators are often said to be 'limited'… or 'unreliable'" (Short 1996: 257), because a one-sided perspective undeliberately excludes many details. The discourse structure may be helpful in illustrating who actually takes the command in viewing and controlling the events: Despite the fact that the unnamed wife is the sole narrator in the story, her husband, John, is the commander of most of the events while she reports what he says. She is more or less a mere recipient of commands, even her suggestions meet a deaf ear from her husband. In this respect, the narrator paradoxically has a voiceless voice. She is doubly oppressed not just because she is a woman in the late nineteenth century in a conservative American society, but also because of her sickness which allows her to utter nothing but the trivial according to her husband. Since the point of view is what reveals how s/he views the events according to his location, it also determines how the reader sees these events throughout the narrator's eyes. Deixis are an essential linguistic element in prose as it helps considering how the narrator points at things or shows them. "The deictic items are those elements whose linguistically encoded meaning includes a certain kind of sensitivity to context. They include pronouns like you and we, demonstratives like this and that" (Allott 2010: 55). The protagonist uses deictic expressions such as Nabil 4 demonstrative "this" in referring to specific things; "the paper" in which she pours her thoughts, or "the room" where she stays most of the time or the "wallpaper" which she faces daily. These are the closest objects to her. The paper is the only means through which she is able to express herself. The room is her sole place or prison, which she keeps examine cautiously. The wallpaper is the focus of her concentration and all her mental process in viewing and analyzing it. On the contrary, the use of "that" is not related to spatial closeness but the emotional one. The protagonist is afraid of the enigmatic pattern in the wallpaper and then feels detached from it because she cannot figure it out. Also, in referring to the woman she later on realizes creeping inside the pattern and starts shaking its bars, she uses "that" to indicate the woman's mysteriousness along with fear of her. However, the pronoun referring to the woman changes at the end of the story to pronoun "I", instead of "she", through which the protagonist incarnates the crawling woman's state. Deixis can easily indicate the changing point of space. Using cognitive spatial expressions visualize the narrator's position, from which she tells her experience. After her arrival to the summer house, she talks about her private room as follows: "I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs" (Gilman 1997: 2). Thus, "downstairs" denotes that the room's location is upstairs. She later on confirms the idea when she says "dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed"(7). Just like a baby or an unable human being, he carries her to her isolated area of the world, the upstairs room. Her dream or release is to be let go only downstairs. The binarity between the two locations implies not just a difference in position but also a gap between what she wishes for and what is imposed on her, between mingling with people and communicating with them and being imprisoned all by herself, and between hallucination or imagination and reality. Therefore, perception verbs of position, such as "come", are very frequent, as the protagonist is the one centered in the room while everybody "comes" to her; a movement towards her. She does not move freely, even her desires for changing place through using "go" are always disappointed. Nabil 5 Concerning temporal deictic expressions, these expressions are very significant in "The Yellow Wallpaper". Adverbs which express time remote from the speaker are apparent; such as in "now" which encodes closeness of time to the speaker. This closeness reveals how desolate the protagonist is; she does not have a schedule for the coming days or something on the list to accomplish in the future, yet she sticks only to the present moment. Therefore, there are references to long periods of time including months and weeks. She says, for instance, "We have been here two weeks" (Gilman 1997: 3). She does not have control on planning for the upcoming events, but she reports her husband's plans which are set for her and the family as a whole; he says "It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days" (9). Time has no real value for her either in her eyes or in her husband's eyes. She waits for her husband to decide for her otherwise the value of time for her is demolished. This underestimation of the value of time has been a manifestation of women's weakness and oppression; women did not contribute in social activities and were deprived of work, so they were confined to typical women activities which were mainly related to the housekeeping. Thus, being related to one specific space, i. e. the house, time loses its attribute of moving forward or progressing, which results in pushing women to a static time where her past, present and future do not differ that much. Being narrated from a first- person- narrator point of view, some linguistic choices determine such a view point. "One way in which viewpoint can be controlled, then, is through choosing to describe only what could be seen from a particular position" (Short 1996: 264). Schema-oriented language manifests how a protagonist under depression would view things around her. Schema is noted to be "essentially, our pre-existing knowledge structures, whether of our ‘world view’ or encyclopaedic knowledge, of language or text structure' (Black 2006: 32). Nevertheless, it is important to know the source of the protagonist's knowledge. It is either from books as she admits about the mansion "It makes me think of English places that you read Nabil 6 about" (Gilman 1997: 2), or from her husband's knowledge in medicine. Schemaoriented language demonstrates a viewpoint contrast between characters. In front of the wallpaper, description differs according to the character's schematic background. The narrator says about her step sister after seeing the paper "Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more' careful!" (10). Jennie, the protagonist's step sister does all the housekeeping in the mansion; therefore, her vocabulary is associated to cleanliness. She uses "the paper", "stained", "yellow smooches" and "careful". However, the protagonist, whose knowledge is generated from reading and her husband's conversations on medicine, uses different vocabulary. She says "the bloated curves and flourishes -a kind of " debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens -go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity… they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase" (7). She is overlexicalized in using terms from different disciplines, oriented from bookish and medical knowledge, and artistically criticizing the pattern of the wallpaper. In addition to designating the point of view through choosing what to describe, designating how to describe things is of a crucial significance. Most of the sentences employed are descriptive and stuffed with value-laden expressions which represent the narrator's perspective of her surroundings. As stated in the second sentence in the story, the spatial setting is declared to be "a colonial mansion". Thus, a reference to "a mansion" allows reference to whatever is attached to it. Therefore, there are references to "roads", "village", "hedges", "walls", "gates", "greenhouses" and "a garden". Then a shift to a more limited space in the "room" creates new reference to other words "windows", "bars" and "bed". In describing the mansion, the narrator uses contradictory adjectives referring to the same thing. Using "colonial", "strange" and "queer" reveals her unpleasant feeling regarding it, however, few lines later she describes it as "comfortable" and "the most beautiful place". Moving from one extreme to the other may indicate her mental disorder which is so sensitive to any Nabil 7 stimulus around her; that is to say her reliability is to be questioned. This opposition in her description may signify her attempt to adapt to the new place she is in even if she dislikes it. The house being described at the very beginning as "colonial" reveals her feeling of enslavement inside it even if she is well treated, but since it is against her will, it is considered a prison. Then another set of value-laden expressions appears in her illustration of the room. She initiatively declares her dislike to the room "I don't like our room a bit" (2), yet later on she uses contradicting adjectives such as "airy", "comfortable", and "fond of the room". She is doing her best to like the room and accept her stay in it though she keeps expressing her displeasure with the room and its details. In referring to things and introducing information the narrator uses either definite indicator for given information and indefinite indicator for new information. The protagonist introduces much of totally new information regarding the mansion, the room and the wallpaper. In introducing the house and its parts, she uses indefinite indicators such as "a", and whenever she re-mentions them she uses definite "the" or "it". However, in introducing characters she gives their mere names without titles or a description of them; the moment the narrator refers to her baby as "the baby", as a given information to state it as a fact. Also, referring to the housekeeper by here blank name "Mary", as if the reader knows her already and she does the same in introducing her step sister as "Jennie". Social deictic indicators are missing because these characters are either less in rank as in the case of the housekeeper, or relatives such as John and Jennie. Nevertheless, introducing them as part of the given information is employed to reflect the dysfunction of her mind which seems realistic in her case. The scale of realism is an important aspect in feminist discourse, since it embodies the scale of suffering that women experience. Therefore, normal nonfluency candidates are demonstrated in the text. There is unnecessary repetition such as in "I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able" (Gilman 1997: 7). This repetition may be due to her inner conflict between expressing the Nabil 8 press of her thoughts out loud and obeying her husband's orders about not to write. Hesitated as she seems to be, anaphoric sentences are used in order to express her desperate state. Linguists define anaphora as "when a word or phrase refers to an object via a link with another word or phrase that also refers" (Allott 2010: 21). The protagonist at the beginning of the story keeps repeating the same sentence for three times at the end of each passage; she says expressing her desperate submission to her husband's instructions "what can one do?" and also says "what is one to do?", which stand in contrast to another anaphoric repetition in "Personally" that give her a space for expressing her private desires. She says "Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good" (Gilman 1997: 1). She is the best one to know her condition, but taking her sickness in consideration, she is deprived of such a right, of deciding for her own. Voiced fillers are another manifestation of realistic dialogue. But since it is a monologue, voiced fillers are mainly uttered by the protagonist herself to illustrate her indecisive attitude regarding her health condition as well as her interpretation of her experience with the wallpaper. Potential candidates appear in the use of "I think", "I suppose" and "sort of". The excessive use of "of course" between sentences is important because she wants to indicate certainty in some parts of her speech. she says "Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued" (Gilman 1997: 14). As she feels upset about the view of crawling women around the house and her inability to reach them, she is thinking of jumping out of the window to investigate them. Though it is a suicidal action, she does not think of it as such, yet puts the act in the scale of social properness, so she withdraws from carrying it out. Women thus take the society's opinion in their priorities, even if some decisions are logically hazard; it is not due to the common sense but due to the society's view. Reversibly, this view entails that if a decision is correct but contradicts with the society's vision it is to be prohibited. Nabil 9 As long as the whole story is narrated from a first person perspective, it takes the form of a stream of thoughts known as stream of consciousness "to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction" (Abrams 1999: 298). It resembles the interior monologue, as it is a one-sided dialogue. Therefore, the protagonist does not move in a linear way of narration. On the contrary, her monologue seems unaimed not following a specific development of a topic. This does not mean that the plot is fragmented; by contrast the plot traces her descending to madness which is getting more complicated by time. Nevertheless, it is her monologue which seems fragmented due to her crowded head with contradictory thoughts. She says "I am sitting by the window now… John is away all day… It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby... I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!" (Gilman 1997: 3). She moves from one topic to another in no time; she starts talking about her passion for writing then her sitting beside the window, then her husband who is kept all the time at work, then her baby and its nurse, then her suffering then the wall-paper. Her thoughts move in a random float not like a scripted text; this is known as trailing "Trailing constructions are more common in casual speech" (Short 1997: 191). It is an "add-on" strategy commonly found in ordinary talk; she adds bits of topics to her speech in a long chain. This chain reveals how suppressed she is to the extent that her exhausted mind if full of thoughts that nobody listens to. In order to make a speech seem more natural sometimes, an utterance lacks some words which are to be re-mentioned after the end of the sentence. Elliptical sentence is "when linguistic material is missing from the pronounced form of a phrase or sentence, that phrase/sentence is said to be (syntactically) elliptical" (Allott 2010: 68). The protagonist uses such sentences as mid-sentences in order to add more elaboration to objects she describes. She says, for instance in her first mention of the wallpaper, "It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches" (Gilman 1997: 3). The hyphenated "paper" retains "I mean the paper", but extra words are omitted. Also, she Nabil 10 says "But I don't mind it a bit - only the paper" (5), which retains "I only mind the paper". Lots of mid sentences appear because it indicates the clumsiness of her thinking process and organizing her thoughts. She also does not pay enough intention for paraphrasing or rephrasing what she writes because she believes she writes these notes only for herself as she is forbidden from writing. In such a nervous condition, breaking the conversational principles is likely to happen. "[T]he maxims are rules or principles which interlocutors should observe in conversation... The claim is that a rational speaker in a conversation will try to be cooperative, and, other things being equal, this will involve obeying the maxims.(Allott 2010: 45). However, the narrator suffers a nervous depression which affects her perception in viewing things. Though the reader has no real access to what is really happening around the narrator, through flouting of the maxims, the reader is able to somehow filling between her riddling thoughts. As previously stated, the story is written in a form of stream of consciousness, that is to say the narrator roams from a topic to the other. As a result, the narrator breaks the relevance maxim "Relevance theory claims that human cognition tends to seek maximal relevance, that is, that cognition generally seeks the greatest gain in accurate representations of the world for the minimum processing effort. (166). Search for relevance is a feature of human cognition. The protagonist roams from a topic to the other, as previously stated, however, in the dialogue between her and her husband, his speech also seems irrelevant. As she is upset about the room, she asks him to repair it, he says "You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental" (Gilman 1997: 7). His answers are irrelevant as he states that the room is doing her well. Thus, he does not quite listen to her. As a practical person, he does not care for the trivial or small things to repair but he relates it to the whole big house. Another maxim is the quality maxim is manifested in contradiction. "A pragmatic theory of contradiction and paradox must describe what speakers and Nabil 11 hearers do when they recognize the inconsistency in discourse" (Norrick 1991: 195). The narrator, due to her limited vision and her position upstairs, states some views about objects around her, particularly the house, the room, the wallpaper and her husband John. She sometimes gets angry with her husband for not understanding her quite well and exaggerating in oppressing her thinking she would get better, she says "I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes" (Gilman 1997: 2). However, later on she admits her love to her and his perfect care of her "Dear John! He loves me very dearly and hates to have me sick". Also about her opinion in the wallpaper she moves from hating it "I never saw a worse paper" to feeling afraid of it "Horrid paper" and finally Getting fond of the room in spite of the paper" which she does not want anyone to touch it, "not alive!" These contradictions are flouted undeliberately. Catherine J. Golden in her "The Writing of the Yellow Wallpaper: A Double Palimpsest" suggests that "we read this tale [the short story] as a double "palimpsest"… a piece of parchment written upon, erased, and then written on again so that the original faded writing emerges as a second muted or background pattern" (Golden 2004: 101). These contradictions are not genuine ones because it is a development of her vision of things. Even in her self- image, her identity develops with narration from being a negative passive character until identifying herself with the crawling woman. Since the story has some mini-dialogue and in other times through reported speech, turn-taking is another element in pragmatics. Proposed by Sacks et al, the turn-taking "is one of the options for turn allocation and to initiate turn change. Current speaker can select next, to whom turn rights pass" (Culpeper 1998: 25). Though it is the protagonist who narrates the story, her husband's voice is permeating and she is the one who gives it a domineering role through repeating what he says through "John says" even if it contradicts with her desires and wishes; she says "I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus -but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad'. In the sixth section, she starts behaving on Nabil 12 her own without being instructed "Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be" (Gilman 1997: 10). The wallpaper has become a new zone for her mind to work in freely; a new field where she unleashes her imagination abilities without restrictions. The protagonist in the last third of the story becomes the domineering figure who triumphs over patriarchal systems embodied in her husband when he faints and continues crawling over his fainted body. The change of the turn-taking is significant from a feminist perspective; the shift of turn-taking in speech from the husband to a wife signifies the shift from male dominance to the female triumph. Speech acts are connected together with joints of turns. The story is crowded with descriptions of the house and its objects; thus constative acts are apparent; "if some utterances play the traditional role of simply providing descriptions of states of affairs then they should be called constatives" (Allott 2010: 37). However, these acts reflect her displeasure and disappointment of the setting through the value-laden expressions used. The protagonist gives various interrogative speech acts to ask about the reason behind the neglected appearance of the house; she says "why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?" Despite being normal questions, her husband laughs at her questions. The intended perlocutionary force is to receive an answer, but since the perlocution is failed, the speech act changes into an expressive act. "Expressives are speech acts in which the speaker expresses a certain type of attitude, such as pleasure, displeasure, liking or disliking. They include thanking, praising, blaming and speech acts which express emotions" (74). Her interrogative acts turn into expressive acts; such as the repeated question "what is one to do?" In such illocutions, she expresses her feeling of dismay and dislike to the house in general and her condition of yielding to her husband's instructions in particular. The husband gives commissive acts in the form of promises "commissives are the class of speech acts which involve the speaker promising or otherwise making a commitment… Commissives are also a type of speech act in Searle’s taxonomy: speech acts that involve commitment to a future course of action. They are analysed as having world-to-word direction of fit. The idea is that when uttering a commissive, Nabil 13 the speaker intends to (try to) make the world conform to what she has said" (Allott 32). He says "It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days" This perlocutionary act has been failed, because he does not try to make his commitment valid for performance. Neglecting his with as he is kept by work, his wife did not improve, on the contrary, she descended to insanity. All in all, not only does language reflect the user's ideology, but also affects one's perspective of the world and his location in it. Scrutinizing gender dynamics in a literary text lends itself to linguistics and pragmatics studies. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman is a clear manifestation of exploring the language of both drama and prose. The point of view is the major element in prose language because it determines schema-oriented schema and deixis. Also, taking the element of dialogue into consideration, the story has many mini dialogues which validate dramatic study of the text and thus enriching it. Exploring the language of the text through exposing it to different literary genres corroborates to visualizing women's suffering in a patriarchal society and traces her struggle; physical and verbal, in order to confirm her identity as an independent human being. Works Cited: Primary Sources: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. New York: Dover Publications. INC. 1997. Print. Secondary Sources: ABRAMS, M. H. Glossary of Literary Term. 7th ed. HEINLE & HEINLE. 1999. Print. Nabil 14 Allott, Nicholas. Key Terms in Pragmatics. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2010. Print. Black, Elizabeth. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. 2006. Print. Culpeper, Jonathan. Short, Mick and Verdonk, Peter. Exploring the Language of Drama From Text to Context. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis. 1998. Print. Golden, Catherine J. "The Writing of the Yellow Wallpaper: A Double Palimpsest". Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition. ed. Golden, Catherine J. New York: Routledge Guides to Literature. 2004. Print. Mills, Sara. Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge. 2005. Print. Norrick, Neal R. "Contradiction and paradox in discourse". Levels of Linguistic Adaptation: Selected papers from the International Pragmatic Conference. Vo.II. ed. Verschueren ,Jef. Antwerp. Belgium: John Benjamins Publishing, Jan 1, 1991. Print. Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Edinburgh: Addison Wesley Longman Limited. 1996. Print.
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