I am glad my case is not serious: Sanity and Hysteria in The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper.
This is the meaning of hysteria: “I am helpless; life is crowding in on me. Rescue me. (Grant 321) From its etymological meaning to the current day usage, hysteria has been immeasurably linked with the female gender. As indicated by the origins of the name from the Greek hystera, "womb," hysteria has always been seen as an ailment. The rise of the novel form and female writers per se invoked the inherent rise of the fragile yet determined female character. This female lead, often only seen in novels written by female authors under pseudo names, invited a challenge to the set-up of patriarchal society where the woman was seen as defiant for her…show more content… Edna’s major resolve by the end of her trip to Grand Isle starts the culmination of what later Freud would conceive, the notion of an unconscious mind which dominates the character’s actions. Of significance is also Edna’s memory, which has been shaping to accommodate both her parents, while the mother died when she [Edna] was young, her father is also baseline equivalent to a corpse for her. She is averse to her father’s existence and agrees to marry Leonce, who is twice her age, if it meant taking him [father] out of her everyday sight. The Awakening dramatizes Edna's psychological problems that Edna goes through during her search for self-autonomy. Kwang Soon Kim in his essay reads the novel through Lacanian lens and understands Edna’s desire for self- autonomy as hardly fulfilled because of the essential split or incompleteness of the human subject in the symbolic dimension. Jacque Lacan, the French linguistic psychoanalyst, argues that human individuals acquire a sense of "I" when they enter the language system that is named the symbolic dimension. In this symbolic dimension, human subjects are not able to avoid the psychological dilemma that comes from a split sense of self because their selves are fundamentally the effect of language whose meaning is always absent and empty (due to the fundamental absence of a fixed relationship between signifier and signified). Edna recognizes her "dual selves" and experiences the fundamental psychological dilemma of human subjects. According to Lacanian theory, the only mechanism to resolve such a psychological dilemma is the narcissistic identification with the images that are not filtered through the language system. There is a dissection between Edna and the wife as active and passive responders. While Edna is
