Producing the Subject: A New Historicist Reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’

Abstract

In the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Foucault occupies a curiously marginal position. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning Foucault is consigned almost wholly to footnotes. In Shakespearean Negotiations he is mentioned three times, two of which are references. In Learning to Curse he warrants two mentions, both of which tell merely of his visits to Berkeley in the late 1970s. In Marvelous Possessions he has disappeared from view altogether. Yet, in other ways, Foucault is everywhere in Greenblatt’s work: the analysis of discourse, the role of discourse in determining subject positions, the relationship between power, knowledge and subversion, the wide dispersion of texts which confirm the existence of powerful discursive formations, the fascination with ‘marginal’ figures and situations — the insane, the heretic, the criminal, the colonial native. Foucault is pervasive as an influence on the work of new historicists, but his influence takes different forms. D. A. Miller, in The Novel and the Police, saw his work as an extension and application of Foucault’s writings, rather than the result of Foucault’s influence. In the first footnote of The Novel and the Police, Miller explains:

[I]n announcing my project as ‘a Foucauldian reading of the Novel’, I mean to signal, besides an intellectual debt, an intellectual gamble for which that debt is the capital. For perhaps the most notable reticence in Foucault’s work concerns precisely the reading of literary texts and institutions, which, though often and suggestively cited in passing, are never given a role to play within the disciplinary processes under consideration. (Miller 1988, viii n.1)

We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognise each other through the merciless language of non-madness.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization