The Yellow Wallpaper" pushes its readers to see beyond what is visible, both metaphorically and literally, at the same time calling into question what it means to see the unseen and what it means not to see it.Haunted by pasts that refuse to remain in the past, the ecogothic dimensions of the story become more pronounced the deeper the reader peers in.At the center of the story is paper, and obviously it is the visions the narrator has from the paper that generate the plot.These visions and the plot they generate in turn reveal to the reader things that might otherwise be unseen-including, most obviously, the subjugation of the narrator under patriarchal authority.They reveal far more than this, however.Like the images in a 3D movie or a stereogram, there are things in this story that are in front of but not easily visible to the reader, at least not the way that the narrator's suffering is-experiences that bob and float in the long stream of sexism that returns and haunts the narrative.Indeed, the story exposes more than simply human relationships and histories, relationships and histories that reside in the very paper itself.This essay builds on the foundational work of scholars such as Dawn Keetley, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Elizabeth Parker, and Michelle Poland 1 on vegetal agency while exploring the explicitly entangled complexities of the truncated agencies of nature and women in "The Yellow Wallpaper."I argue that this story pushes the reader to think beyond the convenient anthropocentric and ecophobic notions of a vengeful nature toward a more balanced understanding of vegetal agency, an understanding of plants on their own terms.It is in our continuing failure to do so and through our thwarting of the agency of the vegetal world that the magnitude of ecogothic horror takes form in this story.
Simon C. Estók (Fri,) studied this question.