Logos/Hysteria

Both terms of each binary are nodes of power, and the narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper” describes the movement from the first to the second; upon completion of this movement, the terms collapse into each other. With the hope of making the relationships clearer, I have created the following chart:

The terms on the left are associated with men or the masculine; on the right, the terms are associated with women or the feminine. Yet this is not to say that men possess the powers named on the left, and women those on the right. Rather, this chart provides one way of looking at phallogocentric discourse—one reading. To put it plainly, men control all the terms (at least in the three texts that are the focus of this essay), but they only overtly wield the terms on the left. The terms on the left define the terms on the right, i.e., the terms on the right are negatively defined via those on the left.