Part 15: Post-Structuralism
How to analyze literature?
Post-structuralism is a critical approach that challenges the idea of fixed meanings and stable interpretations in texts. Building on structuralism, which emphasizes structures like language and narrative, post-structuralism asserts that these structures are unstable, and meaning is always shifting. Key thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes have influenced this approach, which explores how texts resist definitive interpretations and reveal the fluid nature of meaning.
Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction focuses on uncovering contradictions and ambiguities in texts. Through deconstruction, the reader can find the binaries of the text. The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator’s descriptions of the wallpaper are full of contradictions—she simultaneously sees it as repulsive and fascinating, chaotic and ordered—highlighting the instability of meaning. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a single, authoritative interpretation. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the wallpaper can symbolize madness, creativity, societal oppression, or all of these at once. Each reading opens up new possibilities rather than closing off meaning.
Roland Barthes’ idea of "the death of the author" suggests that a text’s meaning is not tied to the author’s intent but is created by the reader. For The Yellow Wallpaper, this means readers’ interpretations of the narrator’s descent into madness or the symbolism of the wallpaper are just as valid as Gilman’s intended feminist critique.
Michel Foucault’s ideas about the relationship between language and power can be applied to the story. The narrator’s voice, constrained by societal norms and her husband’s authority, shows how language and power are intertwined. Her act of writing becomes an attempt to reclaim agency.
Using a post-structuralist lens, The Yellow Wallpaper resists a single interpretation. For example:
The wallpaper itself is a site of endless meaning. It could represent patriarchy, creative repression, or the narrator’s fractured psyche, and each interpretation is valid yet incomplete.
The story destabilizes traditional binaries, such as sanity/madness and freedom/oppression. By the end, it’s unclear if the narrator has gained liberation by embracing her madness or has become fully imprisoned within it.
The fragmented, unreliable narration reflects the instability of language and challenges the idea of a coherent, unified self.
Post-structuralism opens up The Yellow Wallpaper to multiple, shifting interpretations, emphasizing the text’s ambiguity and resistance to fixed meanings. By exploring its contradictions, and examining the interplay of power and language, post-structuralism reveals the complex ways in which the story both critiques and embodies the instability of meaning.
<3 Jonna