This paper examines the discourse of hysteria and performativity in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” ‘Hysteria,' 'female,' ‘body' have always been positioned as others by the patriarch system. They have been conventionally produced, maintained, and rationalized with musculinist discourse. In other words, gender identity and hysteria are performatively constituted by the norms of patriarchic ideology. The paper shows the connection between the discourse of hysteria and Butler's theory of performativity. The connection reproduces female gender and hysteria as performative effects, hysterical writing as discursive performativity, and hysterical body as bodily performativity.
Performativity is the reiterative and citational practice not a singular or deliberate act. Hysteria is presented as acts reiteratively and unconsciously but the acts can be not approved in the conventional society. Hysterical body, shown as symptom, is unconscious one. Unnamed ‘I' in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is sentenced that she must stay only in her house, be separated from her baby, and be prohibited to write anything. The prohibition does not seek the obliteration of prohibited desire but it pursues the reproduction of prohibited desire and becomes itself intensified.
Oppressed and barred ‘I' starts to write about the yellow wall-paper but pretends not to write. Her writing becomes hysterical more and more. Actually, a feature of hysteria is unconscious writing as a symptom. Her hysterical writing, as discursive performativity, is a possibility of subverting the norms of patriarch, and a resignification of conventional originary context. As another feature, hysteria is reiterative ‘somatic compliance' and performativity can be explained in the ‘somatic dimension.' So the hysterical writing of ‘I' is sensible. Creeping women are acting texts and her diary is a speaking text. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” itself becomes body, and the body becomes writing. The text, in the end, becomes the hysterically speaking body.
In conclusion, the hysterically speaking body is neither female one nor male one because the symptom of hysterical body is presented unconsciously but reiteratively presented just as acts. The acts of the speaking body destroy the metaphysical dichotomy between the domain of the mental and the domain of the physical, break down the opposition between body and spirit and between matter and language. The performativity of the text is not under sovereign control and has the possibility of resignification as an alternative reading of performativity and of politics.