Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or the Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

This essay will analyze how the Gothic representation of wives imprisoned, effaced and even killed by their husbands, literalizes and thereby demystifies the legal abstraction of coverture. Under this legal principle, the wife became an unperson, because her legal identity was 'covered' by that of her husband. Through a literal or metaphorical death (enclosure in a castle, convent or a madhouse), the Gothic genre portrays the civil death and the effacement of women’s legal identity. The trope of the dangerous male relative (mainly the father or the husband) reflects the patriarchal legal reality responsible for the social death of the woman. Specific attention will be devoted to the novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (posthumously published in 1798), in which Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage by which women are exchangeable commodities and are denied their natural rights, and uses the sexualized female body as a revolutionary medium of communication; the essay will then analyze Catherine Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), in which the protagonist, enclosed in a room of a country mansions, entrusts her denounce of the punitive, patriarchal set of institutions that require and actually effect the suppression of women’s autonomy and self expression to her writings (her book of evidence), thus claiming her own individual voice and her struggle for the preservation of her identity.