SOURCE: McGowan, Todd. “Dispossessing the Self: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Renunciation of Property.” In The Feminine ‘No!’: Psychoanalysis and the New Canon, pp. 31-46. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

In the following essay, McGowan observes that recent historicist readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” provide key insights into the relationship between female subjectivity and the ownership of private property.

Fredric Jameson begins The Political Unconscious with the mantra, “Always historicize!,” calling this an “absolute” and “even ‘transhistorical’ imperative” of radical thought.¹ Historicizing, in Jameson's vision, is attractive because it gives us access to trauma; it facilitates a traumatic encounter with the contingency of the present, thereby freeing us from the present's awful weight. It does this by revealing that the present doesn't owe its hegemony to transcendental necessity but to concrete historical determinants, determinants that might have been—and might sometime be—different. In short, historicizing...