“SHE IS FINALLY FREE”:
AN ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S PATHOLOGIZED OPPRESSION AND THE
RECLAMATION OF THE ABJECT IN “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” AND MIDSOMMAR
By
Diana G. Schultz
A Thesis
Submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York
In Partial Fulfillment of
The Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of English
May 2020
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ABSTRACT
Women live and lead pathologized lives, as evidenced by past diagnoses of women’s
disorders like “hysteria” and more modern issues surrounding beliefs in women’s hormones and
biological inferiority. In analyzing women’s relationships with a wider male society and the role
Kristevean abjection takes in patriarchal views on women’s minds and bodies, I aim to show
how female characters in horror fiction – namely Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The
Yellow Wallpaper” and Ari Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar – take that abject view and reclaim it
for their own power. Through this reclamation, women are able to gain control from patriarchal
oppression, demonstrating that male created feminine ideals are a form of oppression, that
women can obtain freedom from through abject forces.
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ACKOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the support of a variety of people. I’d
like to thank both my advisor Mary Valentis, and my second reader, Rae Muhlstock, for reading
my roughest drafts and helping me turn a handful of ideas into something worth writing. Their
support provided key insight that helped me expand on specific areas, and gave way to a
stronger, clearer analysis. Thank you to the University at Albany English department and
Graduate programs for giving me a well-rounded and interesting education, and giving me the
opportunity to complete a combined program; thank you to the all of the hardworking faculty
that have supported me and guided my studies these past few years. Lastly, I would like to thank
my family for encouraging me throughout my graduate education, and for always pushing me to
work harder; I would not have gotten this far without so much support.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1: Girls, Gilman, and the Gothic………………..………………………..........8
Chapter 2: Bearing the Burden of Modern Womanhood……………………….............31
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...56
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….62
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INTRODUCTION
There’s an unspoken rule among women: if the man you just started seeing says his exgirlfriend(s) are “crazy” without any real reasoning behind it, you should probably break things
off. Though women subscribe to patriarchal ideas by virtue of being raised under them, there
tends to be things that exist in female circles as well-known red flags, and a man claiming
“craziness” is one of them. This is not only because it suggests he did something wrong to
warrant an angry reaction, but because he perpetuates the idea that women’s – usually rightful
and justified – anger is a sign of something inherently wrong with her: that she’s too hormonal,
too emotional, too crazy. In doing so, women’s emotional responses are in one way, repressed,
for fear of coming off as crazy, and in another expressed more strongly or more highly than
men’s in response to that repression – not because women are biologically prone to excess
emotion, but because oppression and sexism take their toll. The belief in the biology behind
women’s “hysterical” tendencies only supports the narrative that women’s emotion isn’t to be
trusted because it’s somehow more irrational than men’s; conveniently, or perhaps purposefully,
this belief continues male power structures by virtue of its disbelief in the rationality of women’s
minds.
In an era of #MeToo and #ShePersisted, the history and vigor of the women’s rights
movement is becoming ever the more present in today’s political and social landscape. Though
Western women today certainly exist more freely than Western women of the past, female
oppression is still very much alive; its just gotten a little sneakier in how it presents itself.
Patriarchal structures of the past and present worked to vilify and pathologize women’s minds
and bodies: then, it was a medical diagnosis of hysteria which could lead to things like “the rest
cure” that saw women lose any sense of agency and control, no longer able to read, write, or
1
socialize. Now, it functions under more casual social implications, painting a picture of women
as being too emotional and hormonal, leading to repressed emotion, and more serious
consequences of workplace discrimination and justification for violent male behavior.
A commonality between the hysteria of the past and the present lies in how women deal
with this pathologization mentally. In the literary and cinematic world, the horror genre can
provide a space for female characters and writers to expose the oppression they face as a clear
monster to the audience, aligning readers and viewers with their experience. Horror also
functions through the abject, and though that often is situated as the villain of the movie, the
abject can also allow a space for women to explore their social role and gain back power.
Women also have a complicated relationship with the abject in how their minds and bodies are
viewed by a male-dominated social structure: to a male gaze, women are considered abject. Male
standards for women push women’s roles as far from the abject as possible, leaning into soft,
quiet, and nurturing ideals. In both the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and the horror film, Midsommar, directed and written by Ari Aster, the female
protagonists do away with their feminine constraints and embrace the abject forces of their
stories; in doing so, they are able to gain power over their male oppressors, showing this function
both in the Victorian past and the present.
Women have long lived within some state of abjectness, vilified, objectified, and
pathologized in order to sustain a male power structure. In looking at the Western diagnoses of
hysteria that plagued the twentieth century, it is easy to see that women’s bodies and minds were
seen under a constant state of illness and thereby othered from what was considered the rightful
male body. Of course, women of color and lower or working class women were further removed
from white men’s ideals, but for the purpose of this analysis, I will focus on white middle class
2
women facing diagnoses of hysteria and hysterical depression that functioned as a radical act to
oppress them. This pathologization is something that has adapted to today’s Western landscape
under a similar but alternatively named guise: hormones, “PMSing”, or acting “overly”
emotional. Looking at Victorian era diagnoses of hysteria as forms of women’s oppression in
comparison to today’s similar policing of women’s bodies, I will argue that hysteria as it was
then is still very much present in a modern landscape, and that storytelling in horror allows for a
space for women to reclaim the abject and gain a sense of power.
Women’s state of abjectness in comparison to male ideals means that the female
experience is one of horror; women faced higher rates of trauma and violence, but also were seen
as monstrous from a male perspective. My first chapter will look at a brief history of the Western
horror genre in film shows that gender has always been an interesting and sometimes flipped
dynamic within horror, allowing for unique views or commentaries on positions of power. My
research will focus on hysteria diagnoses as a form of trauma and horror for women, analyzing
women’s roles through Julia Kristeva’s work with the abject. Kristeva argues that abjection is an
inherent part of marginalized groups, including women, who are othered and ostracized by the
dominant ideology. Women are forced to make space in the abject, but then can use that space to
their advantage. In analyzing women’s forced roles, I will show that hysteria was not a female
illness because of biology but was more likely to occur in women due to increased oppression,
stress, and trauma in their everyday lives – aspects that supported their abjection from male eyes.
I will also be looking at gender within modern horror to showcase how these dynamics
play out differently from other genres, using Carol J. Clover’s explanation of the “final girl” in
slasher horror as an example of gender dynamics at play in a widespread aspect of the genre. and
how they can allow for women’s empowerment through an eventual embracing of the originally
3
“horrific” forces at play. In analyzing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow
Wallpaper, a gothic fiction based on her own real life account of the “rest cure,” I will show that
feminine power can be found in horror fiction through a submission or embracement of the
abject horror at play. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” faces a pathologized existence,
being diagnosed with hysterical depression and ordered to stay in isolation with no creative
outlet in order to get better. This is all enacted by her doctor-husband, John, who stands in as a
symbol for patriarchal oppression; John’s control over the narrator is only broken when she stops
resisting the abjection she feels from the horrific, repulsive pattern in the wallpaper, and begins
to embrace it and identify herself within it. She finds power and release from its horror, not fear.
The first chapter will also look at a case-study of hysteria done by Sigmund Freud to give
a real-life example of a hysteria diagnosis and demonstrate how the medical belief was
detrimental to women. Freud’s beliefs were important in making a connection to “hysteria” – or,
what it likely was as then unknown disorders like depression, PTSD, and anxiety – and trauma,
but he still argued that that trauma was in some way caused by the victim and not a societal
issue. In his study on a teenage girl he calls Dora, Freud claims Dora’s symptoms – nightmares,
avoidance, increased nerves and melancholy – were in place even before the traumatic event of
her father’s friend sexually assaulting her, and that her disgusted reaction wasn’t normal, but a
sign of hysteria. Hysteria wasn’t just a misguided notion, but a medical diagnosis that worked to
justify men’s predatory behavior and irrationalized women’s traumatized responses.
In comparing the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Dora, we can see a fictional
reflection of real-life oppression. Gilman uses the Gothic genre for her short story, driving in the
dreadful, horrific connotations of women’s imprisonment and making a clear connection
between women’s oppression and emotional responses. In basing the story in horror, Gilman
4
demonstrates women’s everyday experiences as ones of horror: men’s control and
pathologization of the female mind and body become the monster, the attacker, the rapist, the
villain. June Pullman, author of Monstrous Bodies: Female Empowerment in Young Adult
Horror Fiction, writes that “Horror redraws the boundaries between the abject and the subject,
between human and nonhuman, through the figure of the monster, a type of Other and a double”
(15). While she goes on to argue that teen girls inhabit the Other, I would expand that to say that
all women, in some form, exist as Othered within a patriarchal society; horror then extrapolates
on this experience and allows for women to embrace the Other and resist patriarchal roles.
Women’s othering feeds to the abject state they inhabit, but it also opens up a path for a
reclaiming of the feminine other, or the monsterized, abject female, turning that role into
something positive for the woman embracing it.
My second chapter will analyze the modern-day equivalent of hysteria by looking at the
language surrounding women’s hormones and body science that often reaches the same
conclusion: women are too emotional, too overreactive, too nervous. Though Western women
today certainly have made advancements in equality, many circulating ideas of women’s psyche
and biology still push a sexist narrative that supports male rationality and control, thereby
making women seem unreasonable. Here I will use sources that demonstrate how these modern
beliefs can lead to women’s oppression that can keep women out of work, education, or social
circles. The modern horror genre also has a space here for the same reason it did in Gilman’s
gothic, which allowed an opening for women’s experiences as horrific events. Modern horror
films especially deal with social and political issues because of their ability to break down
viewer’s defenses; not only do they demonstrate women’s experiences as ones of oppressionbased horror, but they can connect further to the audience because of induced fear and dread. In
5
doing so, horror films can grant viewers a look into the oppression at hand in a way that connects
to them emotionally and creates better understanding of the issues at play.
This chapter will focus on Ari Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar, which follows its main
character, a twenty-something woman named Dani, as she visits Sweden with her boyfriend and
his friends after suffering a family tragedy. Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, is shown to be
emotionally distant from the beginning, and only invites her to go because he feels bad after the
death of her parents and sister. Their relationship is obviously strained, much of which is due to
Christian’s emotional unavailability, but Dani blames herself for their problems. As they get to
Christian’s friend Pelle’s family home, Harga, for their Midsommar celebration, things start to
take a turn for the worse. Midsommar follows many of the conventions of a horror movie –
friends dropping off one by one, a creepy cult-like society, having characters question their
sanity – but also subverts quite a few tropes to show Dani’s final catharsis and embracement of
the original horror. After repressing any negative feeling for most of the film, in part due to a
desire to please Christian and his friends, who act as though she’s overreacting, Dani finally
reaches emotional release in Harga. In doing so, she gains back power over Christian, who acted
as a masculinist stand-in for an agent of women’s emotional repression. This supports a
conclusion that women, though pushed into abject spaces through male oppression, are then able
to reclaim those spaces for their own empowerment.
Both the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Dani face similar facets of oppression.
The male partners take on rational, authoritative roles that work to shrink them and make them
believe they are at fault for their oppression; they apologize for their negative – i.e, “unfeminine”
– feelings; they are othered by male power. Both also reach a turning point facilitated by an
embrace of abject forces – for the narrator, the wallpaper acts as a repulsive, abject ideal, as does
6
Hårga’s community for Dani, which participates in graphic death rituals and sacrifice.
Importantly, they both are also supported by other women; though it’s not as clear in “The
Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator does find connection to womanhood through the other women
she begins to see within the wallpaper, and Dani more literally finds connection through the
women of Harga. These aspects of sisterhood enable a further empowerment that they would not
have been able to find on their own.
A turn to the abject and horror also means a rejection of “civilized” feminine ideals that
are put in place by patriarchal authority, and an embracement of behavior that is seen as wild or
primal. In conclusion, women are oppressed by strict constraints placed on them by malegenerated femininity and the implications of biological inferiority in both mind and body; the
horror genre, in both modern day film and Victorian Gothic writing, can not only show this
openly, but demonstrate how a reclaiming of those originally “horrific” elements by female
protagonists leads to their empowerment.
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CHAPTER ONE
Girls, Gilman, and the Gothic
Hysterical Histories
An old, empty house sits in the countryside, with a decaying garden, barred windows, and
a bed nailed to the floor. On the bedroom walls lives a swirling, hideous wallpaper pattern, one
ugly and fascinating enough to drive anyone mad. This is the place in which the narrator of “The
Yellow Wallpaper” finds herself imprisoned after she is diagnosed with “a temporary nervous
depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (648) and her husband – and doctor – administers the
“rest cure,” a common treatment of hysteria and other nervous diseases in the nineteenth century
(Bassuk 245). The Gothic set-up isn’t accidental, but the true horror of the story lies not in the
ghostly hallways or creeping atmosphere, but in its narrator’s confinement under her husband’s
control. Gilman’s writing comes from a place well-known to her; as a sufferer from “hysteria”
herself, she too was placed on bed rest and told not to read, write, or socialize under the orders of
her male doctor;1 “ I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so
near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (Gilman, “Why I Wrote “The
Yellow Wallpaper”” 1). “The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates the horror this diagnosis and
treatment plan could cause in a way that highlights male domination of the medical field and
control of women’s well-being and social and political freedom.
Gilman was treated by doctor S. Weir Mitchell who prescribed her “six weeks of complete bedrest, isolation” and
to “’live as domestic a life as far as possible’”. Mitchell’s rest cure would also be used to treat writers Virginia
Woolf and Edith Wharton, and activist Jane Addams, all of whom had negative reactions to their lack of stimulation.
See “Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”” by Gilman, pg. 1 and “'Overwriting' the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell's Fictionalization of Women” by Catherine Golden, pg. 1
1
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Hysteria finds its roots in ancient Greece – the word itself comes from the Greek word for
“of the womb”, husterikos2 – and has been set up as, overwhelmingly, a woman’s disease.3 Used
to explain everything from seizures to paralysis to excess anxiety, the disorder was a catch-all for
women’s behavior that did not fit into quiet, demure, and nurturing feminine ideals. Ideas of
women’s disordered body and psyche trace throughout Western history from the concept of the
uterus wandering the body in Greece to possession and witchcraft, but the Victorian era
revitalized the notion of hysteria and nervous diseases. While different ideas were being
published on the cause of hysteria, they still centered on the same thought: women were more
susceptible because their weaker minds were prone to fancy and nerves. Researcher Carrol
Smith-Rosenberg calls the “female experience” at the heart of diagnoses the “one constant” in
hysteria cross culturally and throughout history (652). Diagnoses during the Western Victorian
era may have been a direct response to women’s growing fight for freedom and changing social
atmosphere; women who went against ideal male standards were at a greater propensity for
diagnosis. Western/American ideals for women in the period were grounded in soft, nurturing
roles:
The ideal female in the nineteenth-century America was expected to be gentle and
refined, sensitive and loving…The American girl was taught at home, at school, and in
the literature of the period, that aggression, independence, self-assertion, and curiosity
were male traits, inappropriate for the weaker sex and her limited sphere. (656)
Women who strayed beyond these roles were reduced to “hysterics”. The symptoms of hysteria
ranged so widely that virtually anything a male doctor saw as abnormal could fall under a
“via Latin from Greek husterikos 'of the womb', from hustera 'womb' (hysteria being thought to be specific to
women and associated with the womb)” from Oxford Dictionaries Online origin of “hysteric”.
3
An upper-middle class white woman’s disease to be precise; in terms of this paper’s scope I will not be focusing on
race or class dynamics, but it is important to note that lower class women and women of color were not facing the
same diagnoses at the same rates. See “The Race of Hysteria: "Overcivilization" and the "Savage" Woman in Late
Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology” by Laura Briggs
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diagnosis (Tasca et. al 115).4 Though lower-class women often avoided the diagnosis, there was
an exception in prostitutes and other “sexualized” working women who inhabited qualities
outside of feminine ideals; in other words, women who greatly expressed traits (like sex
workers) against these “gentle and refined” expectations would face repercussions.5 This
suggests that hysteria diagnoses were not just due to men’s misguided beliefs but stemmed from
a desire to force women to conform to specific traits that would maintain their oppression.
Written in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was a response to the hysteria diagnoses and
the rest cure treatment, but it served as more than just a warning against bed rest. Gilman’s
writing carefully defines John, the narrator’s husband, as the villain under the guise of scientific
insight and well-meaning care by demonstrating the adverse response the narrator had to each of
John’s guidelines. John acts as an everyman stand in – even his name is the most neutral it can be
– and so represents men and patriarchal power as a group. John’s behavior can then be read as
symbolic of male doctors as a group and his treatments as synonymous with established
treatments of the period. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the first well-known accounts of
hysteria and it presented the rest cure from a woman who actively showcased the manipulative
Though this paper is focusing more on the emotional aspects associated with the disorder, it’s important to note
that many of these symptoms were physical as well, speaking to a similar misbelief in women’s pain: while some of
these physical symptoms could have stemmed from repressed emotion, we also now know women suffer higher
rates of chronic pain and autoimmune diseases that may explain part of “hysterical” symptoms (Kiesel). Doctors
didn’t and don’t believe the severity of women’s pain, and much of this was chalked up to emotional issues within
women’s brains – this is still an issue today. Female patients are less likely to receive pain medication for the same
surgeries’ men have, for example, because they’re perceived as overreacting (Bartley and Filligim). While this may
turn more towards a biological reasoning for the physical symptoms of hysteria, it is still a problem exacerbated by
men’s belief in women’s irrationality.
5
Female sex workers of course had more complicated social dynamics on top of this, but the fearmongering of
women’s sexuality played a role in pathologizing women; sexual pleasure and control was not considered
“feminine”. See “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict” by Carrol Smith-Rosenberg pg. 670
4
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authority of male doctors and recognized the diagnosis and treatment as a negative force against
women’s wellbeing.
Hysteria as a diagnosed disorder was originally thought to be a condition of women’s
biology, but that view began to change with Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on
Hysteria, which argued that “hysterics” were created because of past trauma and that men could
suffer from it as well. This turn from biology to mental strife was an important one in the
argument against women’s innate weakness, but it wasn’t able to fully make that leap of why
women were facing higher rates of hysteria, something we might now call PTSD, anxiety, or
depression. Freud and Breuer’s work was vital in understanding hysteria as a result of pain; their
famous study on Anna O. demonstrated the physical symptoms of trauma held in women’s
bodies, for example. It is Freud’s later study of the young woman he called “Dora” that is
compelling when looking at hysteria and gender. While Freud may have admitted that men could
be diagnosed and made the connection of mental illness to trauma, most of his case studies on
hysteria were centered on female patients, therefore sustaining the feminine stereotype of the
disease. The reasoning behind hysterical symptoms often was still centered on the gender of the
patient as well, something that can be seen clearly with Freud’s diagnosis of Dora.
Dora was an eighteen-year-old girl when she first came to Freud with symptoms of
hysteria, mostly a “nervous cough” that lended itself to a loss of voice, general depression (“low
spirits”), fatigue, and a fainting spell (577). She had a strained relationship with her parents,
especially her mother, and seemed to resent the housework – i.e, female duties – expected of her.
At one point she left a note to her parents stating she “could no longer endure her life”,
expressing serious thoughts of suicide (578). Dora’s most profound symptoms seemed to occur
after she had accused her father’s family friend, Herr K., of making a sexual advance towards
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her, something her father did not believe. As her treatment with Freud continued, she revealed
that this was not the first time Herr K. had attempted to harass her; he had forced a kiss on her
when she was fourteen; Dora responded with feelings of disgust and had run away from the
encounter (580).
To Freud’s credit, he does believe that the advances happened, but her hysteria diagnosis
only is strengthened with what he calls an abnormal response. According to Freud, any normal
fourteen-year-old girl would feel sexual excitement from a kiss like this, not disgust, and so
Dora’s behavior, even at such a young age, was “already entirely and completely hysterical”
(27). The very tangible and traumatic feelings that Dora experiences after an attempted sexual
assault become her issue; it is not that she is hysterical because she had faced the trauma Herr K.
caused her, but that her response to his advance was seemingly wrong or abnormal. Freud’s
analysis supported Herr K.’s assault as natural, and though he admitted it caused trauma, he had
connected that trauma back to Dora’s female obsession with the father figure, not necessarily
acknowledging that the event was traumatic itself.6 Even with hysteria’s link to trauma here, the
reality behind it was connected to Dora’s womanhood; it was her unnatural response, her
supposed infatuation with her father, or her competition with her mother that caused the
symptoms she was experiencing, and not the original attack itself. Though of course we cannot
definitively diagnose someone from the past, looking at Dora’s symptoms today, one might
guess she suffered from PTSD, which consists of recurrent nightmares and anxieties over an
original event. Sightings of Herr K. after the event turned her “white as a sheet”, and reminders
of him – like his birthday – would send her into intense anger (591). Freud may chalk this up to
This was part of Freud’s “negative Oedipal complex” (later named the Electra complex by Carl Jung), which
argued that all women have a sexual interest in their fathers and a resentment towards their mothers because of a
competition for their father’s affection. See On Sexuality by Freud.
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Dora’s own female body betraying her due to its base biology; even her cough was thought to be
because of the innate knowledge of her body to “suck”, which was a latent reminder of Herr K.’s
penis pressed against her during the assault. Thoughts like Freud’s excused assault on women as
something biological and natural and Dora’s pathologization as hysteric because of her response
maintained male power.
Reports like Dora’s worked to justify men’s inappropriate or violent actions by placing
blame on the assaulted woman. If Dora had not been “hysteric”, she should have welcomed Herr
K.’s assault, but because she did not, she was seen to be ill. Hysteria and trauma were now
wrapped together, but Freud never seemed to make the full leap as to why exactly woman were
facing higher rates of things like depression, physical stress, or mental illness that would lead to
such symptoms – reasoning like oppression, fear, and higher rates of assault. Though it may not
have been a deliberate or antagonistic method from Freud – though there is evidence that there
may have been more methodical motive7 - the fact that men’s controlling, dangerous, and
oppressive behavior is not blamed is suspect in how that behavior upholds their power structure.
Hysteria was still very much a woman’s disease: as Smith-Rosenberg states, “Thus a woman’s
very physiology and anatomy predisposed her to hysteria; it was, as Thomas Laycock put it,
‘“the natural state” in a female, a “morbid state” in the male” (669).
The Abject and Women’s Horror
Much of the contempt for women’s minds and bodies – and the blame and justification
that comes with it – stems from a male association between women and the abject, or a sense of
See The Freudian Cover-up by Florence Rush, pg. 263, 269: Rush argued that Freud’s theories of Oedipal and
Electra Complexes covered up real sexual assaults. Many of Freud’s female hysteria patients accused their fathers of
sexual abuse as children – something that was not happening with his male patients against their mothers - but Freud
often claimed these were imagined due to an innate desire of the female child for her father.
7
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something wrong, something othered, some putrid. Science created and spread by men has been
used to demonstrate a seemingly inarguable fact of women’s inferiority, and men’s fear of losing
control has perpetuated a fallacy of women’s natural subservience, one that aided in maintaining
patriarchal control through the pathologization of women. Through these centuries - if not
millennia - long scientific consensuses, women have become marginalized and othered from a
male dominated social order. The impact this othering has had on women’s experiences, identity,
and connection to a wider society created a complicated and stressed relationship between
women and their sense of body and self. Women – and other marginalized communities – exist
within an abject state; that is, one of disconnect between their personal view of themselves and
their reality; the strange difference between the “you” in your head, and the “you” you project to
others. Because women’s image and behavior has been controlled by men, there is an abject
horror in losing that distinction, but also horror at realizing that distinction is created by a male
gaze – after all, how do you differentiate your real sense of self vs the one you’ve created for
men’s eyes, if the male gaze is always present? Under the careful watch of patriarchal ideals,
women’s sense of identity is further splintered; Margaret Atwood states in The Robber Bride:
Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're
unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb
your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering
through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man
inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. (441-442)
Women exist under constant and vigilant scrutiny, and women’s horror revolves around the
expectations of motherhood, sexuality, or men’s fear of womanhood, which is often where the
abject comes into play. With the threat of a male gaze always overhead, it is difficult for women
to break away from men’s expectations and soft feminine stereotypes; doing so can result in
punishment, like the hysteria diagnoses, and shunning from the wider social group. However, a
14
complete rejection of male standards can also give women a sense of power, freedom, and
catharsis, though this may only be achieved through a reclaiming of abject behavior – or
behavior that clashed with the feminine ideals made to restrict women’s minds and bodies – that
functions dualistically as freedom and potential further harm.
Looking at Dora’s case, there is a similar disconnect happening between her sense of self
and her social role through her resentment towards her mother and the housewife position she
represents. Freud describes Dora’s mother as having “’housewife’s psychosis’. She had no
understanding of her children’s more active interests and was occupied all day long in cleaning
the house” (577). Of course it’s impossible to say what Dora truly thought about this now, but it
seems as though seeing her mother’s life laid out as her own future brought on some of her
depression, as evidenced by Freud’s statement that “she was on very bad terms with her mother,
who was bent on drawing her into taking a share in the work of the house” (577). While there is
no way to prove Dora’s identity disconnect, interpreting it this way represents a common theme
in women’s understanding of self within a larger patriarchal society. There is a recognition of
entrapment, and in that recognition, a detachment from true self and the created self.
True abjection lies not necessarily in discovering and losing this divide, but in the
breaking down of boundaries between a “me” and an “other”. Julia Kristeva writes about the
concept of abjection in, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, focusing on that state of inbetween and the self’s awareness of the Other. The abject is anything that would invoke a
horrified or disturbed reaction in an individual because of its filth or its confrontation with the
individual’s identity and society. This reaction ranges from something like feeling revolt over the
skin that forms on the surface of milk, to the dread of seeing a corpse because it forces you to
think of your own body in such a way:
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A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not
signify death. In the presence of signified death - a flat encephalograph, for instance - I
would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks,
refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily
fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly, and with difficulty, on
the part of death. (3)
Kristeva’s work is essential to understanding how abjection is a state of horror, and how
marginalized groups function within it. Kristeva describes the development stage in which we
experience the abject as one where we disconnect from the Mother and start to realize we are
separate beings (13). Women’s bodies themselves are considered abject because of our initial
rejection of the Mother and the femininity she represents; women are then seen as abject because
of their biological difference from men’s bodies. Women bleed and give birth and go through
bodily trauma in a way that opposes the “proper” body, i.e, male. Though men still vomit and
produce other functions that also are considered abject, to a male dominated social order,
women’s bodies become abject through their menstruation and other bodily functions, and
therefore go against the more orderly and clean bodies of men.
Women are cast as abject from a societal perspective because of this perceived innate
difference. This construct acts as a form of pathologization: though it isn’t a medical diagnosis, it
others women’s bodies and creates a sense of disgust and aversion to the feminine. This occurs
societally, but also within women’s sense of self - if all they have ever known was this sense of
abject, they begin to think of themselves in the same terms. Elaine Lawless, a researcher and
professor at the University of Missouri, conducted a study of female victims of sexual abuse and
domestic violence in her article “Women as Abject: Resisting Cultural and Religious Myths That
Condone Violence Against Women.” She found, overwhelmingly, that these women had been
victims of severe “abjectivity” from childhood; in other words, their bodies, even at such a
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young age, were marked as dirty and innately sinful. Women who had been abused as adults had
often heard similar taunts and hateful remarks as children; called a “slut” or “whore”, they were
made painfully aware of the wickedness of their bodies and forced to believe that men’s belief in
their abjectness was their own fault:
[…] the symbolic transference of the abject upon the female body has lasing and
dangerously deleterious effects […] Females come to absorb and “believe” that they are
“bad”, “evil” and “deserving of punishment” while males come to abhor the desire of
their own uncontrollable bodies and try, in the end to obliterate that which is perceived as
not believed to be “clean and proper. (245-46)
The intense sexualization of these girls – even pre-pubescent – is a symptom of a larger issue:
women’s bodies are considered biologically inferior and inherently deviant in order to justify
men’s controlling and violent behavior; men also take their anger and the own desire they
believe they can’t control out on women that they deem as abject. Womanhood – and girlhood –
perpetually resides in a state of horror.
Kristevean abjection is a central cornerstone of the horror genre - it’s the feeling of the
abject we often chase for when watching or reading horror, and the experience of this in a safe,
controlled environment leads to a cathartic and satisfying journey. Kristeva calls it “as tempting
as it is condemned . . . a vortex of summons and repulsion” (1). Gender in horror comes with its
own set of complicated dynamics and has been a perpetuator of sexist stereotypes. Horror
involving women is often one of death and misery for the female protagonists involved,
reflecting a patriarchal lens on their experience and supporting women’s physical and mental
weakness – we can all think of a female character tripping and falling as she’s chased in the
woods by the movie monster, unable to defend herself. Female protagonists have long suffered
from monsters, serial killers, their own demonic children, and the like, rarely able to overcome
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the danger present to them. The exception to this is the trope of the “final girl”, a term coined by
Carol J. Clover in 1992, to describe the last woman - and often last character - standing at the
end of a horror piece (in this case, American slasher film). The final girl often survives whatever
encounter she had experienced, whether saved by a (usually male) police officer or rescuer at the
end or saved through her own ability. An important part of the final girl trope, however, is the
girl’s own purity; in comparison to her female friends who are usually promiscuous or rebellious
teenagers, the final girl is a straight edge virgin, and thus granted the right to survival.
The final girl survives also because she acts as a stand in for a male audience but still
subscribes to ideal femininity. Unlike her sexually active, smoking, drinking, counterparts, she is
a “good girl”. A nice girl. She is allowed to live because she doesn’t go against male standards
for women’s behavior, and yet conforms to aspects of masculinity, therefore allowing male
viewers to connect with her over the killer. She has a boyish name and is sometimes ostracized
by her peers, and yet still retains some sort of innocence (Clover 40). It’s also her suffering and
fear we see laid out for us over the span of the entire movie, and her pain we must watch. This
may seem like another way to empathize with a female protagonist, but it also feeds into a malefantasy of beaten, battered women; there is connection with her eventual triumph because they
can also see themselves in her due to her masculinized nature. Victims that do die also tend to be
women, or, “even in films in which males and females are killed in roughly even numbers, the
lingering images are of the latter. The death of a male is nearly always swift…the murders of
women on the other hand, are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater
length” (35). Though some aspects of slasher horror may seem feminist at their surface, women’s
suffering for male enjoyment is still at full display.
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Clover’s defining of the final girl trope is important in situating the horror genre as a
male dominated space; though women could survive, it was only because of their submission to
male approved behavior and their violent suffering at the hands of a male killer. While horror as
a genre goes far beyond just slasher movies, these set the scene for gender within a popular film
mechanism in American culture and show the ultimate punishment for women’s bodies as
abjectly inferior to men. Women’s bodies are beaten, bruised, raped, bloodied at a higher rate in
these films because there is some desire for punishment against them as the abject form. These
same dynamics are often at play even from the start of Gothic, with women fainting, dying,
haunting, and suffering from the male characters around them in order to uphold patriarchal
values (Heiland 8). Slasher is only a stand in for larger issues across the genre, albeit one with
more blood, guts, and physical punishment than other works may utilize. The excessive use of
gore helps highlight an abject response in a more straightforward way, but still reflects a
patriarchal power dynamic that can be seen over and over again.
However, horror also has a unique footing in the abject that allows for women’s stories
and experiences to be told in a different light. June Pullman, author of Monstrous Bodies:
Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction, writes about this within the confines of the
young adult genre, but her analysis on how young girls find empowerment through horror and
the abject can be applied universally. She states:
Horror redraws the boundaries between the abject and the subject, between human and
nonhuman, through the figure of the monster, a type of Other and a double. Teen girls
have firsthand experience with the Other: in a patriarchal culture, they are the Other, even
when they successfully contort themselves into a restrictive normative femininity. (15)
Western women overall have this complicated relationship with the Other, and though it
becomes further complicated with teen girls, it’s the same dynamic across age. Even when
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there’s no real “monster”, that figure of the other comes through in the view of women’s bodies
as inherently abject. Women are both seen as abject and experience the disconnect of identity
within abjection, but the disconnect often comes with knowledge of their oppression; an
embracing of that “otherhood,” abjection, or otherwise monstrous qualities can then lead to
power they may not otherwise obtain.
John Knows Best: Abject Horror and Oppression in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
The pathologization of women feeds into an internalized oppression, as scientific “fact”
and reason is hard to argue with. In order to further “abjectify” women, male dominated spaces
foster isolation, especially by creating a disconnect and a sense of competition between women.
The protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” finds warmth from John’s sister, Jennie, but is also
wary of her; Jennie acts as an extension of John, carrying out his orders of no stimulus despite
the narrator’s desire to read and write. In this way, John’s authority and treatment force Jennie
and the narrator to be distrusting of one another.
Much of her treatment was part of the leading cure for hysteria in the Victorian age: the
rest cure, which had patients isolate themselves to keep from overstimulating their minds and
bodies. Because hysteria patients were majority female, and because doctors were majority male,
this meant that male physicians and psychologists were creating completely isolated spaces for
women to exist in. Women therefore couldn’t compare their experiences with the disorder, which
only contributed further to a sense that they’re struggle had to be faced alone. S. Weir Mitchell –
the same doctor who treated Gilman – was the pioneer of the rest cure in the late 1800s, and
though he originally designed it to be for men and women suffering hysteria, his case studies –
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like Freud’s – were almost always on fragile, nervous women (Bassuk 247). Mitchell believed in
completely removing the patient from friends and family to keep them away from relationship
dramatics, and instructed the patient to stay lying down most times, with little to do herself;
eating, drinking, and bathing were all taken care of by a nurse. The idea was the strengthen the
physical body as much as possible before allowing the patient to reacclimate to stimulated,
intellectual life. This is not a bad train of thought exactly, except that it didn’t reveal the real
reason behind women’s trauma and so wasn’t conducive to women’s healing. Women were not
facing these rates of physical and mental illness because they were overstimulated in their
modern life, but because they had no real control over their fate or duties. Taking that away
further in the guise of the rest cure only pushed women further to the edge of insanity.
The narrator goes through the steps of the rest cure and we see her completely isolated
from other people under the guise of her recovery: “When I get really well, John says we will ask
Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my
pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now. I wish I could get well faster”
(649). She clearly wishes for social interaction, but John’s guidelines suggest otherwise. Though
it may seem like John means well, there is a sinister undercurrent to his arrangements as he
belittles the narrator’s anxiety over the wallpaper (649), or constantly infantilizes her with names
like “blessed little goose” or “little girl” (649, 652). While her isolation may have simply been a
part of a well-intentioned treatment, it also speaks to John’s distrust of the narrator’s
understanding of herself and her environment. Her “sick” mind is othered from John’s rational,
practical thinking, and her sense of horror and disgust from the wallpaper speaks to a sense of
abjection.
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The wallpaper is abject at its base: the narrator describes it as “repellant, almost revolting,
a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (649). Its repulsive
image signifies decay and distress, but it’s the connection the narrator finds within it that forces
her to confront her situation. Kristeva describes abjection as a sense of intense fear and revulsion
at having to confront a sense of mortality or a broken sense of identity. The wallpaper functions
as mediator within both of these aspects; the narrator’s open disgust of it comes from a
connection to decay that’s shown by its rotten smell and direct contrast to new life: “Why I
wouldn’t have a child of mine, and impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds”
(652). It also serves as the catalyst for the narrator’s breakdown of self. Amongst its swirling
pattern, the narrator begins to see a woman trapped within the paper. It becomes increasingly
clear that the woman in the wallpaper and the narrator are conflated as one person; the woman in
the walls only comes out at night, just as the narrator can only sneak away to write at night, and
is trapped in much the same way the narrator is trapped within the walls of the house. As the
wallpaper comes to represent her own entrapment, the abject is situated in the narrator’s splitting
or disconnect from self. She becomes isolated from her own intellectual identity, unable to write,
think critically, or talk to others in an intellectual capacity without reprimand from John, and so
manifests herself through the “abject” horror of the wallpaper.
The story starts with the narrator’s horror and repulsion at the wallpaper and her sense of
unease about the house; she calls it a “haunted house”, though John laughs at her for such
thoughts; “one expects that in a marriage” (649) . This quickly normalizes an imbalance of
power in their relationship and establishes John as rational, representing how men attributed
logic to their minds and “fancy” to women’s. The narrator is a writer but is no longer allowed to
practice because the stimulation may be dangerous for her “nervous condition”; she sneaks away
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to write these entries in her journal when she can. Writing is representative of the narrator’s
artistic and intellectual freedom, both something that’s important to her sense of identity and a
space that allows for her voice and opinion. John’s banishment of her writing speaks to more
than just his control as her doctor, but to men’s control over women’s mental freedom. Without
writing and other stimulation, the narrator retreats further into her depression as she loses a sense
of her independence. She becomes desperate for contact and connection, something she lacks
because of John’s rules. Her isolation becomes more greatly calculated by John’s control; the
less she’s around other people, the less she understands how she can navigate her social world
normally. Without this, her sense of self becomes muddled. While John claims to mean well, and
while the narrator excuses the negative effects of his treatment, there’s a darker undercurrent at
play in John’s methodology. The narrator’s isolation and lack of intellectual simulation are tools
used by a group in power over a group under their control; no reading meant no gained
knowledge, and no social outlet meant no comparison to lean on (Kassin, Fein, and Markus 172).
The narrator could not have realized what John was doing was actually wrong if he – and his
sister, who acted as an extension of his practices – were the only people she could talk to.
John’s manipulation is more suspect as it becomes clearer that the narrator was not the
first woman imprisoned in the house. The aspects she thinks as odd quirks of a child’s nursery
are really instruments used to keep a person confined, with barred windows and a bed nailed to
the floor: “It was a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the
windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls” (648). There
are also signs that someone had a similar imprisonment within the walls of that bedroom, with
parts of the wallpaper already torn off at the same height the narrator can just reach from her bed
and a dark smudge that wraps itself around the room – a smudge, we come to learn that is the
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perfect height and shape for a woman’s shoulder to fit into if she “creeps” around the room on all
fours. While the house isn’t an actual institution meant to house hysterical women – as far as we
can tell – there’s this quiet suggestion that what the narrator is going through is only one
example of a much larger and existent problem; that other women have been in the same spot she
is. The narrator’s continuous insistence that the room and all its oddities were for rough-housing
kids speaks to her justification of her situation. Though these might seem like clear warning
signs, the excuse of it being a nursery is something she had to believe – it’s only when she starts
to understand the reality of her situation and entrapment that the full abject is realized, and the
space between her own sense of self and the self-constructed by John can come together to create
a real sense of horror for the narrator.
The bars and nails, the pre-torn paper, the smudge, and the bitten bed post all suggest the
same thing: a woman before the narrator was in the exact same situation. There is a sense there
may be one after. The woman in the wall may simultaneously be her, and the narrator, and every
other woman who had come there in the past, trapped together; as the narrator states,
“Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one” (654). The
infinite scope of this leaves a feeling of horror at the sheer number of female victims of hysteria
and its treatment, but also brings a feeling of connection. The other women seem to want to help
the narrator understand her entrapment and break free; it is not until the narrator starts to see the
woman that she begins to understand John’s methods as hurtful: “He asked me all sorts of
questions too and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!” (655).
Prior to this she had constantly justified his behavior as something done out of love, but here she
finally admits it to be manipulative. She starts to gain the upper hand.
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The isolation created amongst women fosters fear and a sense of loneliness in women
facing this type of oppression. While women’s rivalry can happen naturally, men often facilitate
competition among women in order to divide and conquer; it’s a strategy not unique to women’s
subjugation but used by any group in power on the groups they’re controlling. In sociology, it’s
something known as “social dominance orientation”; groups in power “have a desire to see one’s
in groups as dominant over other groups and a willingness to adopt cultural values that facilitate
the oppression of other groups” (Kassin, Fein, and Markus 174). Here, this isn’t between the
dominant group – men – and the oppressed group – women – but creates a sense of competition
within the oppressed group as well. This serves a larger purpose: ensuring women can’t find
support amongst each other and realize the truth behind their oppression, and thus cannot pose a
larger threat to male control.
The wallpaper takes over, first as an outlet for the narrator’s boredom, then as a version
of her own disconnected self. While real female patients, like Dora, may have been driven into
physical symptoms to cope with their trauma, the narrator turns to the physicality of the house.
The pattern changes from simply revolting and confusing, to hiding a figure within it – a figure
the narrator comes to realize is a woman. The woman is conflated with the narrator’s own sense
of real identity, the self she knew before her illness, or the self she knows outside of John’s
power over her; the woman only moves at night, just as the narrator does, and she faces a
moment proving the woman is literally her own reflection: “I can see her out of every one of my
windows” (654). That identity is still there but trapped within the wallpaper as if her real soul
was taken by the house itself. It takes the narrator sometime after she starts seeing the woman to
make this connection, but when she does, she is faced with her ultimate break down of
composure – a giving in to a primal instinct for freedom and self-autonomy. The longer she goes
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with no stimulation besides the wallpaper, the greater her need for independence becomes. The
story could be read plainly as a Gothic horror tale, one of a person slowly succumbing to the
wallpaper’s supernatural hold; instead, it uses this backdrop to enhance the real horror women
felt under oppressive circumstances. The narrator’s desire to gain back the control over her life
and for her mental and physical freedom eventually leads her to embrace the abject by realizing
the woman in the wall is herself, trapped. Though she wants freedom, there’s also a realization
the outside world is dangerous and that true freedom lies within the walls with the other women
who might understand: “I don’t want to go outside…For outside you have to creep on the
ground, and everything is green instead of yellow” (656). Here she fully embraces the wallpaper,
rejecting even the literal independence she would get outside – perhaps because she realizes
there is no true independence for her there.
A Turn of Events
In their final day at the house, the narrator fits her shoulder perfectly into the long
smooch on the wall and starts to “creep” around the room, just as the women in the walls do at
night. Her husband comes to the door, which she has locked, and tries to get in; the narrator
thinks “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!”, now reversing John’s role with hers (656).
John has consistently called her pet names like “little girl” throughout the story to infantilize her,
but here, the narrator names him “young man”, gaining the power he had held. When he finally
gets into the room and sees what she’s doing, the narrator tells him “I’ve got out at last, in spite
of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back!” John faints,
and the narrator continues to circle the room, casually creeping over his unconscious body every
time she comes to it. Here she fully connects herself to the woman in the walls, acknowledging
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her entrapment; John fainting also provides the ultimate role reversal as one of the common signs
of hysteria – or emotional women in general – was swooning, or fainting. Though it’s likely this
episode would only lead the narrator to further entrapment and institutionalization, her minute of
power here is what’s important. She becomes the one in control and with the full knowledge of
her own imprisonment in front of her, she gains freedom, if only for that brief moment. There’s a
sense of catharsis in seeing John faint after his seemingly “rational” authority dominated the
entire story, and the narrator is finally able to gain strength over him.
Writing this experience as a form of horror not only emphasizes the real trauma behind it,
but also allows for a space for women to gain power by embracing the abject force. In “The
Yellow Wallpaper,” the abject allows for the narrator to fully understand her own situation and
seek freedom. In her section on ghosts, Pullman writes:
The haunted girl’s new perspective subsequently exposes how the limitations of her
present feminine subject position are constructed and therefore are open to disruption,
rather than as boundaries that are natural and therefore unchangeable. This knowledge
permits the haunted girl to formulate a strategy for resistance, ranging from small
incidents of sabotage to larger acts of subversion. (Pullman 40)
The woman in the wallpaper is never said to be a ghost, but she functions in much the same way,
haunting the narrator throughout her stay in the house. It’s through her – and by extension, the
narrator’s own doubled self – that the narrator is able to see her situation in full light. With this
knowledge of her “limitations”, the narrator is then able to engage in the act of resistance,
successfully subverting her and John’s roles so she gains some measure of power.
Female companionship and connection are important tools for women’s emancipation;
it’s through hearing others similar experiences that allow women to understand their own
oppression and find support in dismantling it. Though the women in the wallpaper are not
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exactly separate from the narrator, it’s through their presence that the narrator is able to finally
find a release from her confines. Looking at other forms of media that pit women against each
other, whether they be Freud’s published analysis of female competition or today’s drama-filled
reality TV, it’s easy to compare how women without female support never find that true sense of
freedom or power.
A brief example of an opposing view would be Darren Arronofsky’s 2010 film, Black
Swan, which follows its protagonist, a 28-year-old ballerina named Nina, into a descent of
madness. Black Swan ends similarly with Nina embracing the “dark side” or her insanity in order
to achieve the perfection she so desperately craves through a production of Swan Lake. Her
desire for perfection is steeped in needing male approval and meeting feminine ideals of beauty
and grace through ballet. Only through her letting go of these and becoming the abjected black
swan she is able to achieve true artistic control. Nina does reach some level of power by the end
of the film, but unlike “The Yellow Wallpaper”, or as we will see, with Midsommar, she is
pushed into strict competition with another ballerina by her male dance instructor, Thomas
(0:14:28). The two become rivals for the coveted lead role. Nina sees doubles of herself like the
narrator, except they’re aren’t pushing her to freedom, but deeper into her obsession with
achieving female perfection. In the end, those ideals win out: Nina achieved her perfect
performance, but only with the cost of her life (1:42:30). She remained isolated and controlled,
and faced the ultimate punishment in response, while the perpetrators of her oppression –
Thomas, or the institution that created her fixation – are left unpunished.
Nina’s downfall serves to better illustrate what happens when women under patriarchal
structures are left isolated from female companionship and forced to compete to strive for
feminine ideals of perfection. In contrast, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is able to
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connect with her female doubles in a way that allows her a moment of freedom and full
realization of her situation. Whether this helps her in the long-term is not necessarily important
to her journey within the confines of the story. The narrator’s embracement of abject behavior
becomes her tool for emotional freedom and catharsis, which we see directly through John’s loss
of power in fainting at the end. Though the female experience may be inherently horrific due to
men’s abuse and control, there’s strength to be found in numbers and a sense of sisterhood. As
Pullman describes:
Female writers of ghost stories participate in a tradition of writing that considers the
conditions of women’s lives (Lundie 1), particularly themes common to the Gothic novel
such as domestic violence, women being dispossessed of their property, the need to know
women’s history, and bonds between women in this life and even beyond the grave that
help ensure their survival. (22)
Horror as a whole may be complicated and sometimes detrimental to women’s empowerment,
but it’s also a genre that can allow for women to expose and explore the trauma at the center of
their experiences within male power structures. Women’s connection and sisterhood within these
stories helps women “survive” by providing a network outside of a male social world and giving
women more freedom and power with each other’s support. Female bonds also provide a space
in which women can be freer from a male gaze; as seen in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and by
contrast, Black Swan, we can see how female connection – especially within the abject where
women can further reject patriarchal ideals – aids women’s empowerment.
While diagnoses of hysteria may seem like a thing of the past, the same arguments and
oppressive structures are present today. The next chapter will further analyze how hysteria, and
its modern equivalent, functions in today’s landscape and how women in modern horror provide
a similar embracing of abject ideals that allows them a moment of catharsis and power. In
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analyzing Ari Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar, with these aspects in mind, I will argue that
women’s pathologization is still very much alive, and further demonstrate how the horror genre
can provide a space for women to expose their oppression and reclaim power through an
embracing of the abject force at play.
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CHAPTER TWO
Bearing the Burden of Modern Womanhood
Hormones, Emotions, and PMSing: Hysteria in the 21st Century
“I’m sorry,” Dani, the protagonist of Ari Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar, says, her eyes
wide and pleading, hauntingly unsure of herself amongst the men around her. What she’s
apologizing for – and there are many instances to pick from – is almost certainly not her fault,
and yet Dani inhabits a constant state of sorry. As the protagonist and only main female
character of the movie, Dani’s role becomes symbolic of a modern, Western woman, and she is
always ashamed of her emotion, apologizing again and again for feeling anger or sadness, even
after she experiences real tragedy. Dani’s repression stems from a constant need for approval in a
male social circle, in which her very rational emotion is immediately calculated as an
overreaction. Though she may never be called hysterical, the implication of her irrationality
hangs in every eyeroll or sigh from her boyfriend, and she compensates with an unwarranted
need to please in order to gain acceptance and connection from patriarchal eyes. It’s the same
need that has the narrator of the “The Yellow Wallpaper” excusing John’s every abuse as a form
of care, and one that is ultimately created by a constant emotional manipulation from a male
dominated structure.
The modern Western woman has seen great changes from the life of her Victorian
ancestors; where she was once confined to housework, marriage, and motherhood she can now
vote, own property, maintain her own finances, or work to support herself – though often while
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still performing housework, wifedom, and childcare.8 Modern women can live with little fear of
being diagnosed with hysteria as the disease was removed from the DSM in 1980, and there’s
little argument that they have gained at least some sense of freedom and power from their past
(Cherry). Today we use the word hysterical more often in context of anyone producing a high
level of any emotion, even happily with “hysterical laughter” for example. The word itself has
never been fully removed from its origins, however, and hysteria follows women’s lives and
mental association closely even now, performing the same function it did then: control.
While Western society today doesn’t use the term hysteria as often as it used to, it’s been
replaced by words and phrases that boil down to the same conclusion: women are too emotional.
Today it may be “PMSing” to refer to women’s biological cycles or “hormonal” to describe
women’s behavior that goes against the grain of patriarchal ideals, but it has the same
connotation as hysteria once did (DeLuca 3). Stereotypes about pre-menstrual syndrome revolve
around angry, loud, and highly temperamental women, traits that are often associated with
positive views of masculinity – women that express these, even in justified cases, are then
considered too far removed from traditional femininity, which could pose a danger to constructed
male power. Just like hysteria, these beliefs perpetuate the idea that women’s emotional behavior
– behavior that can push boundaries and lead to greater rebellion – is a negative and unwanted
part of women’s biology. In her chapter, “Discussing and Dismantling Rape Culture with
College Students”, Laura Finley writes, “When women express concern about continued
inequalities, they are often dismissed as “PMSing.” Or, they are silenced through the general
acceptance that sexism is a normal part of life” (168). In crafting these stereotypes, patriarchal
As of 2018, 20% of American men did housework such as laundry and cleaning, while 49% of women did; men
also engaged in higher rates of leisure activities than women. See U.S Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 2018 American Time Use Survey
8
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institutions can maintain their power over the narrative; women protesting this are silenced by
claiming irrationality as part of their natural and biological minds and bodies.
Hormones and normal menstrual cycles are not medical diagnoses that would land
female patients in institutions or forced isolation – usually – but they can cause serious
repercussions in women’s health, social, political, and professional life. Amy Koerber, a
researcher and professor of Communications at Texas Tech University, writes about the belief in
biology in an article for Rhetoric and Health Magazine entitled, “From Hysteria to Hormones
and Back Again: Centuries of Outrageous Remarks About Female Biology”. Koerber delves into
the history of hysteria and relates to it modern day conversations of hormones; most
significantly, Koerber is able to show how this link and belief in women’s inferiority directly
effects women’s agency and freedom. Google engineer, James Damore, for example, wrote a
memo to the company ‘arguing against Google’s diversity efforts” (180). Damore’s statements
included arguments for women’s “higher agreeableness” and ‘“neuroticism (higher anxiety,
lower stress tolerance)”’ (180). Cleary Damore’s bias contributed to Google’s lack of diversity,
and it’s doubtful he was the only man working there who believed these claims; other men could
include higher managers and those in control of women’s employment. As Koerber explains,
Damore had no background in gender studies, but believed himself to be qualified on women’s
biology because of the widespread and generally scientifically upheld claims of hormonal
differences. Much like the scientific and medical claims of hysteria from male doctors of the
past, “hormones” became a catch-all term to describe traditionally “unfeminine” behavior.
Women who expressed anger, boldness, or intensity are often labeled as hormonal, bitchy, or
bossy in today’s society, giving negative connotation to traits that might help them succeed and
fight against male control (DeLuca 4).
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Just like hysteria, the negative association with women’s power and freedom through the
use of hormones or female biology serves to uphold male power structures. Women today are
still facing aspects of pathologization that have a direct effect on the control and freedom they
have in their lives. Koerber writes:
And even in the most recent medical texts, written within the last decade, researchers
approach female hormones from perspectives that are shaped by centuries of belief in the
idea that women’s bodies are fundamentally irregular and much more difficult to manage
than men’s bodies. (183)
Women’s bodies still inhabit the abject space, different and disturbing to men’s well controlled
form. Period problems and pregnancy hormones are often either played for laughs or used for
horror in that way that is detrimental to the female character; her mind is not her own, but under
the control of her body’s biology.
Modern Women, Modern Horror
Horror today has a unique holding on Western, American audiences. We’re still
entranced and disgusted by it, but slasher films aren’t necessarily as compelling as they once
were, in part because their plot lines became predictable and sometimes parodic of their common
tropes – just look at the actual parody movies like the Scary Movie franchise or Tucker and Dale
vs. Evil. Many modern horror films deal directly with social and political issues under the guise
of monsters and murderers; Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, and 2019 film, Us, symbolized
white privilege, the objectification of black bodies, and the inherent violence of class difference;
Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film, The Babadook, follows a mother dealing with the horror of
postpartum depression and motherhood, manifested as a monster that haunts her and her son;
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Tyler Gillet and Matt Betellin-Ollpin’s 2019 film Ready or Not deals with socioeconomic class
differences through horror-comedy.9 Much like comedy, horror is at a unique position to break
down our defenses and have us come at a well-known story through a different perspective;
instead of laughs, it uses fear. By playing on our fears in a safe, controlled environment, horror
can allow for a greater connection and understanding of social issues at play and subvert our
expectations to analyze these aspects. Researcher Glenn Walters claims horror works because of
three factors: tension, which generates mystery and suspense; relevance, meaning the audience
must identify with the story, whether personally or culturally; and unrealism, meaning the horror
and abject at hand must be understood as fictional (Griffiths). Horror films like these can take
these aspects and make the audience identify with the marginalized character. This allows
audience members to experience the feeling of oppression the protagonist might feel without any
real danger posed; it’s unrealism to an audience member who isn’t a part of that social group, but
still relevant to a societal issue, and personally relevant to viewers who are a part of those social
groups. Fear and the abject can allow for a more intense reaction than regular drama, and thus
have a more cathartic ending that causes a deeper understanding of the problem at hand – for
both those that experience it in real life and those who don’t.
Catharsis is essential to a well-crafted horror story; after the long buildup of fear and
dread the ending of the story often wraps up well for the main character, allowing for a deep
sense of relief for the viewer or reader through the act of imitation – it’s not the tragedy itself
that gives relief, but seeing the tragedy laid out through a fictional means that allows us to go
through the same emotion without any real repercussion (Schaper 139). Films like Get Out or
Films like these are often called “social thrillers” today, sometimes falling into other genres, but often using horror
elements to their advantage, though there’s some debate about whether genre labeling adds to or harms the film’s
message. See “Jordan Peele’s “Us” and the Labeling of Horror Movies” by Emma Fraser.
9
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Midsommar set this up so the main threat to the protagonist is a social oppressor; white, upperclass families in Get Out, for example, or Western masculine culture in Midsommar. By situating
the social oppressor as the villain and aligning audience members with the protagonist who
represents an oppressed group, these stories are able to demonstrate social stratification in a way
that any audience member can understand through the eyes of the protagonist. In using horror
and fear, this connection to the protagonist is strengthened further; we imagine ourselves in their
role and desperately want to see them succeed against the villain. We experience the same relief
and catharsis they do by the end, thus understanding their role on an emotional level.
Midsommar, though billed as a horror movie, doesn’t use traditional jump scares or an
overwhelming sense of fear, but instead plays more with raw emotion, shock, dread, and the
abject. Much like the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, our protagonist in Midsommar gives
in fully to abject behavior – or, at least, what might be considered abject within her culture. It’s
clear that Dani herself finds only freedom and catharsis through an embracing of her grief and
suppressed rage; though these feelings themselves might not be wholly abject, the fact that they
are coming from a woman in a patriarchal society that views women’s emotion as inherently
wrong, makes them abject to the larger social structure. Dani’s eventual dismissal of quiet, meek
feminine ideals for near animalistic emotion accepts a counter image of femininity. Through the
movie, the American men around Dani are shown to be controlling, overly sexual, and
dismissive of her emotion. Her triumph can only be achieved when she stops restricting herself
to their ideals and gives into wholly to her feeling, showing that male control and power works to
keep women oppressed and that women’s embracement of abject or “negative” emotion can lead
to freedom. Kristeva writes about the role abjection has in an emotional catharsis, relating it to
Aristotle and Plato’s views of rhythm and song as a means for release. She states:
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The abject, mimed through sound and meaning, is repeated. Getting rid of it is out of the
question— the final Platonic lesson has been understood, one does not get rid of the
impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time, and differently from the
original impurity. (28)
Though Dani’s emotion and rage aren’t necessarily impure, they are viewed as such by her social
circle; eventually, her repression of these leads to an increased build up that must be released in
“impure” or animalistic ways. Her feeling, originally hidden due to its impurity, cannot be taken
away, but she can repurpose it and use it again to her advantage, therefore bringing “it into being
a second time.”
The abject in Midsommar isn’t always present, and it isn’t only the abject that Dani
submits to at her story’s conclusion; however, it is important in breaking down her – and our –
defenses. Midsommar often uses body horror to undercut emotional sequences; the first time this
is shown forces Dani to confront her own tragedy. The people of Hårga believe in life cycles,
and at age seventy-two, members of the community will kill themselves in a ritualized jump
from the cliffs; Dani, along with the others, witnesses this ceremony as it’s time for an older man
and woman to reach the end of their life. The camera does not shy away from their body’s fall
and focuses the camera on the man’s death. He doesn’t die from his initial fall but must be killed
by another member of the Hårga community, who smashes his head graphically with a mallet.
His vivid and bloody demise is contrasted with the stark white background of the rocks, and the
community garb the Harga people wear, emphasizing the gore and making it all the more horrific
in juxtaposition with the seemingly clean surroundings. This does not only emphasize the horror
of it but turns his death to the abject in terms of both his corpse and a connection to the
“unclean”. Each swing of the hammer is interspersed with close ups of Dani’s reaction,
intertwining the physical horror of his death with her emotional response (1:03:58). It allows her
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to confront the tragedy of her own family’s death without the personal ties, something she isn’t
“allowed” to do because of her boyfriend, Christian’s, judgement. Christian and his friend Josh
both react physically – throwing up and looking away, horrified – but Dani’s reaction is internal
and based on an emotional understanding; afterwards she walks away on her own to cry, letting
out what sounds like a long held-in gasp (1:06:46). The abject and the “impure” then allows for
Dani to find emotional release and starts to set up a space for her liberation.
Male Apathy, Emotional Distance, and Rivalry in Midsommar
The main group of men in Midsommar, though friends, are in constant competition with
one another, or, at the least, uncaring for one another’s well-being. Their rivalry comes to a head
between Christian and Josh after Christian takes Josh’s thesis idea for his own, but can be seen
through smaller interactions earlier on, like Josh’s judgement on Christian’s lack of work ethic,
or Mark’s beratement of Christian’s relationship with Dani (0:07:45). Their sense of competition
and emotional unavailability is set up to be in direct contrast to what Dani needs and
demonstrates a force against her desire for emotional support and connection. Their maleness
then becomes the problem in Dani’s world, and inhabits the role of “villain” instead of Hårga.
We first meet Dani in a state of panic, her voice coming through on the answering
machine in her parent’s house, worried about her sister, Terri. The camera traces their home as
Dani talks, showing viewers the seemingly peaceful, sleeping bodies of Dani’s parents, before
switching to Dani herself, on the phone in her own apartment. She hangs up and nervously
checks her computer, where Terri’s email is still visible: i can’t anymore – everything’s black –
mom and dad are coming too. goodbye. Dani has already sent three emails back, but there’s no
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reply (0:03:08). She bites her lip, clearly distressed by her sister’s message, and picks up her
phone. Her recent calls include her parents and sister’s numbers, but she focuses for a moment
on Christian’s – she had tried to call him once already, but the phone shows “unable to connect”,
a detail that might very well encompass their entire relationship. Dani puts the phone down
again, before giving in and calling him once more – the camera focuses closely on her face, eyes
wide and tearful, as it rings (0:03:31).
Christian’s distance is obvious when he picks up. He’s out with his other male friends
and clearly doesn’t want to be on the phone given his flat, tired tone. We don’t see him right
away, and so he is literally removed from the screen and Dani’s own emotional state; he asks
about her sister, but only after a strained moment of small talk, and quickly puts down Dani’s
fears, stating: “She does this every other day, Dani, and only because you let her” (0:05:08).
Immediately Dani’s anxiety gets turned on her – Christian sets himself up as practical and levelheaded while Dani must be the one overthinking. This is the same belief that labeled women as
hysterical, and though the word is never used by Christian, the insinuation is clear. What’s worse
is that Dani is conditioned to this already; she apologizes and says he must be right, repressing
her emotion in order to fit into Christian’s mindset, but eating at parts of herself in the process.
Her anxiety is warranted already, but her excess worry might stem further from attempts to
oppress it in the first place, as she has no real outlet or support.
Christian’s disbelief of Dani’s concern and his dismissal of her feelings as simple
overreactions reflect real life gender dynamics. Women are punished for expressing what men
deem as negative feminine emotion, which often includes reactions to harassment or abuse,
thereby teaching women to remain quiet and happy under these forms of oppression. It’s
oppression we can see throughout women’s lives today, from the way that women are still
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expected to take over housework and childcare, to how they are treated in their work and social
lives. Director and producer Nell Scovell, for example, wrote about her own experience with
sexism in the entertainment industry, stating, “After a tough notes session with the network, a
male writer walked into the room, screamed an obscenity and threw his script across the table. It
struck me that anger is an emotion too. But nobody thought he was "hysterical”” (oprah.com).
Women are not allowed to express emotions like this without fear of retaliation; it may have
been diagnoses of hysteria in the past, but today still puts women in constant states of repression
and isolation for feeling and acting on emotion that might challenge male power. In scenes like
the one described above, Christian takes on the role of “punisher”. Though he doesn’t harm Dani
physically or even say anything with real harm intended, his active dismissal of her emotion and
worry serves to make her feel ashamed about expressing them.
What’s important here is that the narrative never agrees with Christian. While he may
smugly think he’s the rational mind to Dani’s nerves, the camera’s focus is on Dani while
Christian is literally distanced through the phone. This places the empathy with her. We can feel
her anxiety through the screen as the scene jumps to a different conversation, moments later,
with an unnamed female friend. Dani complains about Christian’s distance, but she turns it on
herself, trying to justify Christian’s – and thereby, male – lack of emotional support: “I always
rope him into my family crap...I’m always leaning on him. What if I scared him off?” (0:06:21).
She paces more, looks at Terri’s email again, and takes a pill - Ativan, for anxiety. Her friend
tries to assure her that Christian’s emotional unavailability is his problem, not hers, but Dani
barely listens. She becomes disconnected from her friend through her rationalization of
Christian’s behavior – instead of listening to her friend’s advice, Dani isolates herself further to
defend Christian. Her face twists with uncertainty. She gets another call.
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As we learn through the next few scenes, Dani was right to worry, thereby justifying her
anxiety to the audience and aligning our view with hers. Her sister killed their parents, and
herself, feeding car exhaust from the garage into their bedrooms as they slept, and taping a tube
of it directly to a mask around her face. We never get a reasoning behind it or any more
information about their family, but Dani’s grief becomes front and center as the story progresses.
It’s interesting here that both she and her sister are shown to have mental illness and are set up to
as if they were slaves to their emotions. Though Terri’s bipolar disorder may not be what we
typically associate with female madness or hysteria, it does serve to paint her as irrational and
attention seeking. Dani’s anxiety fits more in line with stereotypes of hysteria and nerves, but
what’s most important is that the narrative never seems to blame Dani for it; it’s not a condition
that comes out of nowhere because of her womanhood, but feelings that are built through years
of being dismissed, as evidenced by Christian’s repression. In comparison, Terri’s submission to
her mania might serve as an extension of this control; though we never get a true explanation,
Dani’s eventual madness caused by patriarchal suffocation implies a similar confinement in
Terri’s life, and a need to escape it. The horror Dani – and possibly Terri – experiences is not the
murder and cult-like activities that they find in Hårga, but the fact that she has no means for
emotional support or an outlet without being ridiculed and dismissed by a male social system.
Dani’s main issues stem from social and emotional isolation; though she is not literally isolated
like the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she is cut off from any real support, and thus
functionally isolated by a patriarchal emotional unavailability.
Dani is quickly set up to have stereotypically female traits. She’s emotional, anxious, and
overly apologetic, constantly invalidating her own feelings to placate or excuse Christian’s own
issues. Though this personality may seem counter-intuitive, she is never punished by the film’s
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structure, and the narrative itself sympathizes with her over Christian or his friends. By contrast,
this group consists of young men that all function as an aspect of Western male toxicity: there’s
Mark, hyper-sexual and objectifying, Josh, an aloof, pretentious academic, and Christian himself,
who consistently gaslights and dismisses Dani’s feelings, extending his control over her
emotional state. There’s also Pelle, a Swedish student who seems different – softer, and more
traditionally “feminine” – than the rest. When we first meet them, Mark and Josh are pushing
Christian to break up with Dani – “and then you can find a chick who actually likes sex and
doesn’t drag you through a million hoops every day” (0:07:37) – while Pelle sits quietly drawing.
Though this doesn’t excuse him from the conversation, it does distance him from directly
participating in their toxic male bonding. Pelle’s quiet manor speaks to masculinity outside of
Western American ideals, but also distances him from the rest of the group to align him further
to Dani, and thus connect Dani to Pelle’s home and their horror-movie destination, Hårga.
A central aspect of Christian’s emotional manipulation – and by extension, male
manipulation of women’s rationality – is his constant belief that he is in the right. This is
displayed when the trip gets mentioned again at a party they are all attending, which is clearly
the first time Dani’s heard of Christian’s plan to go, though we know he had this arranged from
at least that winter night of her parent’s death. She confronts him about her lack of awareness
when they’re home later, but, again, her feelings are quickly dismissed by Christian, who claims
he’d told her already. Dani makes it evident he’d only mentioned that “it would be cool to go”
(0:16:48). As she continues to attempt to talk about Christian’s miscommunication, he flips it on
her, and tries to leave – Dani, characteristically, apologizes for overreacting. Christian’s behavior
here is almost textbook gaslighting, or psychological manipulation that sets up doubt in the
victim, causing them to question their own behavior or memory (Sweet 851). It’s a form of
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emotional or psychological abuse, and though we don’t get many more direct instances of this,
Christian’s constant distance and disinterest, paired with Dani’s acceptance of blame, insinuates
this is a common dynamic of their relationship.
While each main male character, save Pelle (for the most part), exhibits aspects of toxic
masculinity, Christian’s handling of their relationship might be the most nuanced portrayal of
gender dynamics in the film. Mark’s objectification of women is a more simple and
straightforward account of patriarchal behavior, and Josh’s academic competition and emotional
removal from his surroundings are not directly related to women, but to an emotional
unavailability representative in masculinity, which in itself is more complex. We get a real sense
of this when we see the Attestupa ritual – Josh knew what would happen ahead of time after
hearing the name but didn’t warn any of the others about what the ritual entailed (0:50:29).
Though the ceremony was normal to the people of Hårga, the newcomers, including Dani, were
horrified by what they saw, while Josh sits back to watch. As an Anthropology student, he’s
clearly practicing his emotional removal, and though he does show somewhat of a horrified
reaction, his lack of communication or reaction to the ritual speak to something deeper. Josh is
cold and cut off here, and representative of a toxic male belief in “rationality” without emotion.
His need to remain logical demonstrates an affinity for a complete emotional distancing, and his
rivalry that begins with Christian also feeds into toxic male behavior that gets exacerbated by a
lack of communication.10
It’s important to note that this rivalry is really Christian’s fault and does speak to racial dynamics at play as well;
Josh is the only black person shown in the movie, and the only person of color in their friend group. Christian
stealing his thesis idea and taking it as his own is representative of white, American male entitlement. Unfortunately
for the scope of this paper, I will not be able to further analyze racial dynamics in the film but do acknowledge that
they are clearly present, with Harga’s overwhelming white, blonde-haired and blue-eyed community, and up for
analysis.
10
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Christian’s relationship with Dani, however, goes deeper, displaying gender and power
dynamics existent for modern women. As Dani is the only main female role, she is a symbol for
her gender and modern women’s societal roles; her pathologization demonstrates how today’s
women are not so removed from past diagnoses. Christian acts in a similar role as John in “The
Yellow Wallpaper” in his manipulation of Dani’s emotion, which constantly turns her valid
concerns into overreactions. In doing so, Christian pathologizes Dani’s normal responses,
making them seem irrational and wrong. In response, Dani begins to justify his actions, and
Christian maintains power in the relationship, reflecting real gender dynamics that perpetuate
patriarchal control.
The men’s lack of emotional connection and support is also centered as a negative aspect
of their lives, and they are the ones punished for it. Like many horror films, each character gets
killed off one by one; first two other characters, Simon and Connie, who disappear after
expressing fear and concern over Hårga’s rituals, then, Mark, for desecrating a sacred tree, Josh
for attempting to steal information from Hårga’s books after being asked not to; then, ultimately,
Christian in the final sequence of the film. While Dani is increasingly concerned over their
disappearances, Christian remains unfazed, in part because he was angry with Josh anyway.
Though they are supposedly friends, Christian is less than worried when they start to disappear.
His sense of rivalry, or just plain emotional apathy, overtakes any logical thought process, and
though he believes Dani to be the one overreacting, she’s the one expressing rational fear over
their friend’s sudden losses. Christian’s lack of fear goes beyond an over-logical mindset but
shows that their group’s supposed friendship dissolves when there are real stakes. The men’s
emotional unavailability and toxic masculine competition built by patriarchal systems leads, in
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part, to their downfall, which foils the close connections Dani makes with other women that lead
to her rise.
Feeling Held: Cycles, Rituals, and Sisterhood
“But Dani, do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?” Pelle asks Dani,
referring to Christian in a quiet scene after the Attestupa ritual (1:12:53). Pelle is soft and
seemingly earnest, and for now we can maybe ignore that he will have a hand in bringing his
friends to their sacrificial deaths. He holds Dani’s hand and looks in her the eye, and despite his
morally suspect motives, he provides a form of masculinity Dani hasn’t experienced and an
alternative to her emotional isolation. We know her answer without her having to say it –
Christian might physically hold her, but he doesn’t provide any emotional crutch; Hårga does.
Hårga gives Dani a sense of family and support she craves, and in doing so, allows for her to
gain back power from American masculinity.
What Dani lacks from the American men around her, she gains from Hårga’s women. As
horror movies go, things start to turn for the worse as they enter Pelle’s commune, but mostly for
Christian, Josh, and Mark. The people there seem friendly, and offer the group hallucinogenic
mushrooms or tea, something Dani doesn’t want at first, but quickly gives into once she thinks
the boys are judging her, compromising her own desires for theirs (0:28:02). From this point
forward, the characters are in an almost constant state of ambiguity as they continue to consume
food and drink from Hårga; this is evidenced by the swirling background landscape throughout
the rest of the film, barely noticeable from the centered foreground. Immediately Dani is
welcomed into the group and set apart from the others, with the first man she meets saying to her
in Swedish, “Welcome home”, while he only says “Welcome” to everyone else (0:37:16);. His
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vision is pointedly set on Dani, who seems enamored by the world she has found herself a part
of. Dani’s immediate connection to Hårga further isolates her from Christian and his friends, but
simultaneously creates a connection between her and the commune. This happens again during
the Attestupa ritual – the woman who seems to lead Hårga explains their customs vocally to two
other characters, but she stares at Dani while she speaks (1:05:45).
In Hårga, Dani finds the warmth and connection that she lacks among Christian’s group,
and the Hårga people use that to their advantage. It would be wrong to ignore the manipulation
of Dani on their part, but their world also becomes more of what Aster calls a “fairy tale” over
the real and grounded emotional abuse she faces from Christian (Film at Lincoln Center
0:003:06). Dani’s crowning as May Queen seems prophesied from the beginning, seen in the
drawings on the walls of Hårga’s buildings, or even in the art on her wall back in the U.S,
depicting a blond girl in a flower crown reaching out to a bear (0:12:56). Hårga itself seems to
need her to fulfill some pre-prescribed role, and though they act as another form of control over
Dani, drugging her and pushing her to participate in her friend’s murders, they ultimately allow
her emotional liberation. “For all of the American men, and for the two visiting British people,
this is a folk horror movie…but for Dani, it’s a sort of perverse wish fulfillment fantasy,” Aster
says in an interview with Film at Lincoln Center. In other words, we shouldn’t ignore the
implications of indoctrination Hårga holds, but should focus more on how Dani’s cathartic
freedom and desire for family is finally met, which gives her power and freedom over her
formerly male dominated life (Film at Lincoln Center 0:03:23).
Dani finds happiness through women’s rituals, which provide her a sense connection and
closeness to the other women in Hårga. She participates in baking and cooking, but also more
ceremonial rituals like the May Pole dance, which leads to her crowning. At first, Dani, now
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dressed in their traditional white frocks, sticks out from the other women and girls, standing tall
while they all bow with the start of the music. She is confused, but quickly picks up the steps,
moving in time with the women around her; she even smiles as they go, one of the few times we
see her do so throughout the film (1:42:11). The women move as one large entity, and Dani’s
quick acclimation and comfort speaks to a feeling of unity amongst them: a feeling of connection
and sisterhood. She continues to keep up with their dance as other girls fall out of the circle.
Christian sits to watch, now a clear outsider, the only one in a blue t-shirt amongst a sea of white,
traditional garments. Dani turns to look out at the crowd and all of the people of Hårga wave
their hands, assumedly in support for the dancers still going; Christian looks down at the ground
and picks the grass unaware of Dani’s gaze (1:44:10). She is no longer aligned with him but has
become one of Hårga.
Dani’s connection to the group culminates when she is one of the few still dancing; her
partner speaks to her Swedish, and she speaks back, understanding perfectly though she isn’t
fluent in the language. They continue to converse, but it becomes clear that after a moment,
neither of them is talking in any real language, just gibberish, though they understand each other:
“We don’t need words to talk! It’s dancing” the other dancer exclaims (1:47:16). Though this
speaks to Dani’s wider connection to Hårga as a sense of family, it also implies women’s
connection through language and experience; Dani and her dance partner understand each other
at a fundamental level, something she could never get out of her American male social circle. In
her book on feminine friendships, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early
Modern Britain, Amanda E. Herbert writes about the idea of female connection that’s based on
one soul. Many female friendships of the period, which can be extended to similar Western
ideology, were centered on the concept of soul sharing, as though both women understood each
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other so perfectly to be of one mind and body. Herbert sources from letters between women that
refer to each other as “of one soul”, implying not only an intimacy but a true understanding of
the other’s experience (25). Though these letters are from a different time period, the sentiment
is the same: Dani and her female dance partner are able to communicate in way where they fully
known one another, without the need for formal or verbal language, something women may have
found out of shared experiences and emotional closeness. She is finally heard clearly and
recognized, something Christian could never accomplish; Hårga, and the women she dances
with, provide a system for her underlying need for support and community.
Ritual is important in creating women’s catharsis post-trauma. Janet Jacobs studied the
role of ritual in women’s healing in her article, “The Effects of Ritual Healing on Female
Victims of Abuse: A Study of Empowerment and Transformation”, and found that overall, the
act of ritual was supportive in women understanding and overcoming their trauma. The women
in this study went through multiple rituals, including burning the name of their abuser and
smashing eggs on the ground while shouting their abuser’s name, thereby releasing the hold their
abuser had over them. Jacobs states, “…the respondents reported that the ritual was particularly
effective in reducing fear, releasing anger, increasing one’s sense of power, and improving the
overall mental health of the participant with respect to the trauma of victimization” (268). The
ritual even worked when traditional talk therapy didn’t, potentially because it allowed these
women to take back control from the male perpetrators of their trauma more “violently” – more
abjectly within the constraints of Western femininity. These are emotions these women were
trained to repress because of their “unfeminine” roots; reclaiming those emotions with action
against their abuser gives them greater power against the men who hurt them and the patriarchal
structures that allowed and encouraged that abuse.
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The rituals Dani participates in act similarly in giving her control and power over
American male emotional repression, but it’s also ritual that enforces women’s bonds at the
expense of men’s power. We see this with the “mating” ritual Christian takes part in. In order to
achieve healthy bloodlines, the Hårga often use men from the outside world to impregnate their
women; one girl, Maja, has had her eyes on Christian for the entirety of the film, as she has just
reached an age she is “approved to mate”. This is brought to Christians’ attention directly,
though it’s unclear if he actually agrees to it; either way, he is given more drink that’s meant to
“loosen his defenses” and brought, like breeding stock, to building that houses a naked Maja
surrounded by equally naked older women (1:59:08). They chant and sing, Christian thrusts, and
Dani looks through the keyhole to see the whole thing.
The breeding ritual the women perform is centered on women’s understanding and
support; as Maja gasps, the older women around her do the same, feeling the emotion with her.
Christian is unimportant to them, except for the genetic material he is providing. This same
support system is seen more strongly as Dani, having just been crowned May Queen after being
the last one to dance, sees this and runs away in distress. A reaction like this is normal for her,
and prior moments had her run to be alone with her emotion, with no support from Christian; this
time, however, the women who had been performing the May Queen rituals with her surround
her as she cries out and hold her – really hold her, the lack of which Pelle had previously pointed
out. When Dani yells in pain, they yell with her, supporting her release of years-long pent up
emotion. This is part of the process that Jacob’s describes female abuse victims went through:
“These include shared emotional distress; the act of emotional distancing, through which
individuals both participate in and observe emotional release; and the discharge of emotion”
49
(268). The shared emotional distress is essential to Dani’s healing, and it’s only through this that
she can gain back power from male repression.
It’s important that Christian’s role is essentially flipped here as well. This is the first time
we’ve seen him acutely distressed, and after the ceremony, he runs outside, naked and
vulnerable. The aspect of consent in the breeding ceremony is tricky – is it a rape scene?
Christian is very clearly drugged and unable to actually consent to this practice, though he does
make the earlier decision to drink the liquid knowing it may lead to sex with Maja. Still, his
panic is evident as the scene progresses, and he is left completely without say or power. While
morally twisted, his lack of agency here is the start to his loss of power over Dani as he takes
over the stereotypically “feminine” role: it is not Dani’s body we see objectified or used, and not
her suffering, but Christian’s. Jack Reynor, the actor who plays Christian, decided to do the nude
scene precisely because of common gender roles in horror, stating:
There are so many scenes of sexual violence toward women in films that feature fullfrontal nudity that they have to deal with. I felt that this was an opportunity for that to be
turned on its head. I thought it was important for the audience to see this character
coming out as vulnerable and as humiliated as possible. (Thrillist)
Christian becomes the victim here and takes on a conventionally female role; it’s his body we see
suffer, and his pain and confusion we see laid out for us, while Dani’s emotional suffering is
finally released. In giving Christian the submissive and dominated role and juxtaposing it with
Dani’s power gain through her crowning, Midsommar gives power to female relationships while
showing the detriment of men’s social isolation and competition; at this point, Christian has no
friends left, and no one to look out for him.
50
Final Girl, Final Say
As a character, Dani works functionally as a version of Clover’s “final girl”. She’s the
last one standing out of the main characters – and even has a “boy’s” name like so many before
her – but she differs from the classic trope in the role of her salvation and connection to the
story’s original threat. Unlike traditional final girls, Dani doesn’t need to be saved from the
original horror of the film; she isn’t in mortal danger from Hårga like her friends, and she isn’t
rewarded based on male standards for femininity. Instead, Dani survives because of her rejection
of feminine behavior, not in a way that criticizes women, but in a way that criticizes men’s
control over women’s behavior. This subversion of the final girl trope gives weight to Dani’s
role to better serve her emotional catharsis. She doesn’t only survive the horrors, but embraces
them, thriving because of her break away from Western male ideals.
Hårga is a world where men are punished for their crimes, and though Christian’s might
not be more than emotional unavailability and manipulation, Dani’s freedom can only come at
his expense; and a worthy expense it is. The final sequence of Midsommar is a revenge fantasy at
its best, and one that despite the atrocities committed, we can’t help but feel good about. As Dani
is crowned May Queen, we learn that Hårga sacrifices nine people during Midsommar: four from
Hårga, four from the outside, and one that is chosen by the May Queen (2:10:27). After Christian
is stripped of his last shreds of dignity from the breeding ritual, he finds the bodies of his friends
scattered: Simon, Connie, Mark, and Josh all serve as the four outside sacrifices. Their bodies are
twisted and mangled in strange ways, adding abject imagery that works more classically to
horrify and disturb Christian. The Hårga find Christian as he’s looking at Simon’s body, strung
up with the skin on his back torn opened, like wings – this forces Christian to suddenly confront
the own danger he’s in, but also demonstrates a break between his sense of rationality and safety,
51
and the horrific reality he’s in. They knock Christian unconscious and the scene shifts to a
woman from Hårga physically opening his eyes. “You can’t speak. You can’t move,” she tells
him with a smile; he’s completely paralyzed (2:09:52). His voice and his agency are now gone,
and he must watch, in horror, as Dani finally gets a say.
Though there’s an argument to be made that Dani isn’t entirely in her right mind – she is
clearly drugged in these scenes as well – her influenced state seems to only uncover underlying
emotion, not restrict her. Drugging in the film does “break down defenses”, but in a way that
exposes what’s at the heart of these characters already. While it’s impossible to determine
whether Christian would have cheated on Dani while sober, his disconnect to their relationship
would imply a lack of loyalty, and he was interested in Maja prior to partaking in the ritual.
Dani’s drugging also helps her to reach underlying emotion that she had been repressing; though
the constant use of substances by the Hårga does demonstrate a manipulative tactic on their part,
it also uncovers a core desire within these characters that leads to Christian’s downfall and
Dani’s freedom.
Dani must make her decision: Christian or Hårga native, Turbeyon. She sits on her new
throne, completely covered in flowers; this is a rebirth, a new beginning. She has, quite literally,
bloomed. The camera slowly cuts between Dani and Christian, closing in on both their faces.
Dani’s lip trembles, and her face twists into a mix of sadness and anger (2:13:34). The camera
cuts away, but we know who she has chosen – there could only be one choice, after all.
The scene shifts us to the careful placing of the bodies – six already dead – into a
sacrificial, bright yellow building, then cuts away to men and boys gutting a dead bear. Christian,
still paralyzed, sits in the corner; there’s a building sense of dread and horror as they continue,
and then place him next to the now gutted carcass. Unlike the all-female rituals that brought Dani
52
a sense of connection and emotional freedom, this all male scene only furthers Christian’s pain,
now placing him in a state of literal oppression as he cannot move or speak, just watch what’s
happening to his own body. It’s a deep sense of the abject, and inherent wrongness as we now
see Christian placed inside of the bear carcass, his face emerging from a cut off opening in the
bear’s jaw, blood and guts stuck to his skin. While previous instances of abject imagery worked
in Dani’s favor by helping her reach emotional understanding, it now acts as a true sense of
horror for Christian, who’s become entrapped physically in much the same way Dani was
emotionally. The image of the bear is also significant when looking at Swedish and Scandinavian
mythology, which tells tales of the “berserker”, or men who went into animalistic frenzies, often
in the skin of bear.11 This juxtaposes Christian’s restricted state now, subverting our
understanding of a male bestial form: he cannot be in a violent or animal-state because he is
completely trapped in his body, and in the body of the bear. Knowing this background may help
contextualize Dani, however, who has been connected to the image of the bear since we saw that
painting in her apartment at the beginning. It’s Dani who ultimately gives into animalistic, raw
emotion as the building, with Christian and two other Hårga sacrifices still alive inside, burns.
The Dani at the end of Midsommar is worlds away from the Dani that ran away to cry, or
the Dani that was eager to compromise her own wants and emotional outlets. She inhabits her
role of May Queen, and though she is further removed from an all-female circle, she still
participates in the act of ritual burning. Notably, in the study done by Jacobs, burning away an
abuser’s name was a significant step forward in the women’s healing; Dani is essentially doing
this, just on a much larger and deadlier scale. In doing so, she completely frees herself from the
There’s some argument between “bear” and “bare” skin, but a there is a consensus that berserkers did refer to a
bestial or animalistic role. See “Beast and Man: Realism and the Occult in Eglis saga” by Ármann Jakobsson, pg. 34
11
53
chains that Christian – and Western male power – wrapped her in, and fully gives in to her
repressed emotion. Jacobs states, “Further, as the healing ritual legitimizes the feelings of rage
associated with victimization, participants experience a “return of power” that is then reinforced
through the final act, the guided meditation, in which women imagine female visions of strength”
(272). As “queen”, Dani inhabits the ultimate role of female strength, the feminine leader with
the power now in Hårga. It’s not only her connection with other women, but her connection to
feminine power that gives Dani her agency and control back.
It is here we see the force of the abject come back into play for Dani’s betterment. As
Christian burns alive in the background, Dani moves wildly in the foreground, her dress of
flowers making her look bestial and unnatural. The Hårga people around her scream in tandem
with the screams of pain that come from the yellow building, and jerk wildly, as if experiencing
that pain themselves. Their movements seem almost inhuman, and feed into a sense of unease as
the background music goes from melodic to unnerving, screeching instrumentals, supporting an
embracing of abject feelings; the Hårga don’t shy away from pain, suffering, and death, but
accept it. It gives them power in the end, but more importantly, shares that power with Dani. As
she becomes the final girl, she destroys the patriarchal institutions that originally repressed her.
The abject in the film helps her find and reclaim emotion and behavior that was deemed wrong
from a male society. Konstanze Kutzback and Monika Mueller write about the abject as a form
of empowerment in the introduction to The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the
Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture, stating:
According to Winfried Menninghaus, some of these abjected groups have engaged in
“affirmative abjection” by “condemn[ing] their own cultural abjection as a repressive
function of patriarchal authority, while, on the other hand, provocatively affirming their
abject existence as a socially unaccommodated way of life and source of pleasure.” (9).
54
In other words, abjected groups – here, women – have recognized their social abjection as a
source of oppression but have taken that abjection and reclaimed it as a source of power. Dani’s
emotion was viewed as abject from a male-centered world, but through embracing that source of
abjection, she is able to gain complete power over Christian, taking that impure and reusing it for
her gain. She watches the building collapse from flames and the camera focuses on her face as it
turns from confusion or pain to a wide smile; the script reads: “She has surrendered to a joy
known only by the insane. She has lost herself completely, and she is finally free. It is horrible
and it is beautiful” (Aster 117). This use of the abject as something pleasurable and, as Kutzback
and Mueller would call, aesthetic, demonstrates how it can be a source of good for those who
reclaim it for their own betterment. Just like the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives into
the wallpaper’s force, Dani takes the abject horrors around her – the sacrificial murder, the cultlike demeanor, the body horror – and turns it into her own gain.
Also like the narrator, we cannot be sure of Dani’s ultimate fate; the film cuts to black as
she smiles, and that’s all we get of her story. Will she maintain that power? Come to a realization
of what she’s done? Or be further manipulated by Hårga? The narrator in “The Yellow
Wallpaper” might face drastic repercussions, just as Dani might, but these exist outside of their
narratives at play. What’s important isn’t what happens next, but that sustained moment of power
where roles were reversed. John’s fainting or Christian’s paralysis both take away the agency
away from them – and therefore from patriarchal power – and allow the narrator and Dani to use
the abject forces of their stories to gain it. Even if it’s just a fraction of their timelines, they are
liberated.
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CONCLUSION
Women’s emotional responses to intense scrutiny, oppression, and trauma at the hands of
men and patriarchal societies are not inherently wrong, but they are painted that way by the
structures that create them in order to uphold those structures, to force a belief in women’s
irrationality, and to support male power with little backlash. The narrator and Dani are victims of
these same structures, but they are able to take what was presented as abject to them and foster it
for their own growth; the opposite often happens in our reality, where girls and women are
taught from young ages to restrict parts of themselves to survive. Karen Russel’s short story, “St
Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, opens with: “At first, our pack was all hair and snarl
and floor-thumping joy” (225). The girls in question are born from werewolf parents, raised in
the woods, and are brought to St. Lucy’s to assimilate back into a Western, Catholic femininity,
where that joy is efficiently stamped out. They don’t just learn to walk on two legs, but to
curtsey, to wear dresses and shiny penny-loafers: to be soft and delicate things.
Without losing sight of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Midsommar, I bring this story up at
the end of this paper because it seems to sum up entirely how a patriarchal culture is not an
accidental result of sexism, but a deliberately engineered attempt to keep women oppressed.
While wolf-boys exist in “St. Lucy’s” as well, the story focuses on the girls’ turn from the
freedom they have in the woods – the joy, but also the anger and ferocity they were allowed to
display – to the deeply restrictive human girlhood they must adopt. In forcing this assimilation,
the girls are quieted and kept in-line; one of the first things Jeanette, the oldest wolf-girl, masters
is how to apologize (232). These aspects are obviously damaging and those that can’t adapt, like
the pack’s youngest sister, Mirabella, face physical consequences: “Her teeth were ground down
to nubbins; her hair was falling out. She hated the spongy, long-dead foods we were served, and
56
it showed – her ribs were poking through her uniform. Her bright eyes were dulled to a sour
whiskey color” (236). Mirabella’s suffering, reminiscent of something dying, might itself be
abject in it’s expelling of life and joy, but it’s ultimately what the patriarchal structures deem
abject – that feral, untamed wilderness that exists in the girls – that becomes the threat. Unlike
the narrator or Dani, the girls in “St. Lucy’s” aren’t able to connect back to their abject, wild
roots and don’t reach that cathartic ending, but the narrative still structures those roots as an ideal
that was their freedom. Though a brief anecdote at the end of this work, “St. Lucy’s” provides an
important final example in how Western cultural masculinity is forced upon women to maintain
their subservience.
Womanhood that’s made up of the prescribed roles by patriarchal structures is inherently
oppressive. While wolf-girls may not exist, “hysterical” women did and do – or, I should say,
women facing emotional and physical repression, a lack of agency, and higher rates of assault
do, made into irrational and animal creatures for reacting. Instead of claws and teeth, women
have anger, protest, and a desire for something beyond the roles they were given, which
threatened male structures. Women’s rage, which is fostered in part by these circumstances, is
and was a rebellion against male created standards, and therefore becomes abject within a
patriarchal structure. It also inhabits a sense of abjection by disconnecting women’s sense of
identity within a patriarchal society from their sense of communal self, breaking through the
border Kristeva describes to splinter the “real self” – the real emotions a woman might feel –
from the role she must play.
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” effectively gives into this animalistic behavior,
“creeping” around the room on all fours, as does Dani when she embraces a primal wailing
during the ending ritual; they both lose their constructed selves to a deep-seeded emotional
57
response that became part of their identity. It’s the same instinct the wolf-girls hold on to even
during their assimilation, an underlying need to break away from the subdued world they’re now
a part of and go back to their wild, untamed origin. While “St. Lucy’s” demonstrates how the
animalistic is destroyed to make place for the meek feminine ideals of Western patriarchy, “The
Yellow Wallpaper” and Midsommar show how women who have been stuck under those
feminine ideals take refuge in abject, animalistic, or feral spaces. Women’s anger, rage,
fierceness, depression – anything considered negative and threatening by patriarchal standards –
function as abject from a world that demands softness, gentleness, and warmth. This is not to say
there isn’t value in those traits, but to say that because those traits are so expected of women and
so restrictive in their expectation, an embracing of the opposite – the traits considered negative,
animal, abject – creates a space for women’s freedom.
There is a liberation in a rejection of patriarchal ideals, especially once realizing the
repression that stems from them. From childhood, women know certain things are expected of
them while certain others were out of bounds, though their male counterparts may be allowed to
participate. Women are taught from the beginning that they are softer, smaller, that they mature
faster so that when the boys pick on them, it’s their job to stay calm while those boys face no
repercussion. Everything about Western womanhood is generated to teach women and girls that
they have no control and no agency over their bodies or minds, that they’re inferior, and that
staying quiet and comforting is something to strive for even in – or especially in – the face of
oppression; as bell hooks states: “Sexist ideology teaches women that to be female is to be a
victim.” And then, that to be a victim should be desirable.
Dani and the narrator function, at first, as victims. Like the final girls of countless horror
movies, they suffer under their monsters: male power structures. They’ve been trained to be
58
victims and to apologize to their oppressors, and yet they are both able to turn from their own
suffering to invoke that same powerless on those oppressors. While most works would situate
women who inhabit these traits as monstrous or villainous – just look at harpies, witches, sirens,
Carmilla, Medusa, Lilith – Midsommar and “The Yellow Wallpaper” treat their narrators with
more respect the more unhinged they become. Dani and the narrator embrace the abject in their
narratives and lean into the horror that breaks down their constructed selves into a freer version;
they expel the meek and traditionally feminine parts of themselves for something wilder, primal,
and animalistic. Though there are other works that have similar moves – take Robert Egger’s The
Witch, for example, that shows it’s female protagonist also gain release and power by joining
“evil” forces – looking at a past version compared with a modern one, and a short story
compared to a film demonstrates that not only is this a still-existent problem, but that different
mediums can enhance similar or parallel journeys.
An important aspect of both pieces is also the connection between women, which acts in
itself as a mode of resistance from patriarchal power. Female friendships aren’t abject, exactly –
they may even fall into opposing theories – but they do reject male standards and male control
through sisterhood, and that is a rebellion from feminine ideals in itself. Though “The Yellow
Wallpaper” doesn’t show other tangible women it does demonstrate the narrator’s growing
strength through the image of other women – women invoked through the embracement of the
abject force of the wallpaper. Even this is enough for the narrator to begin to resist her husband’s
rules and break free; similarly, Dani finds emotional connection with other women directly
through her embracement of a primal, horrific, and abject – through its break down of that border
of the self – release. Instead of giving these women further pain and punishing them for their
“unfeminine” behavior, their narratives reward them. Their roles with their male oppressors are
59
flipped, if even only for a moment, and they reach freedom, catharsis, and power. We cannot
begin to guess what happens to them after their stories’ end, but that doesn’t necessarily matter
within the context of their narratives. The narrator and Dani reach complete freedom through a
rejection of social ideals and an embracement of abject feeling and behavior: that’s the
conclusion both pieces reach, and what each one deems important.
This is not to say an embracement of the abject is the only or best form of resistance
against patriarchal structures, but it is to say that there’s an important space for it, and that horror
and Gothic genres often allows for that subversion of feminine ideals. Though this work deals
with fictional stories and characters, it’s interesting to conclude with a look at how similar
thoughts or behaviors show up in real life. While having a psychotic break and tearing down
your bedroom’s wallpaper or lighting your emotionally stunted boyfriend on fire might not be a
successful course of action in reality, women may still find small ways to embrace that sense of
abjection and reject male-created femininity. There is something about the idea of ferality and
primality that women seem to seek out and turn to, the same feeling that the narrator felt from
her trapped sisters in the walls, or that Dani found through both sisterhood, and abject horror, in
Harga. Female monsters are often made to punish abject, bold, and unfeminine behavior, but
these women are rewarded, in part, for their affinity to it.
After her ordeal under the orders of S. Weir Mitchell, and after publishing “The Yellow
Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote an article explaining her reasoning behind the story
and how she returned to a state of normalcy. Mitchell’s guidelines only harmed her already
struggling mental state, but Gilman took it upon herself to refuse his guidelines and start to heal:
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast
the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again – work, the normal life
60
of every human being; work, in which joy and growth and service, without which one is
pauper and a parasite – ultimately recovering some measure of power. (1)
Gilman’s rejection of the rules that were given to her by a male doctor was what allowed her to
understand her situation at hand more clearly and move forward – to gain back the power she
had lost. While Gilman didn’t completely give into some abject force – as far as we know – in
order to do so, she did refuse the ideals placed on her by the common patriarchal cure for her
ailment and understand that it took friendship and stimulation and self-sufficient work – things
that could be considered threatening to male power – to maintain mental stability. Both the
narrator and Dani follow the same line of thought but use the horror of their narratives to better
emphasize how such a rejection is beneficial to them and allow them power. While Gilman’s
suffering may seem like a thing of the past, her memory lives on in Western women today who
face similar forms of oppression in circulating ideas of hormones and uncontrollable emotion
that can harm their everyday life. Women’s oppression and repression survives because of that
adherence to Western femininity. Though mental breakdowns and sacrificial murders may not be
the most realistic or ideal answer to the question of women’s freedom, the possibility found in
the abject space away from feminine ideals speaks to a liberation women and girls are desperate
for: the floor thumping joy – and the snarl – they deserve.
61
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