FORCED ISOLATION, SYSTEMIC DEHUMANIZATION AND THE RECLAMATION OF SOVEREIGN AUTONOMY IN THE YELLOW WALLPAPER AND WOMAN AT POINT ZERO: A RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS

Abstract

This article studies two important works of feminist literature: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892) and Nawal El Saadawi’s “Women at Point Zero”(1975). Both stories are about women who are trapped, controlled, and slowly destroyed by the systems around them. This article argues that both women, the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”and Firdaus in “Women at Point Zero”, experience three connected stages: first, they are forcibly isolated from the world; second, they are systematically treated as less than human; and third, they find a final, radical way to reclaim control over their own existence. To explain these three stages, this article uses three theoretical tools. The first is Erving Goffman’s concept of the Total Institution, taken from his book “Asylums” (1961), which explains how certain enclosed spaces , like prisons, hospitals, and households , completely strip a person of their individual identity. The second and third tools both come from Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” (2003), which explains how certain powers decide who gets to live as a full human being and who is reduced to a bare, controlled existence, and also how the act of choosing one’s own death can become the final act of resistance and sovereignty. By reading both texts through these frameworks together, this article shows that the oppression faced by both women is not accidental or personal , it is structural, systematic and deeply connected to patriarchal power. At the same time, the article argues that both women’s final acts, Firdaus choosing execution and the narrator collapsing into madness, are not simply defeats. They are radical acts of reclaiming the self. This article contributes to radical feminist literary criticism by showing how Western and non-Western women’s texts, separated by geography and time, speak to the same fundamental truth about patriarchal power and female resistance.