Jeff Tibbetts: 00134815
Bluford Adams
008:105:001
December 12, 2005
#2 a: Science Will Not Save Us
As the prestige of science and the scientist grew in the 19th century, a literary counterculture argued that it was stripping the soul out of society. The scientist characters in both The Yellow Wallpaper and A White Heron are fundamentally flawed and short-sided, if not openly malicious. They both suffer from a disconnect in some crucial area: John with his wife and her emotional well-being, and the ornithologist with an intimacy with nature. It is empathy that is lacking in these characters. Both of them claim to study something, whether it's medicine or birds, but they are too narrow to understand their subjects in the broader spiritual and emotional sense. Science is also connected with masculinity; or perhaps more to the issue is that the mistrust or skepticism of science is a feminine characteristic. Men dominated the sciences of medicine in The Yellow Wallpaper, and the ornithologist of A White Heron is very handsome, virile and free in a way that isn't easily accessible to Sylvia.
The danger inherent to the scientist is that they have lost some aspect of intimacy, so they don't understand what it is that they are attempting to study. Even though John claims to love his wife and wants to care for her, he doesn't see into the emotional core of her problem: "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him." (ARR, 257). John can't understand the irrational circumstances of his wife's condition, nor can he see that his treatment is ruining her emotionally. He only thinks in the scientific terms of causation and rational process, so his wife's suffering is inexplicable to his mind.
The ornithologist can't understand that birds are beautiful because of their place in nature. He claims to have some understanding of the birds, but it is a distant and cold relationship: "he told her many things about the birds and what they knew and where they lived and what they did with themselves." (ARR, 76). But not what their songs were like, or what it looks like to watch them soar in the sky. Sylvia has gained a deep connection with the nature that she lives with, "and the wild creaturs counts her one o' themselves." (ARR, 75). This personal, intimate connection is far removed from the analytical, clinical view that the ornithologist takes.
Both scientists think they understand their subjects, but there are things that they don't see. For John, this means that he reviews his wife's condition constantly, but he doesn't trust her opinion of her own suffering. He has set himself so much higher above her, because of his learning, that his wife views him as unreachable: "It is so hard to talk with John about my case because he is so wise, and because he loves me so." (ARR, 262). But his love appears to be misguided. She comes to see that he may not be helping her, and indeed seems to be hurting her, but it takes her a long time to come to that understanding. He has cut off the one potential access to the help she needs by treating her like a child.
The ornithologist doesn't see the truth about the birds that he studies because they are removed from nature and their song when he kills them. He may know what they eat, how they make their nests, and other such scientific details, but he doesn't take the time to share in an experience with them. Sylvia finds the ultimate value in the birds by living with them, and she her knowledge of the birds when "she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together," (ARR, 79). This sort of shared, intense experience is something that science neither values nor truly understands, according to Jewett, and this is more important than understanding the Heron's feeding and domestic habits.
The two views of the scientist have some interesting contrasts in these stories. The principal differences are in the way that the scientists are viewed by the protagonist and presented to the readers, and in the fact that their intentions and the victims of their flaws are not presented as equally malign. Sylvia feels a certain awe of the ornithologist, and a budding sexual desire, and this makes her more sympathetic to his viewpoint. The narrator is clearly picking sides, though: the ornithologist is presented as "the enemy" (ARR, 73) right away. The initial negative view is dropped in by the narrator, and then almost immediately softened by Sylvia's affection for him and his façade of pleasantness. The reader is also allowed to see through the ornithologist's viewpoint on occasion, and we can see that he is ultimately selfish and seeks to use Sylvia, but he is not openly malicious. It is, in fact, it's Sylvia's affection for the man that makes him so dangerous: "Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest!" (ARR, 77). This indictment of Sylvia's feelings for the ornithologist can be extended to the rise of trust in science itself. Because man wants to believe in science, we are in danger of losing our place as a part of nature. Sylvia finds that science will not tell her more about nature than living in it will, so she rejects the goals of science and the dubious rewards that it offers, and the narrator celebrates this decision in the final lines of the story.
The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper begins the story trusting her husband, but eventually his behavior turns her away from him. The reader is not given access to John's own thoughts; all views of him are through the filter of his wife's journal. We do know that he treats her essentially like a child, despite the fact that he is in a position to see her as a woman because she is his wife, after all. The wife becomes disillusioned with the methods of her husband and his colleagues. Initially, she states that she disagrees with them but she believes that her husband must know best. Later in the story, she relates his care of her as though it's an interrogation: "He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind." (ARR, 267). She comes to think that he isn't helping her out of love or even kindness, and at the end of the story he isn't even her husband anymore, he's just "that man." The scientist in Gilman's story seems more directly malevolent than the misguided but still basically good ornithologist in Jewett's story.
The views of science in The Yellow Wallpaper and A White Heron are more similar than different. Both Doctor John and the ornithologist are concerned with a science that is pragmatic, factual, and essentially shallow and distant from the very subjects that it claims to study. The women in these stories have more faith in intuition and emotion, and they are skeptical if not openly critical of the benefits that science offers.
Works Cited
Nagel, James and Quirk, Tom, ed. The Portable American Realism Reader. New York, Penguin Group, 1997.
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