SOURCE: Fetterley, Judith. “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, pp. 147-64. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Fetterley discusses the elements of gendered narrative self-reflexivity in Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as well as in “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe.

As a student of American literature, I have long been struck by the degree to which American texts are self-reflexive. Our “classics” are filled with scenes of readers and readings. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, a climactic moment occurs when Chillingworth rips open Dimmesdale's shirt and finally reads the text he has for so long been trying to locate. What...