Intersubjective Experiences in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Susan Gibb’s ‘Blueberries'

Resumen

Blueberries is an intriguing hypertext by artist Susan Gibb. The reader tries to
unveil the narrator’s secret moving through the hyperlinks of the narrative. In the story,
links provide additional information to the narrative as they pull the threads of the major
themes of the plot -blame, love, sexuality. The tale shows great parallels with Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Both narratives explore women’s struggle for
empowerment. They do these by means of powerful real and supernatural imagery which
involves the presence of ghosts, obsessions, such as the color white in Blueberries and the
yellow in Gilman’s story, or the little man in the hypertext and the strange woman in the
wallpaper. In both stories the narrator is an artist (in Susan Gibb’s story it is a visual artist;
in Gilman we encounter a writer). In her blog, Susan Gibb discusses the process of writing in
Blueberries:
“So what is the impetus for selection [of which link to follow]? Does it depend upon
the individual as far as style (first, second, third link in order) or experience either of reading
hypertext or of knowledge of the author’s style? Is it the text itself that creates desire to go
further in that direction, whether it be the single word (or phrase) that is obviously the link,
or the context in which the link resides?”This paper explores the conditions of production of Susan Gibb’s Blueberries by
providing a close reading of the online para-textual elements and their role in creating
suspense and empathic engagement with the readers. It also positions interpretation in a
wider discussion about media, genre and psychoanalysis by means of the material conditions
of the links, seeking to integrate it into the vision of semiotic engagement described by
Bourchardon and López-Varela in "Making Sense of the Digital as Embodied Experience." I
also use Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper to draw the distinct forms of empathic engagement
encouraged by online writing and the printed text.