The Specter of Body Horror Haunting Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Chair of Tranquility” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

Joyce Carol Oates is the editor of a 2023 collection entitled A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers. Her own story in the collection, “The Chair of Tranquility (from the Diary of Mrs. Thomas Peele, Trenton, New Jersey, 1853),” takes on a fuller meaning when considered in a dialogic relationship to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” By first outlining how Gilman’s and Oates’s stories can be seen as sister stories, then analyzing some essential differences operated in Oates’s story, the author is finally able to discuss the dialogic effect of reading these stories in parallel to support the hypothesis that Oates's story is also an allegorical denunciation of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.