BOOK 158: THE YELLOW WALLPAPER: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A
Story") is a 6,000-word short story
by the American writer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New
England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of
American feminist
literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both
physical and mental.
Gilman's interpretation
Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the
time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the
oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the
way for writers such as Alice Walker
and Sylvia Plath.
In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way
to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time.
While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with
their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile.
At the time women’s
rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed
as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles
they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even
discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an
identity and become a form of defiance for them. Gilman realized that writing
became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had
very few rights.
Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own
experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir
Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways"
She
had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist
physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which
required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was
forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of
mental stimulation a day.
After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her
diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to
complete mental breakdown, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with additions and
exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to
Mitchell but never received a response.
She added that The Yellow Wallpaper was "not intended to drive
people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked".
Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his
treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited
this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating
entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments
would be more widely accessible.
Other interpretations
The Yellow Wallpaper is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its
treatment of madness and powerlessness. Alan Ryan, for example, introduced
the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the
finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It
may be a ghost story.
Worse yet, it may not." Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in
his essay Supernatural
Horror in Literature (1927) that "The Yellow Wall Paper rises
to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman
dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once
confined."
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her book Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper", concludes that
"the story was a cri de coeur against [Gilman's first husband, artist
Charles Walter] Stetson
and the traditional marriage he had demanded." Gilman was attempting to
deflect blame to protect Gilman's daughter Katharine and her step-mother,
Gilman's friend Grace Channing.
Anglican
Archbishop Peter Carnley
used the story as a reference and a metaphor for the situation
of women in the church in his sermon at the ordination of the first women
priests in Australia
on 7 March 1992 in St George's
Cathedral, Perth.
Sari Edelstein has argued that The Yellow Wallpaper is an allegory for
Gilman's hatred of the emerging yellow journalism. Having
created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the
press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy
headlines. Gilman was often scandalised in the media and resented the
sensationalism of the media. The relationship between the narrator and the
wallpaper within the story parallels Gilman's relationship to the press. The
narrator describes the wallpaper as having "sprawling flamboyant patterns
committing every artistic sin". Edelstein argues that given Gilman’s
distaste for the Yellow Press, this can also be seen as a description of
tabloid newspapers of the day.
In Paula A. Treichler's article "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis
and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'", she places her focus on the relationship
portrayed in the short story between women and writing. Rather than write about
the feminist themes which view the wallpaper as something along the lines of
"...the 'pattern' which underlies sexual inequality, the external
manifestation of neurasthenia,
the narrator's unconscious, the narrator's situation within patriarchy,"
Treichler instead explains that the wallpaper can be a symbol to represent
discourse and the fact that the narrator is alienated from the world in which
she previously could somewhat express herself. Treichler illustrates that
through this discussion of language and writing, in the story Charlotte Perkins
Gilman is defying the "...sentence that the structure of patriarchal
language imposes." While Treichler accepts the legitimacy of strictly
feminist claims, she writes that a closer look at the text suggests that the
wallpaper could be interpreted as women's language and discourse, and the woman
found in the wallpaper could be the "...representation of women that
becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak." In making
this claim, it suggests that the new struggle found within the text is between
two forms of writing; one rather old and traditional, and the other new and
exciting. This is supported in the fact that John, the narrator's husband, does
not like his wife to write anything, which is the reason her journal containing
the story is kept a secret and thus is known only by the narrator and reader. A
look at the text shows that as the relationship between the narrator and the
wallpaper grows stronger, so too does her language in her journal as she begins
to increasingly write of her frustration and desperation.[19]
An episode of The Twilight
Zone — "Something in
the Walls" (1989) — is a variation on Gilman's story, in which
a woman commits herself to a mental institution and insists on plain white
walls and no patterns within her hospital room, after having seen faces in the
patterns of her bedroom's yellow wallpaper and hearing ominous voices from
those faces.
The TV series Pretty Little
Liars (2010) uses the original book cover as a wallpaper design in
Aria Montgomerys bedroom.
The TV series American
Horror Story season 1 (2011) references The Yellow Wallpaper in the
eighth episode.
(Information from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper
)
