Assignment 8

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

Gilman was a leading feminist and social activist at the turn of the nineteenth century. She grew up in a family that included prominent advocates of a woman’s right to vote; one of her great-aunts was the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her writings, Gilman argued that the traditional conception of women’s roles was the result of social custom; it was culturally conditioned rather than anchored in biology. She made revolutionary proposals for freeing women for work outside the home.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” ( pp. 729-41)

This famous story has been read in many ways–metaphysical, sociological, political, psychological–and as rallying cry for women struggling to escape the labyrinth of their fate. Such different interpretations tend to supplement rather than contradict each other; in each the imprisoned woman exerts her will to be free.

Like many of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories, with which Gilman’s story has often been compared, (as our editor notes, Gilman draws upon many elements of the gothic),“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a study of a descent into madness. But whereas motives in Poe’s stories are often vague and mysterious or entirely personal, Gilman is clear in assigning a social cause to her protagonist’s disintegration: the suffocating role a patriarchal society imposes on women.

Patriarchal values are so deeply embedded in the narrator’s psyche that she is unable to recognize what is happening to her. Incapable of openly rebelling, Gilman’s narrator turns her anger inward. Throughout her narrative, she blames herself and constantly worries about inconveniencing her husband. Both husband and physician, John is a potent representative of the oppressive patriarchy. He attributes her nervous condition to her writing, an activity too strenuous for the frail mind of a female. He refuses to change the wallpaper that disturbs her because “nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (p. 757). Impervious to the reality of his wife’s condition , caught up in the male arrogance that he knows what’s best, John is unable to see what is happening to his wife.

The story is almost clinical in its depiction of the escalation of mental illness–as if we were watching the patient from the outside, somewhat the way John, the husband-physician, does in the story. However, Gilman makes us see everything in her story from the inside. We see everything from the point of view of the patient. Gilman herself had suffered from severe postpartum depression after the birth of a daughter in 1884. She was treated by a specialist who prescribed “rest cure,” a method developed after the Civil War by the famous Philadelphia physician S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914). The Mitchell treatment required confining the patient to a hospital, hotel, or some other remote residence. Once isolated, the patient was to have complete bed rest, increased food intake, iron supplements, exercise, sometimes massage and electric shock therapy, and no intellectual stimulation. Gilman had experienced Mitchell’s “cure,” and the treatment, Gilman said later, drove her so near the borderline of mental ruin that “she could see over.” She gave up the treatment after a few months, then sent an early copy of this story to him as criticism. To his credit, after receiving the story Mitchell modified his methods.

The descent into madness is powerfully conveyed through the narrator’s descriptions of the wallpaper. Early on, she says that the curves on the wallpaper “suddenly commit suicide. . . and destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions,” this last phrase an apt metaphor for her life. Later, the wallpaper seems to have no design; it is a collection of “bloated curves,” “columns of fatuity,” an “optic horror’ that dissolves into “confusion.” We may find it somewhat startling that she sets about resisting her incarceration by attacking the wallpaper. At best this seems an impractical means for getting out, so we ask what the hideous paper represents to her, and, by extension what it can represent for the reader who identifies with her in her plight? Is it a token of the ugly artifices of domesticity? Of all the discontents of civilization that oppress here? Of something she must reject in her psyche?

Perhaps it is all these things and more. This particular wallpaper seems to represent something insulting by its pattern. It is perhaps the emblem of fences and cages of every sort. In this case the token and the physical reality of the wall behind it have the same significance, so while it may be rational to direct her attack against the paper while the confining wall remains impervious, in this case the irrational revolt will prove the correct beginning.

In her frenzy to penetrate it, the loathsome paper is transformed for her into a kind of beacon to guide her through the obligatory phases of her passage to self-realization. It is a map to be decoded by being pierced and destroyed. Beneath it the prisoner discovers an under-pattern, which suggests that she has delved into her own psyche and discovered hitherto unconscious definitions of her nature and condition. Here is something she can read to improve the rationalized ego that was in fact an accomplice in her illness. No matter what this under-pattern may be called as we proceed with our interpretation of the story–it is intermediate in her discovery that behind this second layer of paper there is another person–someone is helping to strip it away. The emergence of the shadow figure is almost a metaphysical ploy, a shift of the story into fantasy. We need not read that way, finding rather that the other person is the true self now coming to the rescue.

Whatever our guess, whatever terminology we draw upon to name the emergent partner, the story ends with a triumphant victory over the offensive wallpaper and the myriad things it may represent. Early in the story she sees from one of her windows a garden that, with its “deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees, and the garden might possibly suggest an unfettered freedom to grow, which she yearns for. As she fantasizes the death of her husband at the end, we understand in Emily Dickinson’s words, that “Much madness is Divinest sense.” Unable to directly confront John, on the one hand, and unable, like John’s sister, to believe in and accept the patriarch’s values, the narrator “saves” herself through madness. She regresses to subhuman behavior as a self-inflicted punishment following her psychological rebellion–the wallpaper’s bad smell, its bars and grid, its fungus and toadstools, and its images of the creeping (dependent, inferior) woman.

Telling her story enables the woman to achieve her greatest desire–the symbolic death of her husband. The story ends, “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” The central irony of the story, however, is that by the time she realizes the twisted ambition fostered by obediently following “like a good girl” her passive role as a conventional member of the “weaker sex,” she has been driven insane.