SOURCE: Heilmann, Ann. “Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, pp. 175-88. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Heilmann asserts that Gilman challenged the dominant nineteenth-century patriarchal discourse on high art by transforming her own ideas about art and politics into the narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” thereby mapping “the transition from male aestheticism to a new female aesthetic.”]

When William Dean Howells approached Charlotte Perkins Gilman about the inclusion of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” [“The Yellow Wallpaper”] in his Great American Short Stories, she told him that it “was no more ‘literature’ than [her] other stuff, being definitely written ‘with a purpose,’” adding that “[i]n [her] judgment it [was] a pretty poor thing to write … without a purpose.”¹ Gilman's purpose in writing “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has been variously linked to a radical attack on the institutions of marriage and motherhood; to an indictment of patriarchal medicine and science; to a celebration of the subversiveness of the hysteric; to an interrogation of the relationship between the personal and the political, the autobiographical and the historical; and lastly, to a cultural critique of the literal as well as literary and linguistic, the material and the symbolic, problems faced by the woman who wants to survive as an artist in a male-dominated society.²

With “The Yellow Wall-Paper” today regarded as an almost unparalleled literary masterpiece which provides a brilliant exposition of the conditions of women's lives under patriarchy, the dichotomy between “literature” and “purpose,” or “art” and “politics,” which Gilman foregrounded in her comment to Howells, is not usually perceived as a problem. Neither was this dichotomy borne out by Gilman's life: after studying art at the Rhode Island School of Design, she earned her living as an art teacher and a decorative artist, painting flowers so perfectly that, as she tells us in her autobiography, if she had “give[n] [her]self to it” she could have made a name for herself (Living 46-47). Her first book, In This Our World (1893), was a collection of poems, the cover of which she devised herself, modeling it on Dreams (1890) by Olive Schreiner, another eminent turn-of-the-century feminist whose work combined art and politics (Living 168). In 1898, the year of her breakthrough as a feminist philosopher and author of Women and Economics, she saw herself “[a]s poet—as author—as orator”—the poet coming first, and the term author, like that of prophet or visionary, incorporating both aspects, the artist and the political reformer. Even forty years later, at the age of seventy, after completing her mystery novel, Unpunished, she was still planning for new work which should form part of “Art, Service, Education, Religion.”³ Writing as a form of art was clearly important to her, although this art was always bound up with “service”—but here she had a famous role model: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), an epic novel-poem about a successful woman artist, a book Gilman read and reread in the early years of her marriage to Walter Stetson, ends on the message that “Art's a service,” in other words, that art is a political project for reforming the world as well as an aesthetic and philosophical endeavour.⁴

Even while considering herself a writer, and implying that she could have been a notable artist, had she only wanted to, throughout her life, Gilman qualified her artistic achievements by insisting that what she had done was “perfect of its kind, but not ‘art’”; that she was devoted to “literature and lecturing,” but that her writing was “not, in the artistic sense, ‘literature’” (Living 46, 248; Diaries 2: 846). Why this preoccupation with the dichotomy between art and purpose, and what significance does it have for my reading of “The Yellow Wall-Paper?” Conrad Shumaker and Sheryl Meyering have interpreted Gilman's disavowal of her artistic self as a strategy common to women writers who sought to defuse the threat they posed by emphasizing their own insignificance⁵; however, this would be strangely at odds with the rest of her work, which so manifestly sets out to challenge patriarchal values and hierarchies. Another explanation might be found in the maternal interdiction of “brain-building” (day-dreaming), which may have caused the thirteen-year-old girl to believe that purely pleasurable (aesthetic) imaginative activity was selfish and immoral (not “work”), initiating a life-long habit of checking her creative impulses if they were not directed toward a specific “purpose” (Living 23-24). However, in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” such a narrow view of art is exposed as dangerous: it is, after all, John's prohibition of writing, his utter incomprehension of his wife's need for constructive creative expression, and his injunction to her not to “give way” to her “false and foolish” “fancies,”⁶ which propel the narrator on a journey to self-disintegration and madness.

While Gilman knew herself to be an artist in terms of her own feminist reconceptualization of art, I want to argue that she self-consciously distanced herself from the contemporary conception of “high” art because she associated with it specific movements and a specific gender, in other words, “masculine” art and an “androcentric” perspective—the antithesis of everything she and her art stood for. The beginning and end of her career saw her writing pitted against fin-de-siècle decadence and twentieth-century “high” modernism, predominantly or exclusively male-oriented movements whose most central aspects—“Art for Art's Sake,” privileging style and formal experimentation over content—clashed with her notion of “purposeful” art and explicitly political literature. “When Mrs. Gilman says, ‘I am not an artist,’” an early twentieth-century critic noted, “she is rebuking strictly esthetic expectations. … The whole effect of her work … is of … a seer's intentness, a prophet's passion to say … she is making a case, she is translating a vision.”⁷

If “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was written to teach Silas Weir Mitchell and, by implication, other wielders of patriarchal authority, “the error of [their] ways” (Living 121), Gilman also responded to the dominant artistic discourse of her time by “translating her vision” of political art. In the context of the 1890s, the color and strange floral pattern of the wallpaper literally and literarily take on a specific cultural meaning. Why yellow? As Mary Jacobus and Susan Lanser have noted, yellow, the “color of sickness,” would at that time have been associated with racial fears of national invasion (the “Yellow Peril”) and with social fears of the invasion of privacy (the sensationalist “Yellow Press”).⁸ Most significantly, of course, it stood for the aesthetic and decadent movement. Morris's fashionable designs in which, as Heather Kirk Thomas points out in her contribution to this collection, yellow featured significantly, Van Gogh's sunflowers, Whistler's blue-and-yellow room, the French yellowback novel, The Yellow Book, and indeed, the Yellow Nineties. Above all, the color yellow evokes the image of Oscar Wilde, self-styled “Professor of Aesthetics,” carrying sunflowers and a yellow silk handkerchief in lieu of aestheticism to the America of the 1880s, and responding to hostile newspaper reports by quipping, “If you survive yellow journalism, you need not be afraid of yellow fever”; Wilde who put a novel bound in yellow, mistakenly thought to be The Yellow Book, under his arm when he was arrested and whose A Woman of No Importance (1893) features a young American woman with a purpose, teaching the higher morality to decadent English aristocrats in a “Yellow Drawing-room.”⁹

Wilde's poems “In the Gold Room: A Harmony” (1882), “Symphony in Yellow” (1889), “Remorse (A Study in Saffron)” (1889) and “La Dame Jaune” (undated) established yellow as the color of decadence, conjuring up an atmosphere where the erotic connoted decay and the rotting “flowers of evil” (falling hair in “Remorse” and “In the Gold Room,” falling clothes in “La Dame Jaune,” falling leaves in “Symphony in Yellow”) (Wilde, Complete Works 862, 872-73; Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 196). Decadent eroticism was similarly visualized in painting, for instance in Albert Moore's “Yellow Marguerites” (ca. 1880), which encoded female “solitary vice” by depicting a languid young woman reclining on a sofa against a background of flowery yellow wallpaper.¹⁰ Sexual perversion was made explicit in The Yellow Room, an anonymous sado-masochistic text published a year before “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in which the title room is the site of the heroine's flagellation by her uncle.¹¹

By turning the two signifiers of aestheticism (the color yellow and the flower tapestry made so famous by William Morris) into the central metaphor of her story on women's sociocultural oppression, Gilman was visualizing her emerging feminist opposition to the “pointless pattern” of male thought and cultural production (31), juxtaposing these with a woman-centered politics and perspective, the central female consciousness of her text. Judging by a lecture she gave in 1894, “Art for Art's Sake” was, as she noted in her diary, bound to have “evil results” (Diaries 2: 583).¹² Like so many feminists of the time, in particular the British New Woman writers, Gilman constructed decadence not as subversion, but merely as a different expression of patriarchy. If, on a symbolic level, the yellow wallpaper denotes the phallocentric structures of science and the patriarchal family, it quite literally reflects contemporary male art and also, as Kirk Thomas illustrates in her essay, male consumer culture. Doctor, husband, artist, and interior decorator combine to enclose the female narrator in a prison of maleness, a “delirium tremens” of masculine frenzy, its “sprawling outlines run[ning] off in great slanting waves of optic horror” (31, emphasis in original), and pressing on the narrator “like a bad dream” (34). “Our androcentric culture,” Gilman was to write two decades later in The Man-Made World (1911), “is … a masculine culture in excess, and therefore undesirable.”¹³ In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” she suggested that this “excess of degeneracy,” as Kirk Thomas calls it, was not only “undesirable,” but also a health hazard.

In what sense does the biographical context throw further light on Gilman's critique of aestheticism? No record exists of any meeting between her and Wilde, but there is enough evidence to suggest that their paths crossed indirectly. In 1882, when Wilde toured America for a year, Gilman was twenty-two and teaching art and designing advertising cards in Providence. She might have heard about Wilde from her uncle Henry Ward Beecher, whom Wilde visited in July 1882. Wilde lectured in Rhode Island on three separate occasions, on 25 or 26 September in Gilman's home town. She neither attended nor made a note of Wilde in her diary, but she could hardly have avoided reports of the occasion in the local press and subsequent local gossip. As Wilde's lectures were transcribed almost verbatim by the newspapers, she would have had a good idea of what they were about. One can only speculate about the impact the media debate on Wilde had in terms of shaping her views on art and aestheticism. The Woman's Journal, for instance, which one year later accepted Gilman's poem “In Duty Bound” (1884), carried a heated diatribe against him on 4 February 1882 (Diaries 1: 240; Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 174-75, 180-83). On the other hand, the poet Joacquin Miller, who was to become a friend some ten years later, was a passionate Wilde advocate, writing fiery open letters in his defense.¹⁴ Since Wilde was in the habit of visiting art galleries and art schools of the cities in which he delivered lectures, he might have stopped at the Rhode Island School of Design or at the Providence Art Club (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 175-76, 182). In any case, he did not conceal his disdain for “young ladies painting moonlights upon dinner plates and sunsets on soup plates”; “[t]here is one thing much worse than bad art,” he said in his lecture on “The Decorative Arts,” “and that is no art”—an attitude that would certainly have made Gilman feel ill at ease with her own flower painting, which, we remember, was “perfect of its kind,” but (in the light of Wilde's comments?) “not ‘art’” (Living 84; Wilde, Complete Works 932).

Richard Ellmann notes that, notwithstanding his bad press, Wilde's “opinion was constantly sought in connection with plans for new art schools and galleries, and young artists looked up to him … as a god” (Oscar Wilde 182); surely Gilman and Stetson must have discussed Wilde and aestheticism. It is possible that Gilman bowed to Stetson's “superior” judgment, at least outwardly, as she says she did in her autobiography: “Do it as you choose,” she told him when they were furnishing their marital home, “I have no tastes and no desires. I shall like whatever you do” (Living 85).¹⁵ Perhaps it was in this spirit that she dressed in yellow for an art reception of Stetson's in 1884, shortly before their wedding; her diary note of 4 March reads:

[D]ress for Walters [sic] reception. Carrie's black silk, white Spanish tie, ruching, & lace in sleeves, yellow ribbon, yellow beads, gold comb, amber bracelet; yellow breast on bonnet, yellow flowers. Many people there, all seemed pleased.

(Diaries 1: 262)

Two years later, after starting her course of reading on women, she was sufficiently confident to express divergent views on art; one wonders whether her disapproval of some of Stetson's paintings had anything to do with aestheticism. On one occasion she “criticize[d] his pictures, one so harshly from a moral point of view that he smashe[d] and burn[t] it” (Diaries 1: 349). By the time she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” she had established her artistic independence publicly, as a writer and also, as Kirk Thomas notes, as an interior decorator. If this independence took the form of anti-aestheticism, it was rooted in her personal experience, inextricably connected as it was with her sense of immurement in an artistic marriage which obstructed her (artistic) development.

Sensitive to the public prohibition of homosexuality despite her own love for two women, Gilman may have reacted negatively to Oscar Wilde's spectacular over-performance of a deviance she appears to have shared.¹⁶ As Mary Hill notes (Charlotte Perkins Gilman 225), her sense of transgression—she had felt “queer” and “unfeminine,” almost a “morbid, strange cold sort of monster” during her friendship with Martha Luther—indicates that she had “partially accepted the derogatory socially imposed attitudes towards [same-sex] love.” Wilde's stance also alienated male homosexuals like Henry James who, after calling on him in Washington, concluded that “‘Hosscar’ Wilde is a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad” and an “unclean beast” (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 171). With its “repellent, almost revolting,” “lurid” and “smouldering unclean” color (26), associated, as the contemporary critic Holbrook Jackson wrote, “with all that was … queer in art and life,”¹⁷ the wallpaper anticipates the discourse of the Wilde trial in 1895. Its unaccountably “inharmonious” (29) and unsavory aspects also recall the language of Robert Louis Stevenson's “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886), a story which, as Elaine Showalter has argued, encodes homosexuality. Both texts play on the word “queer,” a word whose homosexual connotations were established in slang around the turn of the century.¹⁸ On the very first page, Gilman's narrator informs us that “there is something queer” about the house (24), and in Stevenson's story one of the characters remarks in the first chapter that “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.” Hyde and the wallpaper cause a similar feeling of nausea in the people exposed to them, and in each case this disgust defies any attempt at rational definition or explanation: the wallpaper has an “inexplicable look” and entirely indeterminable pattern (35, 31), and Stevenson's Utterson finds that he cannot give utterance to the unspeakable: “There is something more,” he says, “if I could find a name for it.”¹⁹ Just as the wallpaper hides “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” behind its sub-pattern which, though “subdued” in the daytime, “is all the time trying to climb through” in the moonlight (30, 34, 38), Dr. Jekyll's house conceals a back street door from which Hyde emerges at night in pursuit of forbidden pleasure. The fact that Gilman read “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in January 1890, shortly before she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” is significant in that it suggests that she deliberately drew on, and represented in her text, the “queer” register of contemporary male art.²⁰

If the wallpaper denotes both aestheticism and sexual deviance, and therefore by implication Oscar Wilde, whose “extreme aesthetic[ism]” was “almost a euphemism” for homosexuality even in 1882 (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 80), then Gilman “produce[d] [her] own etiology of the queer” when she “came out” as a feminist.²¹ Using her story to pit her growing sense of a sociopolitical mission against what she would have perceived as decadent immorality, she contrasted a male politics of pleasure with the feminist agenda of “serious” social reform, implying that masculinized, androcentric culture would, and must, be transformed by the feminizing influence of the female artist. Combining the personal with the political, Gilman drew on her autobiographical knowledge of what it meant to be an artist's wife and medical patient to create a nameless narrator who stood for everywoman, at least in the white middle-class sphere.

With his notorious kneebreeches, lilies, dark velvet outfit, and “queer” sexuality, Wilde may not have been “dull enough to confuse the eye in following” (26), but his “defiance of law” (34) was certainly “pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study,” and like Gilman's wallpaper, his bons mots, witty repartees, and aphorisms were calculated to “plunge off at outrageous angels [and] destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (26). While Wilde, in his 1882 lecture on “The Decorative Arts,” warned his American audience that nonaesthetic wallpaper would “lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime” (Complete Works 934), Gilman argued ten years later that decadent wallpaper drove women mad. “Today more than ever the artist and a love of the beautiful are needed to temper and counteract the sordid materialism of the age,” Wilde pronounced in “The House Beautiful” (1882), the second of his three American lectures; “the artist comes forward as a priest and prophet of nature to protest, and even to work against the prostitution of … what is lofty and noble in humanity” (Complete Works 925). Gilman, too, saw herself as a priest and prophet, engaged in uplifting humanity: “My business was to find out what ailed society, and how most easily and naturally to improve it,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I [was] here to serve the world. As a perceiver and transmitter of truth and love” (Living 182; Diaries 2: 849).

The overriding value Wilde attached to “beauty,” Gilman placed on “truth.” In her eyes, aestheticism did not reflect human existence “truthfully.” Masculine art, she argued in The Man-Made World, was useless to society because it was based upon the premise of exclusionary practices. In a “properly developed” community, which furthered the artistic spirit in all its members irrespective of class or gender, we should enjoy “the pleasure of applied art in the making and using of everything we have.” What was on offer in androcentric culture was “applied art at a very low level, small joy either for the maker or the user. Pure art, a fine-spun specialty, a process carried on by an elect few, who openly despise the unappreciative many” (Man-Made World 77-78). Just as Gilman juxtaposed “purpose” and “literature” in her comment to William Dean Howells, so she contrasted “applied art” and “pure art” in The Man-Made World, coming down firmly on the side of the former and condemning the latter as unnatural, artificial, and even antisocial. “It is sometimes said that our art is opposed to good morals,” Wilde admitted in “The House Beautiful,” but he took pains to emphasize that “on the contrary, it fosters morality” (Complete Works 925); to Gilman, on the other hand, the inevitable outcome of masculine cultural elitism was “a natural art wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends” (Man-Made World 81).

What were the parameters of this “noble art” Gilman saw degraded by the exclusion of women, and how did this affect her conception of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”? In “The House Beautiful,” Wilde offered guidelines for creating the perfect aesthetic ambience: “in decorating a room,” he urged, “one keynote of color should predominate.” Whistler's painting, “Symphony in White,” was proof of the fact that much could be achieved by restricting oneself to one single color. The true aesthetic mind avoided bright colors, choosing “toned or secondary,” even “sombre” tones to set off the ceiling and walls against the ornaments and furniture. To enliven these more “gloomy colours,” Wilde suggested selecting “joyous [wall]paper … full of flowers and pleasing designs,” but warned against hanging “[t]wo pictures … side by side—they will either kill one another, or else commit artistic suicide”—this is of course precisely what the “lame uncertain curves” of the not so joyous flowers do on Gilman's wallpaper (26). To impress on his audience “what a great effect might be realised with a little and simple colour,” Wilde gave a detailed description of Whistler's blue-and-yellow room:

The walls are distempered in blue, the ceiling is a light and warm yellow; the floor is laid with a richly painted matting in light yellow, with a light line or leaf here and there of blue. The woodwork is all cane-yellow, and the shelves are filled with blue and white china; the curtains of white serge have a yellow border tastefully worked in, and hang in careless but graceful folds. When the breakfast-table is laid in this apartment, with its light cloth and its dainty blue and white china, with a cluster of red and yellow chrysanthemums in an old Nankin vase in the centre, it is a charming room, catching all the warm light and taking on of all surrounding beauty, and giving to the guest a sense of joyousness, comfort, and rest.

(Complete Works 916-17, 922)

No doubt this room, significantly also one singled out for providing “rest,” sounds incomparably more habitable and peaceful to the mind than Gilman's nursery. In fact, Wilde stressed the importance of congruence and symmetry, advising against compiling a “collection of a great many things individually pretty but which do not combine to make a harmonious whole” (Complete Works 915). In principle Gilman shared Wilde's notion of beauty; in The Man-Made World she declared the highest form of art, that is, “human” (as opposed to sex-specific) art, to be characterized by “regularity, symmetry, repetition, and alteration” (75)—the very opposite, that is, of her wallpaper, which, as she notes in her story, is “not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry” (31). The point that Gilman makes is that “human” art and, therefore, true beauty and aesthetic expression are not possible in an androcentric culture; as long as women are oppressed, Whistler's vision of peaceful symmetry must inevitably turn into the nightmare of the nursery.

Taken by itself, or in conjunction with different furnishings and in a more positive context, the wallpaper would not be as “horrid” as it must appear to the narrator (32). What makes the nursery so disturbing is the violent clash between the wallpaper's pretense to aestheticism and the room's function as a prison. If, as Kirk Thomas points out, Gilman's metaphor of the “yellow room,” encoding male artistic taste but also the callousness of an oppressive husband, was prefigured in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), it takes on even more alarming dimensions in her story. The “rings and things in the wall” (26), the nursery's sound-proof location at the top of the paradigmatically patriarchal “colonial mansion” (24), separated from the rest of the house with gates, the bars on the windows, the narrator pinned to a “great heavy bed” which “looks as if it had been through the wars,” nailed to a floor “scratched and gouged and splintered” (30, 31), the strange, smelly, yellow stains all over her and her husband's clothes—the sister-in-law who “wished we should be more careful” (35)—and the “ravages” of the torn and “torturing” wallpaper which “slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you” (29, 34), and which reduces her to crawling; all of this hints at sexual assault. How could harmony or peace of mind be conceivable against a background of abuse? How could a male movement lay claim to creating beautiful and enduring art while all the time witnessing and choosing to ignore, the lives women had to endure? “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” the narrator writes, as if the “two bulbous eyes” of the male artist both watched and created the conditions for the subjection and disintegration of female identity (29, emphasis in original). What Gilman suggests, then, is that in patriarchy, art produced by the ruling sex (and class) serves to establish and consolidate the dominant power structures.

A society which suffers from an “excess of masculinity” and a concomitant “lack of femininity,” Gilman argues in The Man-Made World (78), produces art that is defined by three features, which, conflating sex and gender, she sees as generic male characteristics: “desire, combat, [and] self-expression.” These traits are written into the wallpaper. “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before,” the narrator tells us (29). In her futile attempt to define the pattern, she discovers that, while “each breadth stands alone,” all breadths “connect diagonally … and … horizontally”; they seem to move toward “a common centre” but then “rush off in headlong plunges” (31). Read in terms of human society, this clash between centripetal and centrifugal presents us with an image of “isolated” combatants each competing for individual expression, unable to avoid interlinking and criss-crossing with others at times, but who, instead of cooperating (converging on a common objective), are continually in conflict. As a result, both the wallpaper and the society represented by it radiate antagonism, evoking the hatred of those subjected to its influence, women and children: “No wonder the children hated it!” (26). In addition, the wallpaper reflects an aggressive and frenzied sexual desire, an army of fetid “toadstool[s] in joints … budding and sprouting in endless convolutions” (34), steadily closing in on the narrator, whose only means of escape is through projecting her fear on to the sub-pattern, with the first sighting of the woman behind bars directly following this description of an ominous, terrifying, imperialist masculinity.

If male art has such dire consequences, what potential for change does Gilman see, and what solutions does she offer? “The true artist transcends his sex, or her sex,” she argues in The Man-Made World (79); “Art is Human.” But to achieve the conditions in which human art can be produced, art must first be feminized. Literature and fiction in particular need the feminizing influence of women artists because so far they have “not given any true picture of woman's life, very little of human life, and a disproportioned section of man's life.” (102) Male writers, she claims, have in the main concentrated on two scripts, each foregrounding predatory masculinity: “the Story of Adventure, and the Love Story” (94). Neither has “touch[ed] on human processes, social processes” (95), in other words, shown a commitment to creating works of art that, while representing human psychology and social interaction truthfully, “lifted, taught, inspired [and] enlightened” the reader (123). To counteract this masculine influence, Gilman outlines the parameters of female and “feminine” fiction. This fiction is concerned with the real-life experiences of women, examining the problems and conflicts they have to contend with, and also exploring the great potential of female-to-female, and human, interaction and cooperation:

The humanizing of woman … opens five distinctly fresh fields of fiction: First, the position of the young woman who is called upon to give up her “career”—her humanness—for marriage, and who objects to it. Second, the middle-aged woman who at last discovers that her discontent is social starvation—that it is not more love that she wants, but more business in life: Third, the inter-relation of women with women—a thing we could never write about before because we never had it before: … Fourth, the interaction between mothers and children; this not the eternal “mother and child,” wherein the child is always a baby, but the long drama of personal relationship; the love and hope, the patience and power, the lasting joy and triumph, the slow eating disappointment which must never be owned to a living soul—… Fifth, the new attitude of the full-grown woman, who faces the demands of love with the high standards of conscious motherhood.

(Man-Made World 104-5)

In “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Gilman turned her attention to the first of these new themes, describing with clinical precision and an acute psychological insight sharpened by her autobiographical experience what happens to the inner life of a young woman who, stifled by marriage and motherhood, is denied individual and professional growth. Gilman's story also addresses the other “feminizing” themes, but because she wanted to make a point about the sheer destructiveness of depriving women of careers and, therefore, of a human existence, they are developed in a negative sense. For instance, if we read between the lines of the narrator's story, we catch glimpses of Jennie, John's sister, the “perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper” who “hopes for no better profession” (30). Surely one of the tragedies of the text is the unexplored possibility of sisterhood, the failure of the two women to interrelate and thus to counteract the impact of the patriarchal alliance between husband, brother, and doctor. In a later short story with the same theme, “Making a Change” (1911), the older domestic and younger artistic woman get together behind the husband's back with the mother-in-law recovering her youth and sense of purpose when she turns infant-care into a lucrative business, opening a baby-park on the roof of their apartment block, while the wife resumes her career as a piano teacher, the housekeeping and cooking being taken over by a well-paid professional. What starts as a variant on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (in her desperation the wife tries to gas herself) ends with domestic peace and happiness, aided by the substantial addition to the family economy.²²

What Gilman suggests, then, is that woman-to-woman friendship is even more vitally important than a constructive female-to-male relationship; if Jennie identified with, and supported, her sister-in-law instead of acting as her jailer, the narrator would not have to seek for an imaginary “sister” in the mirror of the wallpaper. Instead of giving metaphorical birth to her Other self, a self that escapes out into the open road while she remains behind, tied to her umbilical cord (39, 41), she would, with Jennie's help, be able to set herself free in physical and material terms, too. As it is, she finds relief and some degree of mental liberty by crawling into the recesses of her mind, but even if, as she tells her husband, he can never “put [her] back” (42), she is, for the moment at least, a “captive imagination.”

While the narrator herself remains suspended between absolute psychological freedom and physical confinement to a room in the “ancestral halls” of patriarchy (24), death (of her former self: the “Jane” she names on the last page) and rebirth (into a state unnamed and undefined by any man), the process of writing about the ripping of the wallpaper constitutes a metaphorical “overwriting” of the male patterns inscribed into the text: marriage, medicine, and art. Placed in the cultural context of the Yellow Nineties, the journey Gilman takes the reader on is thus one that leads from male aestheticism to the vision of a feminized future. As yet the Other self of the artist that the narrator has released is creeping, but she is creeping out in the open; she is moving fast, and has replaced the yellow of decadence and decay with the green color of life (41).

It is at this point that Gilman's story could be seen to move from the male-defined texts of patriarchy to a female artistic tradition. In Olive Schreiner's “Three Dreams in a Desert,” an allegory highly prized by Gilman, a woman reaches the banks of a river which divides her from the land of Freedom. Before she can cross over, she must take off all her (patriarchally inscribed) clothes except one (Truth), and she also has to abandon her dream of Love (a male baby who bites her breast when she lays him on the ground). Not only does she feel “utterly alone,” but it is also unlikely that she will succeed in reaching the other side. All she can hope for is to “make a track to the water's edge” with her body, over which thousands of women, the sound of whose feet she can hear in the far distance, can walk into a new life.²³ In Gilman's story and Schreiner's allegory alike, the female protagonist must shed male coverings (wallpaper and clothes) and sacrifice herself to release other women into freedom (Gilman's creeping and Schreiner's marching women).

In a short memoir, Gilman's friend Harriet Howe describes the impact Gilman, and through her Schreiner's allegory, had on her:

[Mrs. Stetson] introduced me to [a] precious book, …“Three Dreams in a Desert,” … And if I had been exulted before, over the poetry; here was vital truth, aspiration, reality for the whole human race, in so perfect a setting that no work of human hands could excel it. I cried incredulously, “And this book is in the world, and still the women are asleep? Then what use is it to try further, for this cannot be surpassed.” In a reverent tone she answered me, in the very words of the book, “We make a path to the water's edge.” And I wept, unashamed, while she walked away a little distance, I think to conceal her own eyes, but I am not sure. From that hour I was dedicated to the work of lifting humanity by awakening women to a knowledge of their power and their responsibility. It was a consecration.²⁴

As the “art which gives humanity consciousness,” Gilman wrote in The Man-Made World (93), literature was “the most powerful and necessary,” “the most vital” of the arts. In “The Yellow Wall-Paper” she made “a track to the water's edge” of “human” art by mapping the transition from male aestheticism to a new female aesthetic.

Notes

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, introduction by Ann J. Lane (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 121.

2. For an overview of readings see Elaine Hedges, “‘Out at Last’? ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ after Two Decades of Feminist Criticism,” in Catherine Golden, ed., The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper (New York: The Feminist Press, 1992), 319-33.

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, [from] “Thoughts and Figgerings,” 18 January 1898 and 11 August 1930, in The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight, 2 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 2: 847, 854.

4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (London: Women's Press, 1982), bk. 9, 1. 915.

5. Sheryl L. Meyering, “Introduction” to Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 2-10; Conrad Shumaker, “‘Too Terribly Good to Be Printed’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” ibid., 65-74.

6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), in Golden, Captive Imagination, 18, 34. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.

7. Alexander Black, “The Woman Who Saw It First” (1923), in Joanne B. Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 64.

8. Jacobus, “An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Reading,” Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), 234; Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America,” in Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards, eds. “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 225-56.

9. For references on Wilde see William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London: Cape, 1945), 105; Martin Fido, Oscar Wilde (Leicester: Galley Press, 1988), 41; Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1987), 166, 168, 170; H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London: Mandarin, 1990), 510; Fraser Harrison, “Introduction” to The Yellow Book: An Anthology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1982), 10-11; Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 477.

10. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 75.

11. Anon., The New Epicurean and The Yellow Room (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), 69-127.

12. As the lecture falls in the early stages of Gilman's career, it is likely that there was a written transcript; however, no such title appears in the 1894 file of Gilman's papers held by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Harvard University. I am obliged to Ellen M. Shea for checking the records.

13. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1971), 22.

14. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 210-26.

15. As Kirk Thomas points out, Gilman's diary entries present a different picture.

16. Gilman acknowledged her same-sex love for Martha Luther and Adeline Knapp in her autobiography (Living 78, 133) and was worried about the threat of public exposure after her relationship with Knapp collapsed; see Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Meridian, 1991), 166-67.

17. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), cited in Stephanie Forward, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper,” English Review 7 (February 1997): 35.

18. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomington, 1991), 105-26.

19. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde With Other Fables (London: Longman's, 1914), 10, 23 (emphasis in original).

20. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was written probably in July 1890 (Diaries 2: 417, 905). I am obliged to Gary Scharnhorst for the information that Gilman read “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” on 20 January 1890 (Second International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, 26-28 June 1997).

21. Jonathan Crewe, “Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form,” Tulsa Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1995): 282.

22. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Making a Change” (1911), in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 182-90.

23. Olive Schreiner, “Three Dreams in a Desert,” Dreams (London: Unwin, 1890), 81; reprint in Ann Heilmann, ed. The Late-Victorian Marriage Question: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1998), vol. 4.

24. Harriet Howe, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman—As I Knew Her” (1936), in Karpinski, Critical Essays, 75-76.

Select Bibliography

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Benigna Machiavelli. Serialized in Forerunner 5 (1914). Reprint, Santa Barbara: Bandanna Books, 1993.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Edited with an introduction by Ann J. Lane, New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900.

The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 2 vols. Edited with an introduction by Denise D. Knight, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

Forerunner. Vols. 1-7 (1909-16). Reprint, with an introduction by Madeleine B. Stern, New York: Greenwood, 1968.

Herland. Serialized in Forerunner 6 (1915). Reprint, with an introduction by Ann J. Lane, New York: Pantheon, 1979.

His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. New York and London: Century Co., 1923. Reprint, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924. Reprint Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1976.

The Home: Its Work and Influence. New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1903. Reprint, New York: Source Book Press, 1970.

In This Our World. Oakland: McCombs & Vaughn, 1893, 3d. ed. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. Reprint, New York: Arno, 1974.

“Kitchen-Mindedness.” Forerunner 1 (February 1910): 7-11.

The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited with an introduction by Denise D. Knight, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Foreword by Zona Gale. New York: Appleton-Century, 1935. Reprint, with an introduction by Ann J. Lane, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture. Serialized in Forerunner 1 (1909-10). Reprint, New York: Charlton Co., 1911.

“Mind Cleaning.” Forerunner 3 (January 1912): 5-6.

“Moving the Mountain.” Serialized in Forerunner 2 (1911). Reprint, New York: Charlton Co., 1911.

“The New Motherhood.” Forerunner 1 (December 1910): 17-18.

“The New Mothers of a New World.” Forerunner 4 (June 1913): 145-49.

Unpunished. Edited with an afterword by Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight. New York: The Feminist Press, 1997.

What Diantha Did. Serialized in Forerunner 1 (1909-10). Reprint, New York: Charlton Co., 1910.

With Her in Ourland. Serialized in Forerunner 7 (1914).

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. Reprint, edited with introduction by Carl N. Degler, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

“The Yellow Wall-Paper.” New England Magazine (January 1892): 647-56. Reprint, with an afterword by Elaine R. Hedges, Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973. Revised ed. 1996.

The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1899.

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited with an introduction by Denise D. Knight. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Secondary Readings

Ceplair, Larry, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.

Hill, Mary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Emergence of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

———. The Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897-1900. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995.

Karpinski, Joanne, ed. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. (Includes critical essays by Catherine Golden, Elaine Hedges, Mary Hill, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Joanne Karpinski, and Gary Scharnhorst.)

Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1995.

Knight, Denise D. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Kolmerten, Carol A. “Texts and Contexts: American Women Envision Utopia, 1890-1920.” In Utopians and Science Fiction by Women, edited by Jane A. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994.

Lane, Ann J. To “Herland” and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Lanser, Susan. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 415-41.

Meyering, Sheryl L., ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1989.

Robinson, Lillian S. “Killing Patriarchy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Murder Mystery, and Post-Feminist Propaganda.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 10, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 273-85.

Rudd, Jill and Val Gough, eds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Forthcoming.

———. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Very Different Story. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1998.

Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.