Female Confinement and Escape in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

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In 1913, more than twenty years after the first publication of ''The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote that she devised the story, "to save people from being driven crazy." Gilman had suffered a near mental breakdown herself, and had been prescribed a rest treatment very similar to that prescribed to the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For Gilman, the act of resuming her normal life, which certainly included writing, was what restored her health. Though we don't know what became of Gilman's narrator, we can chronicle Gilman's own life after her near mental breakdown. If Gilman's narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" regressed into her insanity, Gilman certainly did not; unlike the narrator she created, she made her voice heard. She pursued her career as a writer and lecturer, and she wrote works of theory and social commentary that brought her international fame. Though she concentrated on feminist issues, her influence reached beyond the woman's sphere. She has been compared by some critics to the author George Bernard Shaw and the art critic John Ruskin, and the London Chronicle compared her book, Women and Economics, to the writings of John Stuart Mill.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" commands attention not only for the harrowing journey into madness it portrays, but also for its realism. It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that the "The Yellow Wallpaper" is autobiographical. In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman placed herself under the care of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a well-known nerve specialist. She was suffering from depression, "nervous prostration" as diagnosed by the doctor, after the birth of her daughter. At that time, the medical profession had not yet distinguished between diseases of the mind and diseases of the brain; problems that would now be treated by psychiatrists, such as depression, were treated by neurologists such as Mitchell. The symptoms of depression—fatigue, hysteria, crying fits—were thought to stem from the body, and thus were treated through care of the body. Mitchell's treatment for breakdowns of the nervous system, and the treatment he prescribed for Gilman, included total bed rest and isolating the patient from family and familiar surroundings. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman demonstrates the horror that such a treatment could induce in its subject. When the narrator is threatened by her husband with being sent to Weir Mitchell if she does not get better quickly, she says: "But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!"

Gilman was sent home from Mitchell's sanitarium after one month, having been pronounced ''cured,'' with the following instructions: ''Live as domestic a life as possible ... Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brash or pencil as long as you live." When Gilman heeded this advice she came, in her own words, ''perilously close to losing my mind." Mitchell's "rest cure" had been used on other literary figures—Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf—and other noted persons--Jane Addams and Winifred Howells, whose father, the editor William Dean Howells, was instrumental in the publication of "The Yellow Wallpaper." Woolf, Addams, and Howells, like Gilman, protested against the treatment (Woolf also attacked it in her novel Mrs. Dalloway). In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman chronicles what happens to a woman forced to succumb to the "rest cure" and thus, to her inflexible position in society as a prisoner of the domestic sphere.

Gilman claimed a purpose for everything she wrote. "The Yellow Wallpaper" pointed out the dangers of the medical treatment imposed by Mitchell and other doctors like him. Years later, Gilman learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment of nervous prostration after reading the story, so she won her victory. Yet, the story is far more than just a crying out for improvement in one facet of a woman's life; it touches on many issues relevant to women of the nineteenth century, particularly that of the limited roles available to them.

Despite Gilman's avowal that her story was not literature, it has been appreciated as such since its rediscovery in the 1960s (Gilman's works had been out of print since the 1930s). And just as "The Yellow Wallpaper" espoused Gilman's feminist views when she wrote it, critics have analyzed it as a feminist work—or a work that has feminist issues as its main concerns—for the past two decades. As is often the case, the critics disagree. The story has been seen as a realistic tale in its portrayal of the narrator's descent into madness, as a feminist Gothic tale in its use of abnormal behavior and occurrences, and as one of the earliest modernist texts for its unaware narrator and its intense focus on what she is thinking and feeling. Readers and critics alike have even disagreed over the meaning of the story's ending. Some critics see the narrator's defeat: she has retreated into the world of childishness. Others, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, see in it the narrator's triumph: by fainting, John shows he is defeated, and the narrator has become the woman behind the wallpaper, who can creep down the road, away from the house and her husband's authority. Even attempts to understand why the story was ignored for so long have led to dissent. Some critics argue that Gilman's contemporaries could not understand this story of a woman's mental breakdown because they were accustomed to "traditional" literature. Still others believe that women could accurately read the story, but they chose not to because they were afraid of what they would find.

What then are we to make of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Essentially, it is a story of female confinement and escape. Gilman's narrator is trapped in the home, in her maternal body, and in the text she has created for herself, which is the only escape she can find.

That Gilman's narrator is physically and spiritually trapped by her husband is apparent from the beginning of the story. Though she "wanted [a room] downstairs that opened on the piazza ... John would not hear of it." The narrator strives for some space of her own; the room she would have chosen would not fit two beds and had no other bedroom for John nearby. Instead, John has put his wife on the top floor, away from the rest of the household (their baby, the nurse, and John's sister) in a room she believes to have been a "nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium." Though she recognizes her captivity—John "hardly lets me stir without special direction"—she overlooks other more ominous signs of her confinement: the bars at the window, the gate at the top of the stairs, steel rings on the wall, and the nailed-down bedstead.

This habit of the narrator of deliberately misreading her surroundings is apparent throughout the story. For instance, when John refuses to give in to her fancies about changing the wallpaper because, after that ''it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on," is he reminding her of her confinement? Does she recognize this subtle way of controlling her? Rather than confronting such a possibility she instead, outwardly, relies on John's advice. "I think sometimes if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me," she muses, which she then follows with a reiteration of what John wants her to think—"But I find I get pretty tired when I try." Such is her effort to believe in him and thus preserve her sanity (sanity as defined by John), because she knows she has not the will to resist him:''But what is one to do?" she says. In fact, she does something John doesn't approve of—she writes in a journal, thereby creating her own text. Unfortunately, because the text is her only place of true self-expression, it becomes as oppressive as the room, as oppressive as her husband.

Gilman's narrator is so cruelly trapped both by the conventions of nineteenth-century American society, which says that a woman's function is to bear and raise children, and by her husband's inflexible belief in this code. John has attempted to take away one of the few things that bring her consistent pleasure, her writing, "He hates to have me write a word," she says, and notes his determination to correct her ''imaginative power and habit of story-making." Unfortunately, for Gilman's narrator, these sentiments are shared by others in society. John's sister, a woman who occupies her proper place in the domestic sphere by being "so good with the baby" and a "perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper," seems to believe "his the writing which made [the narrator] sick!"

Because the narrator has no physical or spiritual escape from her husband, she must seek relief elsewhere: in the yellow wallpaper, and thus, in the text she creates as she describes her relationship with the wallpaper. Though at first she says of it, "I never saw a worse paper in my life," as she loses her slim hold on sanity, she gets "really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper." Her initial discomfort decreases as she sees mirrored in the wallpaper her own existence. She realizes that the wallpaper has two patterns; the front pattern is made of bars, and in the back pattern is a woman "stooping down and creeping about,'' and later shaking the bars. And the woman in the wallpaper continues to reflect the narrator, "she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through the pattern—it strangles so." By the end of the story, the narrator finds escape when she becomes the wallpaper woman as she "creep[s] smoothly on the floor." With this final action she escapes those places of her confinement. Her husband, the force that keeps her in the home, has become an inanimate object, one that only gets in the way of her ''path by the wall, so that [she] had to creep over him." She releases herself from her maternal role as she occupies the role of a ''madwoman.'' And, by refusing to write it anymore, she has freed herself from the text that chronicles her mental breakdown.

Virginia Woolf, in her important essay A Room of One's Own, says that in order to write a woman must have money and her own private room. Perhaps implicit in Woolf's words is that women also need to be accepted for what they are: creative, independent, thinking creatures. For Gilman's narrator, having money, a private room, and the necessary leisure time certainly was not enough to sustain her as a writer and as a person; she was lacking that other essential element: a family who believed in a woman's right to creativity and self-expression.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.
Rena Korb is a writer and editor.

Analysis

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her personal bout with postpartum depression to create a powerful fictional narrative which has broad implications for women. When the narrator recognizes that there is more than one trapped, creeping woman, Gilman indicates that the meaning of her story extends beyond an isolated, individual situation. Gilman’s main purpose in writing The Yellow Wallpaper is to condemn not only a specific medical treatment but also the misogynistic principles and resulting sexual politics that make such a treatment possible.

The unequal relationship between the narrator and John is a microcosm of the larger gender inequity in society. Gilman makes it clear that much of John’s condescending and paternal behavior toward his wife has little to do with her illness. He dismisses her well-thought-out opinions and her “flights of fancy” with equal disdain, while he belittles her creative impulses. He speaks of her as he would a child, calling her his “little girl” and saying of her, “Bless her little heart.” He overrides her judgments on the best course of treatment for herself as he would on any issue, making her live in a house she does not like, in a room she detests, and in an isolated environment which makes her unhappy and lonely. John’s solicitous “care” shows that he believes the prevailing scientific theories which claim that women’s innate inferiority leaves them, childlike, in a state of infantile dependence.

Gilman makes John the window through which readers can view the negative images of women in her society. In Gilman’s lifetime, women’s right to become full citizens and to vote became one of the primary issues debated in the home, the media, and the political arena. As women’s reform movements gained the strength that would eventually win the vote in 1920, the backlash became more vicious and dangerous. Noted psychologists detailed theories that “proved” women’s developmental immaturity, low cognitive skills, and emotional instability. Physicians, who actually had little knowledge of the inner workings of the female body, presented complex theories arguing that the womb created hysteria and madness, that it was the source of women’s inferiority. Ministers urged women to fulfill their duty to God and their husbands with equal submission and piety. In indicting John’s patronizing treatment of his wife, Gilman indicts the system as a whole, in which many women were trapped behind damaging social definitions of the female.

One can see the negative effects of John’s (and society’s) treatment of the narrator in her response to the rest cure. At first, she tries to fight against the growing lethargy that controls her. She even challenges John’s treatment of her. Yet, while one part of her may believe John wrong, another part that has internalized the negative definitions of womanhood believes that since he is the man, the doctor, and therefore the authority, then he may be right. Because they hold unequal power positions in the relationship and in society, she lacks the courage and self-esteem to assert her will over his even though she knows that his “treatment” is harming her. Deprived of any meaningful activity, purpose, and self-definition, the narrator’s mind becomes confused and, predictably, childlike in its fascination with the shadows in the wallpaper.

In the end, the narrator triumphs over John—she literally crawls over him—but escapes from him only into madness. As a leading feminist lecturer and writer, Gilman found other options than madness to end her confinement in traditional definitions of womanhood. Eventually, Gilman divorced her husband, who married her best friend, and her husband and her best friend reared her child. The public, friends, and family so sharply censured Gilman for her actions that she knew many women would stay in unhealthy situations rather than risk such condemnation. By having the story end with the narrator’s descent into insanity, Gilman laments the reality that few viable options exist for creative, intellectual women to escape the damaging social definitions of womanhood represented by John. In her horrifying depiction of a housewife gone mad, Gilman attempts to warn her readership that denying women full humanity is dangerous to women, family, and society as a whole.

Expert Q&A

What does a psychological reading reveal about "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed narrator suffers from Postpartum Depression. This causes her to go mad, as evidenced by her hallucinations that a woman is trapped in the wallpaper.

How do psychoanalytic and feminist theories apply to "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

Psychoanalytic theories in "The Yellow Wallpaper" suggest that the narrator's nervous condition and subsequent hallucinations may indicate postpartum depression or psychosis, with her mental conflict rooted in subconscious childhood experiences. Feminist theories focus on patriarchal oppression, exemplified by the narrator's husband's control and the medical community's dismissal of her concerns. This reflects broader societal issues, where patriarchal structures confine women to domestic roles, contributing to her mental breakdown.

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Critical Overview

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"The Yellow Wallpaper," which was first published in the New England Magazine in 1892 after being rejected by the editor of The Atlantic, did not receive much serious attention until American writer and critic William Dean Howells published it in his The Great Modern American Stories in 1920. In that volume he wrote: "Now that I have it in my collection, I shiver over it as much as I did when I first read it in manuscript, though I agree with the editor of The Atlantic of the time that it was too terribly good to be printed." It was not until 1973, when it was republished after being out of print for years, that the first lengthy analysis of the story was written by Elaine R. Hedges. Writing in the afterword to the volume, she stated that '"The Yellow Wallpaper' is a small literary masterpiece" and a work that "does deserve the widest possible audience."

Since then, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has received widespread critical attention. Contemporary scholars have interpreted the story in numerous ways, with feminist readings being the most common. Reviewers focus on the relationship between the narrator and her husband John, maintaining that John's treatment of his wife represents the powerlessness and repression of women during the late nineteenth century. Hedges concluded that the story is ''one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship."

Critics have also commented on the story's focus on psychology and its influence as an example of both psychological realism and Gothic fiction. It is often considered one of the most detailed and emotionally charged accounts of depression and despair in short fiction because it is told from the vantage point of the person actually suffering a nervous breakdown. Furthermore, Gilman does not romanticize or downplay the realities of mental suffering. In addition to being discussed as feminist literature and as an example of psychological realism, "The Yellow Wallpaper'' has been lauded as a preeminent piece of Gothic fiction because of its incorporation of such Gothic literary elements as horror, suspense, and the supernatural.

"The Yellow Wallpaper," like Gilman's other short stories, has been faulted by some critics who claim the story is nothing more than a vehicle through which she explicated her feminist social beliefs. In fact, Gilman once stated that she wrote the story "to preach. If it is literature, that just happened." However, most critics have acknowledged that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is realistic, accessible, and thought-provoking and have called it Gilman's best work of fiction.

Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in "The Yellow Wallpaper''

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In the autumn of 1830, shortly before Emily Dickinson's birth, her mother made an unusual request. At a time when her pregnancy—or as it was then called, her "confinement"—might have been expected to absorb her attention, Mrs. Dickinson abruptly demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Apparently dismayed by this outburst of feminine whimsy, her stern-tempered husband refused, prompting Mrs. Dickinson to her only recorded act of wifely defiance. Though "the Hon. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done," a neighbor's descendant recalled, "she went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born."

To place this incident in context, we should note that Mrs. Dickinson, aged twenty-six, had just moved into her father-in-law's Amherst mansion and now faced the grim prospect of living with her husband's unpredictable relatives, along with the even grimmer perils of early nineteenth-century childbirth. Although Mrs. Dickinson was by most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman—in short, the nineteenth-century ideal—it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion. Emily Dickinson's most recent biographer, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, suggests that "The little explosion of defiance signaled fear and distress, and it was the prelude to unhappy, silent acceptance."

Though the color of Mrs. Dickinson's wallpaper went unrecorded, the anecdote forms a striking parallel to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ''The Yellow Wallpaper,'' first published in 1892 but, like Emily Dickinson's work, under-appreciated until decades after her death. Both the domestic incident and the terrifying short story suggest the familiar Gothic themes of confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and "irrational" fear. Both include such Gothic staples as the distraught heroine, the forbidding mansion, and the powerfully repressive male antagonist. If we focus on the issue of the Gothic world and its release of imaginative power, however, the stories form a dramatic contrast. A woman of ordinary abilities, the unimaginative Mrs. Dickinson would later represent the nadir of female selfhood to her brilliant, rebellious daughter. "Mother does not care for thought," the poet remarked dryly in 1862; and by 1870, she could issue this blunt dismissal: "I never had a mother." But Dickinson surely would have admired the unnamed heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper," who willingly accepts madness over repression, refusing a life of ''unhappy, silent acceptance." The poet would have especially responded to the woman's identity as a writer, and to the way in which her story adroitly and at times parodically employs Gothic conventions to present an allegory of literary imagination unbinding the social, domestic, and psychological confinements of a nineteenth-century woman writer.

Rather than simply labeling the narrator a madwoman at the story's close, we might view her behavior as an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown (like those actually suffered by both Dickinson and Gilman) but which represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption. This reading accounts for two elements of the story usually ignored: its emphasis upon the narrator as a writer, who is keeping a journal and putting forth her own text—''The Yellow Wallpaper''—as an antithetical triumph over the actual wallpaper that had nearly been her undoing; and its brittle, macabre, relentlessly satiric humor that suggests, in the story's earlier sections, her barely suppressed and steadily mounting anger. As in many of Poe's tales, this seemingly incongruous humor serves only to accentuate the Gothic terror of the narrator's situation....

The narrative focus of "The Yellow Wallpaper'' moves relentlessly inward, detailing the narrator's gradual absorption into the Gothic world of psychic chaos and imaginative freedom; but Gilman controls her heroine's deepening subjectivity through repetition, irony, parodic humor, and allegorical patterns of imagery. The two worlds of the story—the narrator's husband and sister-in-law's daylight world of masculine order and domestic routine, and her own subjective sphere of deepening imaginative insight—are kept clearly focused and distinct. Most important, Gilman reminds the reader frequently that her narrator is a habitual writer for whom ''The Yellow Wallpaper" is a kind of diary, an accurate record of her turbulent inward journey. Drawing on Gilman's experience of post-partum depression and breakdown, the story is far more than an indictment of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women and an account of one woman's incipient psychosis. Gilman made her heroine a writer for purposes of art, not autobiography, and the story as a whole describes a woman attempting to save herself through her own writing, to transform what she calls "dead paper" into a vibrant Gothic world of creative dreamwork and self-revelation.

Two of the story's major structural devices are its contrasting of the husband's daylight world and his wife's nocturnal fantasy, and the religious imagery by which she highlights the liberating and redemptive qualities of her experience. When the story opens, she acknowledges that the idea of their rented summer house as a Gothic setting is laughable, a romantic fancy of the kind her husband wishes to repress. The allegorical opposition is quickly established: her husband (named John, suggesting a male prototype) is a "physician of high standing,'' a figure of dominance in every sense—social, domestic, intellectual, physical. He is a thorough-going empiricist who "scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." Throughout the story John, along with his like-named sister and housekeeper Jane, is associated with the rigidly hierarchical and imaginatively sterile daylight world that ridicules Gothic "fancies" and represses in particular the "hysterical tendency" of women. Before the story opens, the narrator had abandoned her own social responsibility of motherhood, and the object of this summer retreat is a ''rest cure'' (of the kind made popular by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the famous Philadelphia neurologist who treated Gilman during her own depression, and against whom the story enacts a brilliant literary revenge). That her husband exerts his tyrannical control in the guise of protectiveness makes the narrator feel all the more stifled and precludes outright defiance. As she remarks sarcastically in the opening section, ''He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."

It is the daylight consciousness of late-Victorian America, of course, which has designed the flamboyantly hideous yellow wallpaper that the narrator initially finds so repulsive. Even John wants to repaper the room, but after his wife complains about the wallpaper, he benevolently changes his mind, since "nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies." Associating her nervous illness with her ''imaginative power and habit of story-making," he forces his wife into daily confinement by four walls whose paper, described as "debased Romanesque," is an omnipresent figuring of the artistic degeneration and psychic chaos she fears. It is here that John makes a significant error, however, as he underestimates the very imaginative power he is seeking to repress. By placing his distraught wife in a nursery, he is merely following the nineteenth-century equation of non-maternal women—that is, spinsters and "hysterics"—with helpless children. Yet he is unthinkingly allowing her the free play of imagination and abdication of social responsibility also characteristic of children. Thus as the story progresses, the narrator follows both her childlike promptings and her artistic faith in creating a Gothic alternative to the stifling daylight world of her husband and the society at large.

The story's terrific suspense derives from the narrator's increasingly uncertain fate and from the considerable obstacles blocking her path from one world to the other, not the least of which is her own self-doubt and debilitating psychic exhaustion. Near the end of the next section, she glimpses a subpattern in the wallpaper, which can be seen only "in certain lights, and not clearly then"; beneath the ''silly and conspicuous front design'' is a figure she describes as "strange, provoking, formless." These three adjectives suggest a notably ambivalent attitude toward her own inchoate, slowly emerging selfhood; but significantly, she notes that she is viewing the pattern by sunlight. Near the end of the next section, at sunset, she can "almost fancy" a coherent design in the wallpaper. Yet immediately after using her husband's forbidden word, she feels an emotional and psychological depletion that is emphasized by a series of brief, depressed paragraphs:

It makes me tired to follow [the pattern], I will take a nap, I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

This passage describes the narrator's spiritual nadir, and may be said to represent her transition from conscious struggle against the daylight world to her immersion in the nocturnal world of the unconscious—or, in other terms, from idle fancy to empowering imagination. The nature of Gilman's allegory becomes especially clear when, for the first time, the narrator watches the wallpaper by moonlight and reports with childlike glee: "There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will." Yet the transition is incomplete and puzzling. While John sleeps, she lies awake ''trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately," noting that "by daylight" the pattern is a constant irritant to a "normal mind." Then comes the moment of terrified but thrilling revelation:

By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

As we witness the narrator in the final scene, creeping along the floor, we might recall once again that her bedroom is actually a nursery. The fact that she is crawling on all fours—as opposed to lying still and docile under her husband's "rest cure"—suggests not only temporary derangement but also a frantic, insistent growth into a new stage of being. From the helpless infant, supine on her immovable bed, she has become a crawling, "creeping" child, insistent upon her own needs and explorations. (The parallel with Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, who likewise crawls on all fours and exhibits similar destructiveness, is surely deliberate.) To the daylight world, of course, this transition is terrifying; poor John, in Gilman's witty inversion of a conventional heroine's confrontation with Gothic terror, faints dead away. Seizing rather than surrendering to power, the narrator is thus left alone, the mad heroine of her own appalling text.

Although Gilman's Gothic allegory so powerfully demonstrates that writing is her only salvation, the poignant facts of her own biography point to her internalization of the restrictions enforced by John in her story and by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell in her life. A compulsive writer who produced scores of volumes and earned a worldwide reputation as an eloquent advocate of women's rights, Gilman discredited the value of her imaginative writing throughout her career; she wrote to William Dean Howells, who asked to reprint "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a collection of American masterpieces, that the story was ''no more 'literature' than my other stuff, being definitely written 'with a purpose'"—that purpose being to demonstrate to Dr. Mitchell the cruelty and inefficacy of the restcure. (She sent him a copy of the story upon publication, but received no response.) Patricia Meyer Spacks, in an incisive discussion of Gilman's curiously impersonal autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, notes that although Gilman's breakdown led her to abandon marriage and motherhood, become a professional writer, and devote herself to social causes, this self-determination was limited strictly by her continuing need to be "good" and necessarily precluded the acknowledged use of her own imaginative power.

Thus Gilman's life story became, as Spacks asserts, "a paradigm of feminine anger," what Gilman herself called "a lifetime of limitation and wretchedness.'' Denied the artistic redemption that Emily Dickinson had achieved by renouncing the world, as well as the conventional satisfactions of nineteenth-century housewifery and motherhood, Gilman uneasily compensated for her denial of creative selfhood with the fulfillment of useful work. Committing suicide not because her inoperable cancer caused her pain but because she felt her "usefulness was over"—the phrase comes from her suicide note, a poignant last text of self-effacement—Gilman stayed true to her own daylight world of feminism, social commitment, and constant hard work. Still under-read, still haunting the margins of the American literary canon, Gilman and the full scope of her achievement await their due recognition. Reading "The Yellow Wallpaper'' we can only guess at the furious effort, and the constant bargaining with her own demons, by which that achievement came into being.

Source: Greg Johnson, "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," In Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 521-30.
Johnson is an American critic, short fiction writer, and novelist.

Gilman's ''The Yellow Wallpaper": A Centenary

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It seems no accident that important recent novels have been Tom Morrison's Beloved, about the power of a sacrificed child over her mourning mother's life, and Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter, a major fiction about four generations of women, linked together in their martyred and futile lives through the mother-daughter bond. For at least these hundred years, since Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her controversial and relentlessly accurate "The Yellow Wallpaper," women writers have confronted the basic conflicts of women's lives: how to be both a person and a wife and mother; how to live with acceptable passivity in a patriarchal culture while yet being aggressive enough to stay alive; and how to be both "good" and sensual, supportive and necessarily selfish, and, above all, sane.

Of these many conflicts inherent in women's trying to lead acceptable female lives, perhaps the most troublesome is that of motherhood, its attendant responsibilities, and its almost inevitable loss of self-identity. Women who care for infants are almost literally used up in the process, the twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance subsuming their own mental and physical activities. No other human situation demands the same level of inexorable attention. Yet of the many controversies about women's roles, that of motherhood—and, as Dorothy Dinnerstein emphasized, the care-giving during childhood as much as the actual birthing—has seldom been discussed. It is almost as if the role of mother is beyond discussion, beyond change: if one is a mother, one accepts its burdens with its joys, and does not in any way try to tailor its numerous givens....

When Gilman wrote the short novella, she—married and a mother—had recently recovered from the trauma of a severe post-partum depression. And she had managed that recovery by defying the advice of one of the most respected of American physicians, S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell was the physician of Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, and Winifred Howells, among other women who suffered from inexplicable Victorian "female" ailments such as hysteria and neurasthenia. Mitchell's treatment was a rest cure which depended upon seclusion, massage, electricity, immobility, and overfeeding. Isolated for up to six weeks, some women gained as much as fifty pounds on a milk-based diet. As a parallel to the rest and diet, most patients were forbidden to use their minds in any way. Gilman recalled in her autobiography that, because her "cure" added the almost constant presence of her infant daughter, Katharine, she ''made a rag baby, hung it on a doorknob and played with it. I would crawl into remote closets and under beds—to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress." ...

Gilman's autobiography makes clear her years of poverty and debt, her loneliness, and her arduous life. No wonder "The Yellow Wallpaper'' portrays a spent woman so accurately. But it is not so much the truth of Gilman's presentation as the immediacy of her theme that attracts today's readers. "The Yellow Wallpaper" gives us the young married woman as mother.

In the narrative, the protagonist's baby appears infrequently, but at crucial times; his existence is clearly a key to his mother's problems. Gilman underscores the identity of the protagonist as wife-mother (a bewildered wife-mother, who sometimes becomes a child) by placing her in a room that was formerly a nursery—a nursery, however, with barred windows so that she cannot escape. The conflation of the roles of child and mother occurs as the narrator keeps her focus entirely on the enclosing walls of the sinister room. An infant would not be able to leave its nursery; neither is the mother (though Gilman makes clear that the protagonist does sometimes leave the house and walks in the garden or sits downstairs). For the purposes of our involvement with this narrative, however, the story's location is the nursery. And just as an infant would spend hours staring at walls and ceilings, kept in one place at the mercy of whatever authority was responsible for its care, so too does the protagonist. An infant would also have difficulty finding language to express its feelings. With a brilliance rare in nineteenth-century fiction, Gilman gives her suffering protagonist a restricted language that conveys her childlike frustration, even though it is not obviously childlike. For its effect, the protagonist's language works in tandem with the narrative's structure....

Gilman's protagonist may have found a more compatible world in her fantasy, but she still worries about her role as wife and mother. As the narrative ends—with her life as much in her own control as it has ever been—she is worried about wandering in this labyrinth, about physically losing her way. She is never to be the self-reliant, capable help-meet of John's dreams.

And that is one of Gilman's points, that a woman reared to be a child, treated like a child by her husband (and, one supposes, a father) will respond in kind. No woman expects to be literally put to bed, or removed from all responsibility. Gilman's prose tells of the greatest indignity: the mother of the child becomes the child, the ''little girl" of the household (though the mention of the double bed and the husband's presence at night suggests that a sexual role still dominates the relationship). And what is the role of the young daughter in a patriarchal household? To be Daddy's favorite. This is the anger that Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" bares—the rage that, once having been brought up to trust the father figure, in whatever guise it appears, then being abandoned by it, being misled by it, being misused by it is insufferable. Gilman's young unnamed wife thus shares in two kinds of anger: that at having her rightful responsibilities taken from her, and that at being misled and miscounseled by the father figures (husband as well as brother) in her life.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" shows what a frustrated woman does with anger. Repression cannot be healthful, and as the protagonist grows more and more quiet, she is becoming more and more mad. Her world has become the world of seething self-enclosure, sparked only by bright, jolting colors and the miasma of rotting odor. In the 1880s, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, a woman would probably have repressed her anger instead of showing it. If she had showed it, she might have been thought insane and institutionalized, a process which would probably have led only to deeper insanity. The ideal female would become the peaceful "good" girl, who does not cause trouble, does not want attention or help, but is content to wreak havoc in her own way—usually a silent, surreptitious, and vicious way. Gilman's protagonist does just that. The defiance she comes to feel has finally been shed in favor of outright rebellion, yet what would have been more obvious rebellion (harming the baby or John, running away, destroying things important to the household instead of just the horrible wallpaper) does not occur. Instead, the well-behaved woman protagonist (the "good" girl even in her madness) stays within the room, although she has a house key and could easily leave, joining the imaginary women who creep through the wallpaper. (The whole tribe of rebelling women are moving as if they were infants just learning to crawl.) The pathos of the characteristically docile protagonist finally coming to rage, and action, but venting her anger in such a tentative and hidden way underscores Gilman's irony. Even coming to anger does not mean change or improvement. It certainly does not mean victory for the protagonist of this novella. Her escape into madness may have won her continuing argument with John, though he will not recognize that it has done that, but it is only a Pyrrhic victory because her present life is valueless to anyone, particularly to herself.

The larger question, once the literary merits of Gilman's text have been proved, is what significance does this trapped protagonist have for today's readers? What does it mean to write about a woman caught within these circles of male authority (and cultural reification of that authority), trapped within a sickening room and made, in effect, to lose her mind because of the disgust she feels for not only her culture and the roles it mandates for women, but for herself as a sexual, procreative woman? What is the mode of literature that results from such deep anger, such unrelieved depression, that the text itself is unrelieved, pointed inevitably toward an ending that only repeats—relentlessly—the text's theme?

In Gilman's ''The Yellow Wallpaper,'' subtext becomes text, repressed discourse becomes visible. Gilman explained that in writing this novella, she had not intended ''to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy." Her didactic purpose, her intentional theme, was in some ways subverted by her own artistry. Unlike many of her shorter stories, "The Yellow Wallpaper" convinces less by its explicit content than by its metaphoric impression. As captured by the confines of the attic room as the protagonist is, the reader plots and charts, reads and worries as the story progresses. It is the Modernists' ideal of involving the reader to the fullest possible extent. In current narratological terms, according to Fetterley, the movement of the end of the story is precise and highly directional; the reader goes where Gilman takes him or her. ''Increasingly, her behavior becomes flamboyant and outrageous. Getting out through the text of the wallpaper, she not surprisingly gets in to the subtext within the text that presents the story of a woman trying to get out." She wins back her language, and vanquishes her husband—who has neither speech nor action by the end of the story. He lies as if dead in the path of her highly functional movement, and she simply crawls over him. The wallpaper has replaced the writing paper that he would have taken from her, and she has in some ways won back her right to speech and control.

Source: Linda Wagner-Martin, "Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper": A Centenary," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Woman and Her Work edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 51-64.

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