Final Research Paper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” follows a traumatized, submissive housewife who is taken to a summer home in the country by her physician husband, and given a rest cure for undisclosed reasons. This involves her being effectively locked up in a bedroom for days and weeks on end, being instructed to do nothing and go nowhere for an extended period of time. As time passes, she begins to slip into insanity, as she imagines figures in the yellow wallpaper of the bedroom – eventually turning on her husband and the rest cure that she has been prescribed.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s body of work deals chiefly with feminist themes of gender inequality within American society, “The Yellow Wallpaper” in particular acting as a case study for the unethical nature of the ‘rest cure’ as a treatment for women’s postpartum depression, among other things. Gilman’s work comes heavily from her own experiences with rest cures, as well as her desire to write faux-American Gothic horror stories about the plight of women. Gilman’s work, being as early and macabre as it is, helped to pave the way for American feminist literary criticism, and provided some of the most effective social criticism of patriarchal American society in literary history.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born in 1860, had an understandably traumatized childhood. Her mother did not show her very much affection growing up, forcing Gilman to teach herself how to read as her mother forbade the reading of fiction or the forging of friendships (Gilman, Living 10). To that end, she grew up among books, spending her youth reading books her father would give her or at the local library; this led her to become a very independent woman in her own right, having little to no chemistry with her brother Thomas and resenting his apparent favor within their family (Davis 24). After marrying an artist named Charles Walter Stetson, she had her first child Katharine, but experienced significant postpartum depression after the fact (Gilman, Living, 92).
Gilman’s chief concern was the inequalities and injustices that women experienced in the 19th century, which were frequent. Women still had a tremendous lack of social capital, men refusing to take them or their particular concerns seriously. At the time, women were viewed as highly emotional and nervous individuals, prone to ‘hysteria’; this was an easy way to invalidate the needs and concerns of women by an all-too-ignorant male population (Gilman, Living, 90). Recognizing these inequalities, and not wanting to share them, Gilman separated from Stetson and moved to California, where she started writing and working in many reformist and feminist organizations, including the State Council of Women (145). Her incredible influence in the social reform movement of the late 1800s and early feminism cements her status as a significant role model in fighting for women’s rights.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the wake of suffering from her own rest cure; she herself writes that she “suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia – and beyond” (Gilman, 1913). A rest cure is a medical procedure, popular during 19th and early 20th century medicine, in which women were asked to isolate themselves from any other living being in a secluded area for a tremendous amount of time, being prevented from talking to other people or expressing oneself artistically (the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” like Gilman, was not permitted to write during her rest cure) (Triechler 61). In this respect, it is clear that “The Yellow Wallpaper” acts as a response to the doctor who made her take the rest cure – a decision she deeply resented and recognized for the oppression that it was. The purpose of this story (and many of her other stories) is to provide a feminist treatise against patriarchal 19th century society and medicine, which often exacerbated (or even caused) the very things they were claimed to cure.
Because of her influence in feminism, many critiques and analyses of Gilman revolve around this feminist lens. As one of the first feminists, Gilman’s works are treated as a sort of ancestry for feminist writing; Haney-Peritz (1986) notes the early responses of the public and Gilman’s closest compatriots to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” calling it “utterly ghastly, more horrifying than even Poe’s tales of terror,” among other things (113). This was part and parcel of the resistance the public had to Gilman’s story, particularly the male public; this kind of feminist writing was considered highly dangerous at the time, but now within the annals of feminism Gilman’s work is celebrated as being an early example of powerful feminist literature.
That being said, there is also some pushback to the feminist criticism of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or at least the limiting nature of this criticism to a very specific female experience. Lanser, for example, suggests that “feminist criticism's own persistent return to the "Wallpaper" - indeed, to specific aspects of the "Wallpaper"- signifies a somewhat uncomfortable need to isolate and validate a particular female experience” (420). Instead of speaking to all women, Lanser argues that the work’s viewpoint is highly subjective from a “white, female, intellectual-class” point of view, ignoring the other various privileges such a class employs even though they are women (435). To that end, the work does not age well, not reflecting the more pressing and specific needs of women of color or lower-class backgrounds, though this branch of criticism still recognizes Gilman’s contributions to the building of feminist literature.
Strict feminist criticism is not the only lens by which “The Yellow Wallpaper” is read, however. Crewe, for example, notes the social, political and even sexual forms the work evinces; the work showcases the conflict between the imagination and the forms that hold it back (i.e. orthodoxy, common societal laws). A queer perspective can also be read into the work, as the unorthodox relationship between the narrator and the woman she believes she sees in the wallpaper is deeply connected and abnormal in a way that eschews normal heteronormative expectations of women. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is said to showcase this conflict “partly through its representation of the ‘imaginative’ protagonist’s captivity and partly as the self-comprehending text of a minor prose writer whose principal empowerment consists in recognizing her own limits” (273).To that end, the trapping of the protagonist in a room, only to have them go insane through lack of a creative outlet, becomes the primary subtext of the work irrespective of the gender politics of the work itself.
Still others talk about Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” more specifically in terms of Foucaultian Panopticism, which was a theoretical concept created by Michel Foucault revolving around a circular structure that offers both total visibility and a total absence of privacy (Bak 40). The Panopticon provides the ability for outsiders to covertly observe those inside the structure without their knowing about it. As it relates to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Bak notes that the story’s narrator “supports Foucault’s contention that the individual is more ill-served by the surveillance of the Panopticon than by the unhealthy or unappealing environment of the prison or mental ward he or she would have typically encountered” (45). Despite the relatively disparate approaches to the plight of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they all carry the fundamental theme of oppression of the individual through isolation, alienation and subjugation; Gilman’s overt history as a feminist and women’s rights leader makes the work’s gender politics more apparent.
With the historical context and academic criticism of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in mind, the work itself functions well as Gilman’s symbolic tale about the stifling nature of gender roles within marriage and the dangers of discounting women’s real problems as ‘hysteria.’ While the story can easily be read as a tale of terror in which a woman is driven insane by the societal pressures and unhealthy mindsets men force women into, I would argue that the oppression of the rest cure room allows the narrator to more clearly recognize the systemic inequalities she and other womankind must constantly deal with, and thus her insanity in fact brings her closer to true liberation and action against the patriarchal society that made her that way.
Imprisonment is a major theme of the work – just as the narrator feels trapped in her marriage, she is trapped in the room itself. The stifling nature of her environment starts to slowly wear away at her sanity and mental barriers, until she has become a gibbering mess. While this is the most overt, simple interpretation, one could argue that the narrator’s loss of sanity is merely a way of ‘checking out’ of the patriarchal world she lives in, finding a more significant sense of escape in the fantasies that she creates regarding the figures in the wallpaper and herself. In this way, she manages to symbolically ‘escape’ her prisons by reframing her reality into one in which she is free – even if that means destroying any sense of who she was before. This kind of insanity is arguably liberating for a woman who has no options, agency or escape from this environment.
The antagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is quite clearly the narrator’s husband John – an analogue for Gilman’s own husband, who also prescribed the rest cure for Gilman after their baby was born (Haney-Peritz 113). John’s occupation as a doctor permits him to act both as the domineering, patronizing husband who takes dramatic action for the perceived good of his wife, and as the erroneous 19th century physician who believes rest cures are an adequate solution for hysteria. By singling him out as the person both responsible for her rest cure and for her overall feelings of submission and oppression as a woman (however latent), John becomes the avatar by which Gilman can impose all of the damaging effects and culpability for social patriarchy onto. He is inattentive, presumptuous and condescending, constantly insisting he knows what is best for her: “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear, and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time” (Gilman 3). To that end, as the narrator’s grip on reality grows looser, the reader begins to relate to her growing animosity towards John.
The narrator herself is a fairly passive woman, taking John’s word as gospel and naively believing in the notion of the rest cure – or at least his assurance that it will work. (Gilman 3). Still, she has her doubts as to his good intentions, even at the beginning: “John is a physician and PERHAPS.that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman 1). This is another strong point to indicate the narrator’s societal inability to assert her own desires and what is best for her, as her subordinate role in the marriage prevents her from straying from her husband’s lead. His gender, privilege and education have given him a higher standing, which coincidentally provides him with yet another system of control in the form of the ‘rest cure’ and isolation from any possible sources of strength, such as friends and family. By putting her in such a weakened, helpless condition and blaming it on biology, the implicit goal is to make her easier to manipulate, providing a symbolic representation of the systems that serve to oppress and devalue women.
However, while the narrator’s place in the room indicates a victory for the male-dominated society that put her there, her insanity nonetheless brings her around to a greater sense of female empowerment and solidarity, even if indirectly. While in the room, the narrator begins to obsess over the wallpaper, becoming fascinated with its patterns, until it starts to shift before her eyes. Eventually, she starts to see another female figure in the wallpaper as well, giving her someone else to communicate with and obsess over. The wallpaper quickly becomes symbolic of the barriers put up against women in society that prevents them from having agency: “she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman 5). The woman in the wallpaper becomes synonymous with that struggle, which is what makes the narrator so intrigued by her.
Most importantly, however, this provides her with a chance to begin reorienting herself without John as an anchor, shifting her attention to the female figure. The rest cure’s isolation removes her inhibitions as well as her sanity; before she was taught, as any woman would be, to “hide her anxieties and fears in order to preserve the façade of a happy marriage, and to make it seem as though she is battling her own depression and living to tell the tale” (Haney-Peritz 114). In a room alone, with no one but a mysterious female shape to keep her company, the narrator gets to rediscover her sense of solidarity with womankind and become fully cognizant of her status as a woman in society. She relates to the mysterious figure in the wallpaper because she sees herself in it; it is both a neighbor and a reflection of herself, feeling herself trapped in her marriage/the room just as the image is ‘trapped’ in the wallpaper. Through this recognition of their similarities that she begins to turn on John in her mind and rebel against the patriarchy by going insane. She even locks herself in the room, owning the space and calling it hers.
The climax of the story provides much-needed catharsis for the suppressed protagonist, who has now fully identified herself with ‘other women’, i.e. the woman in the wallpaper. Finding her clawing at the wallpaper and walking around the walls, the sheer horror at the narrator ‘losing her mind’ causes John to faint. Though this may seem like a dark ending, there is actually a glimmer of subversive hope, as she seems energized and excited now that she has abandoned the world of men for the radical feminist world of the wallpaper: “I’ve got out at lastin spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 36). While she is not physically ‘out’ of the room, and therefore her prison, she has simply appropriated the prison from John, turning it into her entire world and owning it. Despite the darkness of that ending, the narrator at least finds a way to reframe her world in a way that grants her agency, which is the silver lining on this particularly tragic cloud. By shocking John into fainting (and then casually walking over his body every time she circles the room), she also manages to fight back in some indirect way by not even considering him at all.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work as one of the first major feminist writers and social reformers inexorably colors “The Yellow Wallpaper” as having a feminist context. Even through the horrifying experience of a rest cure and the subtle subjugation that occurs on the female protagonist by the established dominance of men, the narrator finds a way to rebel against that by letting go of reality and creating her own world in which she is empowered. By having the narrator experience this subversive mindset and come around to nearly revolutionary thinking, the flaws of a rest cure are cemented, furthering the notion that male-dominated society is oppressive to women, even if it is subconscious. By showing just how erroneous John is in thinking the rest cure will a) heal her postpartum depression and/or b) solidify his control over her in the marriage, Gilman showcases a radical tale of female empowerment, using the insanity brought on by such oppressive systems to spur women into direct action.
Works Cited
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Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (Winter 1994): 39-46.
Crewe, Jonathan. “Queering ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
Politics of Form.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall 1995): 273-293.
Davis, Cynthia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. Stanford University Press, 2010.
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America." Feminist Studies (1989): 415-441.
Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow
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