In the Victorian period The Woman Question was a widely discussed topic, and engaged many Victorians, both male and female. The ideal woman of that age was associated with tenderness, understanding, innocence, domestic affection and submissiveness. The woman had to maintain the status and integrity of her husband, being always the devoted and pleasing angel in the house. Coventry Patmore supported the idea that women should be extremely pure and selfless in his popular, best-selling long poem “The Angel in the House” (1854). A woman that failed at such responsibilities was labelled either mad or hysterical. During the Victorian period, feminist critics started insisting that, like every other representation of women by the male dominant discourse, less attention should be given to psychiatric and medical depictions of female madness and more to the written accounts of first-hand experiences and sufferings of women. Semi-autobiographical reports that portray experiences of madness, relevant for this analysis, can be found in many Victorian novels such as in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Braddon's Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra (1860). American fin de siècle authors also delivered notable critiques of patriarchal oppression and its relation to madness, e.g. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). All the above mentioned novels are descriptions of female madness, identifying confined and repressed family life, double standards and separate spheres as the main reason of such. Therefore, The Yellow Wallpaper can be regarded as one of the archetypes of representation of madness as a female malady. The main protagonist is denied any form of articulation and expression, finds, however, her own channel through the realm of madness to voice her discomfort and frustration.
In The Yellow Wallpaper the reader never learns the name of the main protagonist. We know her husband’s name, the name of his sister, and every other character’s name. Jennie and Mary are both accomplished and obedient women and have, therefore, a right to a name. The main protagonist, however, is anonymous and unnamed. All that is revealed is that it is an ailing woman, prone to nervous fits. She exists, just like the Angel in the House, in relation to her husband and is defined by him. Denied a name and an existence of her own, the main protagonist is also denied any form of articulation. Her husband John forbids her to write convinced that this creative outlet is going to worsen her state of mind. The fear of her husband is clearly stated: “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word” (8). Writing and keeping a diary means very much to her. She points out: “but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind” (Gilman 4). She is very careful of how to present her dissatisfactions. In the beginning, we notice her crying very often. She writes: “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (Gilman 16). She also cries when she expresses the wish to go visit her cousin Henry and Julia, but she realises that her request was going to be denied because she cried. Batja Mesquita and Ryan Powell argue in their essay on “The Cultural Psychology of Emotion” that “more recently it has been argued that tears, like the distress vocalizations of infants, evolved to signal to others that one is in need of succor” (2). In other words, her early breakdowns were clear signals for help which were disregarded, being perceived as utterly hysterical and imbalanced. Her husband urges her to use her “will and self-control” (Gilman 6) instead. Similarly, Elaine Showalter writes in her study The Female Malady that “Victorian doctors believed that in most cases insanity was preventable if individuals were prepared to use their will power to fight off mental disorder and avoid excess” (30). Our narrator, as her deterioration progresses, stops crying altogether. Instead of Freud’s Writing Cure, the narrator is prescribed Silas Weir Mitchell’s Resting Cure. Hence, she is stripped away all the possible channels of communicating her discomfort with her situation, that she needs to seek alternative ways to cry out for help. Our mad narrator is thus helplessly silenced by her husband.
In the outset of this short story, the narrator is brought to a colony mansion and she cannot help but feeling impending doom, as if foreshadowing or conjuring her own tragedy. She believes it is “a haunted house” (Gilman 5) and that “there is something queer about it.” (Gilman 5) She has no say in the choice in the bedroom, and all she can do is to agree on the former nursery room suggested by her husband. She feels discomfort at the sight of the bars on the window, and she is appalled by the yellow wallpaper. What appears to be mostly distracting to her is that the wallpaper is torn. The wallpaper is symbolic of a material manifestation of her own imprisonment. In general, wallpaper is also a decoration and it is designed to hide the plain and rough wall. The tear in the wallpaper reveals that there is something else underneath. After a close observation of a series of developing images, our author realizes that this yellow wallpaper is a prison, and that there is a woman trapped behind the bars. Towards the end, the narrator identifies with that creeping woman, which shakes the bars every night in an attempt to escape. Gradually, they become one. In other words, the wallpaper becomes her vessel and her space to articulate the cry for help in a non-verbal form, her own madness. Since words have been taken away from her, our narrator expresses herself through colour and smell: “The only thing I can think of that it is like is the colour of the paper! A yellow smell” (Gilman 28). Shoshanna Felman argues: “Madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation” (Cited in Showalter 5). In other words, it can be claimed that madness is the sphere and final stage at which a person arrives after enduring a complete loss of own identity, since the preservation of self-integrity reflects itself in the articulation of protest and self-affirmation. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notions, Venla Oikkonen makes in her essay “Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” an indisputable connection between madness and body politics. By suggesting we should see “the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body” (cited in Oikkonen 2). She aims to prove that bodies which are not viable and do not match the desired description and are renounced as unacceptable.
Finally, our protagonist feels altogether a failure as a woman. Her household is taken care of by John’s sister Jennie, and her child is taken care of by Mary, the nanny. Her husband has confined her to a barred nursery room, patronizes her and controls her every step. He has forbidden her to write and isolated her from her friends and family in order to treat her from her “nervous depression.” (Gilman 8) She is invisible, silent and non-existent, only to the extent that her husband reminds her that she is a burden to him. With her final act of tearing off the entire wallpaper she could have possibly reached, she feels free from confinement. Victoriously, she exclaims: “And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back.” (Gilman 28) Herewith, she has finally found a way of liberating herself completely from the clutches of her dominant and controlling husband, but she has also, unquestionably, descended completely into her own world of madness; a world where she is now at liberty to speak and to act, even at the price of losing all her respectable agency. By abandoning her role of the angel in the house, she has regained he freedom to speak. The position from which she speaks now is, however, one that is unreliable and disregarded. She has become a madwoman. Hence, through her madness she is liberated.
Works cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Wallpaper and Other Short Stories. New York: The Floating Press: 2009. Print.
Mesquita, Batja and Ryan Powell. “The Cultural Psychology of Emotion”. The Handbook of Cultural Psychology. New York: Guliford Press, 2007. Print.
Oikkonen, Venla. “Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Helsinki English Studies: Electronic Journal 2004: n. pag. Web. 01 April 16.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830- 1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Print.
