This classic story which was first published in 1892 is typical of Charlotte Gilman who describes a young woman’s descent into neurosis and psychosis with alarming reality and stark detail. Principally, the story focuses on the girl’s fixation with her surroundings which intermingle with the declining effect on her health. This is all brought about by her husband’s wicked decision to confine her to a room in solitary presence where she is forbidden to undertake any sort of mental activity, this may include literary or other similar pursuits and this type of situation literally drives her mad. This is very much the story of Charlotte herself who suffered greatly from depression and anxiety.
We also find the stream of consciousness in the story as a leitmotif which explores the dank sense of loneliness which permeates everything we observe. The decaying room with the peeling and yellowish wallpaper is one of the motifs which explores this actual stream.
Gilman is extremely skilful in setting the scene and in creating a situation wherein we have to feel some sort of pity for the subject in question. There is also a feminist turn to the story as many times in the past, men who wanted to get rid of their wives tended to lock them up in some institution citing madness as the subject. This story also compares with some others written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes canon where women also ended up locked in some room in a vast mansion and where left to rot away with madness enveloping them.
However Gilman’s story is far more powerful in the sense that she creates a world of unbearable nervous tension with the woman in question observing all sorts of figures and shapes on the house’s wallpaper. These continue to dominate her mind as she gets ever more mad and ever more intrinsically involved in the subject of her own neurotic state. The writing is palpably intriguing and is extremely effective with the descriptions of the goings on in the main character’s mind quite harrowing and extremely depressing.
One can also compare Gilman to Virginia Woolf who suffered similar bouts of depression and ended up committing suicide with the tendency to subside into deep depression and loneliness a summary characteristic of both writers. Indeed Gilman had confessed to being autobiographic in this novel and there are areas of it which seem to be more personal than others in this sense. Gilman recreated her own life in the story since the main character is full of the foibles and characteristics of her own depression and loneliness.
The wallpaper provides a sense of stimulus as can be seen through this quote which focuses on the almost sensual powers of the said wallpaper:
"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! The only thing I can think of that it is like, is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." (Gilman, p 319)
So in a sense the wallpaper serves as a stimulus for the woman who is slowly growing ever more mad and without hope. The epistolary style of the story is also uncannily unique and original. One can only marvel at the effects which Gilman creates and at the end of the day this is a story which is surely one of the most appealing and also one of the most challenging from this author.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story with powerful reaches into the psyche of the human mind also showing a certain amount of feminism. This story can also be compared to ‘A rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner which also touches on the topic of madness in the home and intrinsically in a woman’s mind.
There are also similarities between William Faulkner’s character Miss Emily Grierson, in “A Rose for Emily” who is driven mad by the townspeople of the community in which she lived. Within the walls of her once elegant home this woman has been cut off from the world. After the death of her father the townspeople offer her no company, they do not attempt to be part of her life or help her in any way. This leaves Emily in a position to isolate herself and to create her own world within her walls. All of this ends in absolute horror as her lover Homer ends up never being seen again when he enters the house for the last time and his body is eventually discovered in an advanced state of decay by the neighbors. The story ends with Emily’s funeral in the desolate and fictional town of Jefferson.
“So [Miss Emily] vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell”. (Faulkner, p 23)
Emily’s home is opulent and the envy of the prying neighbors in her town. This tells of the money and power that she was accustomed to. Unfortunately all this has now decayed and everything has ended up in anger and disappointment as Emily is left to contemplate a world in which poverty and misery are the only hopes for the future, not really hope but always alone without any cares. The town speaks of Emily with reverence and pity. The town watches voyeuristically as this woman spirals downward. They gossip and whisper yet never try to aid her in any way. They seem to relish her loss of status and feel justified when it is revealed that she has committed a horrible act. This is typical of the situation in small town Deep South America such as a state like Mississippi from which Faulkner comes and which features quite consistently in his writings.
Miss Emily is the victim of a terrible town, their behavior left her no choice but to live in her own time and place. She was not a welcome part of society so she chose to create her own reality. She would never be alone again with Homer Baron in her bed each night. This poor woman who had been abandoned by so many would never be abandoned by Homer. Unfortunately she is driven to insanity and probably ends up killing Homer although Faulkner does leave this issue quite open ended.
In The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman we see a view of a woman who also looses touch with her reality. In this case the narrator chooses the reality of a wallpaper world, whereas Miss Emily chooses a reality in which she is never abandoned or left alone again. Gilman is also extremely subtle with her arguments over insanity and the story slowly but surely builds up to a seminal conclusion.
Works Cited:
The Norton Introduction To Literature. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, (2011). 315-328. )
Allen, Judith (2009). The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-01463-0
Berman, Jeffrey. “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and `The Yellow Wallpaper. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Catherine Golden. New York: Feminist Press, 1992. 211-41.
