In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the typical Victorian marriage is constructed as a prisoner from which a woman is only able to escape when she becomes insane. Her insanity becomes her only way of defying her husband, and gaining freedom. The author’s feminist argument in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is skillfully constructed by creating a protagonist whose growing mental instability is narrated from her own perspective. However, ironically, at the same time with her worsening mental state, she evades the social rules and pressures which had entrapped her in an unhappy marriage. While her mental condition worsens, she nevertheless becomes stronger as a woman, and less willing to submit to her husband’s dominating force. The characterization of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” therefore reveals the underlying theme of the story, and allows the readers to understand the author’s motives. In the story, the narrator is an intelligent and talented woman, whose marriage keeps her in a state of perpetual emotional childhood and boredom, resulting in her eventual madness that defies her husband’s diagnostic and ultimately sets her free.
The story focuses to a great extent on the protagonist and her evolution throughout the story. The unnamed narrator is a round character. As Gioia and Kennedy (“Character” 75) explained, round characters evolve throughout the story and “learn or become enlightened, grow or deteriorate”. Clearly, in this story, the narrator deteriorates until the end of the story, as she becomes completely unable to function in the outside world, after being declared too fragile for this anyway by her husband. In the beginning, the character seems the typical Victorian lady of good upbringing, who writes in a very educated way, and self- identifies as an ordinary person, married to a man named John, a physician. She is a young mother, who moved to a mansion for the summer, with her sister in law, and her husband, in an attempt to recover from her nervousness. The conflict with her husband is clear from the first pages, because they have very different ideas about what would help her recover from her unnamed illness. The character states, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Perkins Gilman 172). Although her husband believes her to be a little girl, she is a woman with a mind of her own, whose ideas contradict those of the most prominent physicians. The usual treatments for “nervousness” at the time, were based upon the idea that women were fragile beings, and working, as well as physical activities, could do them harm. As the story evolves, the readers become interested in her and her relationship with John, who seems to be extremely different than her wife, and unable to understand her.
The evolution of the character depends to a great extent on the setting. Settings “can make things happen. It can prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their inmost nature” (Gioia and Kennedy, “Setting”, 113). In this case, the setting is crucial to the story, not only because it explains the condition and the situation of the character, but also because it explains her evolution to a great extent. First, the story was published in 1892, in a time when women were still expected to act as mothers and wives, and to represent domestic angels for her husbands. Her inability to perform her domestic tasks causes great guilt to the narrator, who complains, “I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!”(Gilman Perkins 174). This statement can be explained through the lens of the time when the story takes place. Furthermore, the husband’s belief that the narrator is only affected by “nervousness” is also justified by the Victorian beliefs that women’s inferiority causes them to be more prone to mental fragility. Furthermore, their dependence on men was absolute, particularly for middle-class women, thus causing them to appear as helpless children. This attitude is also betrayed in the narrator’s story, when she says, “ then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain” (174). The narrator does not protest at the label “little goose” which means “silly” and she may agree with it also. This causes her to be dependent on her husband, who appears much more “in control” of the situation, and capable of solving it.
Apart from the time of the action, the place also has a crucial impact on the development of the character. The ‘ancestral halls’ that they secure for the summer, cause the narrator’s imagination to awaken. From her own statements, the narrator seems to be a writer, who may have tried to turn writing into a profession. However, her husband forbids it to her, motivating that it makes her condition worse. In fact, this restriction may be a way of making the narrator more dependent on her husband. However, she clearly defies this restriction by writing her story, which also allows the audience to understand that the narrator is not as submissive and helpless as the husband believes, or wants her to be. As a writer, her imaginative power, which contrasts with the husband’s practical character, is able to transform the house into a living and breathing being, a character in itself. This characteristic of hers is revealed in her confession that, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store” (Gilman Perkins 175). This reveals a power of imagination above average, which is a great quality for a writer, but it represents an obvious flaw in John’s mind. Due to this, when she says that she can imagine people waking on the alleys of the property, John warns her not to allow her imagination to run wild, because her nervous weakness would transform them into “excited fancies”. Therefore, one of the defining traits for the narrator is her imagination. Even though this trait is a prerequisite for any good fiction writer, it also causes her to perceive the house as a menacing, living presence.
The character’s evolution towards madness shows that John’s ‘treatment’ was wrong, and that she was right to resent it. The house is like a prison for her, and the lack of activity, isolation and loneliness cause her to crush mentally. Her slow devolution towards madness allows the author to build the theme of the story, namely the evils of the patriarchal system which submits women to men almost absolutely. As in many other stories, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the theme is the moving force and the principle of unity of the story (Gioia and Kennedy, “Theme”, 181). In the story, the protagonist is constructed around the theme, in order to create a tragic character, which could have had a better fate, were it not for the dominating husband. Her story causes the audiences to feel antipathy for John, even though she insists on convincing herself that “dear John” knows best, that he is superior to her, and that she must submit to him. For example, she declares, “Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick” (Perkins Gilman 176). However, he ends up making her cry in many of their discussions, because he continues to insist in her isolation and lack of activity. This allows the readers to perceive the narrator as unhappy in her marriage, and deprived of fundamental rights.
Therefore, the narrator is an intelligent and imaginative woman, who feels guilty of her inability to perform her domestic chores, which are part of any Victorian woman’s identity as a wife and mother. Her slow decline into madness represents her sole escape from an unhappy marriage, which causes her to become completely dependent on her husband’s will, and places her entirely under his control. The very act of writing the story is a form of defiance, which shows that, despite her education and her own attempts to be a perfect wife, she cannot obey him entirely, and she cannot stop herself from writing. Perhaps, being a writer defines her more than being a wife and a mother, and this is exactly the source of her ‘problem’.
Works Cited
Gioia, Dana and Kennedy, X.H. “Character”. Literature: An Introduction. Eds. Dana Gioia and X.H. Kennedy. . New York: Pearson. 2007. 74-77. Print.
Gioia, Dana and Kennedy, X.H. “Theme”. Literature: An Introduction. Eds. Dana Gioia and X.H. Kennedy. New York: Pearson. 2007. 113-115.Print.
Gioia, Dana and Kennedy, X.H. “Setting”. Literature: An Introduction. Eds. Dana Gioia and X.H. Kennedy. . New York: Pearson. 2007. 180-182.Print.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. Eds. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters. Boston, MA: Bedford. 172-185. Print.
