Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper places a woman into an insane Victorian environment for the purpose of demonstrating the insanity of the insanity of the Victorian Woman. It is an ingenious plan to “show” rather than “tell” the repercussions of a social construct that respected and repressed women at the same time.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the most intelligent of the early feminist writers. Having published over 200 writings, she blatantly blows the collar of Victorian imagery off the necks of women everywhere. When Gilman started writing, the role of women was to act “as agents of moral influence, were expected to maintain the domestic sphere as a cheerful, pure haven for their husbands to return to each evening” (Quawas 147). The Victorian woman was to be the jewel within the home, the keeper of the family sanctity, and the nectar all men desire. “Possibly the most important, and most broadly felt pattern dominating the life of the Victorian woman was what the reformer Jane Addams once called the "family claim." According to the family claim, women, far more than men, were regarded as possessions of their families” (Women’s Life). As a result, women were placed on an insubstantial pedestal that restricted their every movement and only allowed them to be worshiped from afar.
With the advent of the feminist movement, such visions of a woman’s role could not possibly be maintained. Gilman was one of those who lived the life of a Victorian lady, indeed, sought it out. “The young Charlotte, who wrote fiction and poetry and kept a journal, revealed in her writings an intense conflict between her desire to be useful in the world - to have a career, though in what area was unclear - and her strong attraction to conventional married life” (Norton 10). It was appropriate that when she had matured and developed her sense of self that she single-handedly should divest women of the collar of Victorian womanhood.
Gilman's appropriately unnamed narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is a new mother and (unfortunately for her) the wife of a doctor. Her husband has examined her condition and proclaimed that she has "temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency" (3), for which he inflicts the “rest-cure”. Required to forgo intellectual and social stimulation and indulge herself in eating and sleep, the narrator is kept in a strange upstairs room of a rented colonial mansion. This setup mirrors the perfect image of the Victorian woman. Gilman has set her stage, now the fun begins.
The result of her forced enclosure is anger: "I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes . . . I think it is due to this nervous condition" (4); animosity: "I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery"; and rebellion by writing in a diary against John’s instructions: "there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please" (5).
Her enclosure is a big, airy room covering nearly the whole floor with windows that look all directions and air and sunshine aplenty. A rosy look that darkens with a closer look inside that reveals the windows are barred, and there are rings and things in the walls. Other signs of previous captivity emerge—the gnawed bedstead, the wallpaper stripped at arm's length all around the bed, the "smooch" from a shoulder rubbed "round and round and round" at the base of the wall—are symbolic of the capture and enclosure of the Victorian woman within the home. The wallpaper grows like the whims of a young lady. First there are only curves in the pattern that suddenly "commit suicide" by their motion only to be filled with "two bulbous eyes" (6) that have a "vicious influence" (7). Gradually, the narrator overcomes these visions for a brief period.
In her mind, her resistance to the little things happening in the wallpaper helps her to heal. She leaps into the "gymnastics" of the paper's pattern which brings on a temporary calming but studious lethargy. According to her diary entries, her fascination with the heavily patterned wallpaper brings her excess energy with which she tries to interpret the bizarre forms. She uses reason; she uses principles; she repeats laws in an attempt to embrace the restricting forms around her. She sees "a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase" (9), "a florid arabesque" (12), "a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convulsions" (12), and "strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision" (18). Stimulated by a sense of purpose she shouts to herself, "Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was" (14).
She determines that there is a woman whom she must liberate behind a lattice who shakes the lattice by moonlight. In a dramatic, wish-fulfilling series of scenes, she locks out everyone else: "No person touches this paper but me,-not alive!" (17). In her mind she sees a mass of women, like her, bent and creeping about their enclosures, seeking release from confinement, not of their making. "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" (18). She discovers herself in a world of yellow where women like her provide a reason for existence.
Her flight is symbolic of the escape of all women from the collar inflicted by the role of the Victorian woman. Free at last, she rushes past the boundary of her husband and into the world of color.
This symbolic resurrection of purpose closes an age of restriction for women. An age where they found respect at a terrible cost.
Works Cited
Norton, Mary Beth. "The Pattern In "The Yellow Wallpaper"" ProQuest. New York Times, 15 July 1990. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Quawas, Rula. "A New Woman's Journey Into Insanity: Descent and Return in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" ProQuest Central. AUMLA: Journal of Austraiasian Universities Modern Language Association, May 2006. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3-19. Print.
"The Life of a Victorian Woman." Women’s Life. Victorias.com, n.d. Web. 08 Mar. 2016.
