The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is an outstanding piece of writing by a writer who, at the time lived in a society that that put a heavy burden on social expectations and conventions on women, was trying to weaken these limitations through sharp examination of the male dominated society surrounding and tying women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has written a substantial number of short stories, poems and novels all dealing with the situation of women as mothers, wives, workers, artists, and individuals. However, the characters of all her works are provoking and particularly critical at the time, not gratifying Gilman with a lot of fame; “The Yellow Wallpaper” is both distinctive in style and draft, more effective and subtle. This is because it amalgamates her various levels of social criticism to a well-built attack on a structure that not only suppresses female creativity, but wrecks female sanity. By the time “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1892, it was classified as a horror tale since it contained stories typical to those the tradition of Poe, and largely due to its petrifying impact on the reader. This article seeks to tell more of the “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a story that would be easily classified as the American feminist classic and has been deduced as a “transformed autobiography”, as a “critique of gender relations” and in multiple ways as a “clinical/journalistic account of a woman’s gradual descent into madness” (Dock 28).

Gilman can be described in a number of ways, but the most probable and fitting description is a “material feminist”. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” she advocated for a drastic review to traditional approaches of the fundamental spaces of daily life as they both revolve around gender ideologies. Gilman’s main concerns included the improvement of women’s rights and the use of a child-care system that sorely relied on “socialized motherhood”, a method that would recruit the skills of specialized child caretakers, not unlike the present day’s infant and preschool day-care operations. Gilman illuminates the situation of many middle-class women then and now

The situation has changed because unlike the past, women are no longer confined to the house. The pattern of “The Yellow Wallpaper” comes to suggest the configuration of values and practices that govern the relation between men and women, male physicians and female patients, husbands and wives, which is to say that the pattern involves the socially acceptable power relations of a world controlled by men (Troll 77). The earliest readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” may not have understood Gilman’s profound questioning of conventional gender relations and the situation of middleclass women clinically depressed by what they experienced as irreconcilable conflicts between their longing for freedom and their recognition of the values of womanhood. As a result, Gilman believed that women should be on the same foothold with men on matters related to economic, social, and political well-being.

Gilman shows in “The Yellow Wallpaper” that the narrator, as opposed to her neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, has ideas of her own about the curative value of her work, change, and lively company. Underlying the Mitchell’s rest cure is based on the supposition that women are academically inferior to men, and that the cause of their hysteria or neurasthenia is as a result of “overusing” their minds, and that even though a neurological, physical cause was posited and could never be located, physical treatment was prescribed to provide a cure. In this case, total reliance on the resolve and influence of the male physician was necessary, hence the prohibition and isolation against lively company. The neurologist avoided some of the draconian practices and procedures that were also used to treat women with nervous ailments. Although the neurologist had a devoted following and became wealthy and well-known globally, his rest cure did not augur well with intellectually active women. Furthermore, it did not work for Gilman, whose autopsy revealed, not a problem with the will, self control, or the mind, but an organic problem Mitchell’s theory prevented her from seeing (Chung 46).  Unlike Gilman, who is challenging the authority, assumption, and practices of a major representative of the emerging culture of professional medicine, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” keeps her ideas of a cure to herself. However, Gilman powerfully uses the narrator’s insights acquiescence, and covert rebellion to undercut the authority that the narrator’s husband embodies in both these roles, not to mention that they engage the basic issue of late 19^th century assumptions about men and women.

When Gilman fell in love with Stetson, she was strongly attracted to him sexually, and for two years she struggled to reconcile her commitment to herself and the world with her susceptibility to the demands of conventions she both accepted and rebelled against. Before committing herself into marriage, Gilman tried to undergo a secular, women’s version of the Protestant conversion experience, a process that contributed significantly to the agony of her emotional state. Gilman agreed to get into marriage, but sympathetically observed “I have lost power. I do not feel myself so strong a person as I was before. I seem to have taken a lower seat, to have become less in some way, to have shrunk” (Schorkhuber 127). In the process, Gilman fought against debilitating depression before and after her marriage, and before and after the birth of her daughters, whom she named after Catherine Beecher. On her side, Gilman experienced the deepest conflicts, since she accepted and reacted against what she and others expected of her. In other words, she was living through a central, unresolved contradiction in the Beecher tradition.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman is writing what is in effect a Gothic tale, but she is denied a public, professional outlet for her work. She holds hospitable work with high esteem presumably that of professional author, and she is against the profession of perfect housekeeper, represented by the narrator’s husband. The narrator’s thoughts are guided by the assumption that her husband is entitled to pursue his career outside and she is to remain at home. According to Gilman, this indicates the pervasiveness of the underlying division between the masculine sphere of work and power and feminine sphere of domesticity. This gender division, an important component of the late 19^th century market society, has manifested itself in “The Yellow Wallpaper” much more prominently than in the typical American work probing the fierce alter egos and divided selves of the dominant tradition (Kahle 122).

The result was a disciplined compartmentalizing of the self that leaves it mark on the characterization of the narrator, the alter ego, and the role of imagination in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, just as it illuminates Gilman’s depression and perhaps her avoidance of imaginative and emotional depths in her subsequent fiction.  In addition, the narrator’s insanity seems to be a well orchestrated method of dismissing the role of a wife. Through the detailed portrayal of the narrator’s schizophrenic process in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman made an effort to artistically embody a man/woman relationship and the process of the development of feminine subject in the late 19^th century America. In short, even though “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be categorized as a successful feminist story, Gilman herself only made an imaginary solution to a real problem.

Works cited

Chung, H. C. The Art of the Possible: A Collection of Critical Essays. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2002. Print.

Dock, J. B. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s the Yellow Wall-paper and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2010. Print.

Kahle, A. First Wave of Feminism in Politics and Literature. USA: GRIN Verlag, 2010. Print.

Schorkhuber, V. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: An Analysis. USA: GRIN Verlag, 2008. Print.

Troll, Y. Writing Oneself into Existence: The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Female Self-Definition. USA: GRIN Verlag, 2009. Print.

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