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Controlling the Female Psyche: Assigned Gender Roles in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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Controlling the Female Psyche: Assigned Gender Roles in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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"The Yellow Wall-Paper": A Twist on Conventional Symbols

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"The Yellow Wall-Paper": A Twist on Conventional Symbols

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The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Twist on Conventional Symbols

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Reflecting their role in society, women in literature are often portrayed in a position that is dominated by men. Especially in the nineteenth century, women were repressed and controlled by their husbands as well as other male influences. In "The Yellow Wall-Paper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist is oppressed and represents the effect of the oppression of women in society.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman""The Yellow Wallpaper" (pp, 729-41): Sp13 ENGL-2200-LO1

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Telegraph article

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She found herself weeping while breastfeeding her baby. 'Even motherhood brought no joy' The Yellow Wallpaper is often described as a masterpiece, though its authoress, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, might have objected to that particular term, for she was an early feminist who wrote the story in part to escape the mastery of male doctors and to become the mistress of her own destiny. Since its rediscovery in the 1970s by a new generation of women, The Yellow Wallpaper has become a cult classic, passed on by word of mouth (even, somewhat bizarrely, inspiring Marios Schwab's fashion collection last autumn); and its status is likely to grow now that Virago is reissuing a new edition. But when Gilman wrote this eerie novella in 1890, fictionalising her own catastrophic nervous breakdown after the birth of her daughter, and her treatment by a leading physician, Dr S Weir Mitchell, she had to battle to get it into print.

The editor of the Atlantic Monthly gave it a curt rejection, which Gilman recounts in her memoir (extracts of which are also included in the forthcoming Virago edition of The Yellow Wallpaper). 'Dear Madam,' he replied in a brief note after reading her manuscript, 'I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself.' When Gilman's novella was eventually published in The New England Magazine, in 1891, it elicited a number of angry letters, including one from a doctor who protested, 'The story can hardly, it would seem, give pleasure to any reader... such literature contains deadly peril. Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?' More than a century later The Yellow Wallpaper has lost nothing of its unsettling power - the kind that troubled its early readers, and enthrals many more of us now - but what is it that makes it such a profoundly disturbing story to read? The answer, I think, lies in its urgent immediacy, born out of Gilman's own experience of mental illness, and the horror of what follows by way of 'treatment'. The narrator, a nameless young woman who has a small baby, is suffering from what she describes at the start as a 'temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency'. This is the label her illness has been given by her husband - a physician - and also her brother, another doctor. The treatment prescribed by her husband is rest - '[I] am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again' - and, with this aim, she is confined to the top-floor room of a large country house that he has rented for the purpose.

'Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good,' she observes. 'But what is one to do?' The terrible, stifling prescription is that she must do nothing - she must not write, cannot see friends, her baby is cared for by a nursemaid - and soon she finds the only freedom allowed her is to examine the peeling yellow wallpaper around her. 'I never saw a worse paper in my life,' she writes in her secret journal. 'It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions... The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.'

Before long the narrator has begun to perceive the figure of a woman behind the sinister pattern, and then more women - some beneath the monstrous Gothic design, others creeping in the landscape beyond her barred windows - until eventually, driven mad by her confinement (quite literally, bored out of her mind), she peels the wallpaper away from the walls and joins the shadowy figures around her. 'I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did?... I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!' The horror of the story - for it is, in a very real sense,creepy - is manifest without one knowing anything of the biography of its writer; but, nevertheless, Gilman's life is as disturbing, in some ways, as the yellow wallpaper, and certainly contains several similar 'contradictions'. Born in Connecticut on 3 July 1860 to Mary and Frederic Beecher Perkins, she was the youngest of three children born over three years; the first died at birth, the second was a son, Thomas, and Charlotte followed just over a year later. 'The doctor said that if my mother had another baby she would die,' wrote Gilman in her autobiography. 'Presently my father left home. Whether the doctor's dictum was the reason or merely a reason I do not know. What I do know is that my childhood had no father.'

Gilman clearly suffered from the loss of her father (a librarian and editor who wrote infrequent letters, but occasionally sent books to his children), and also from the absence of affection shown to her by her mother. According to her memoir, her mother gave her children 'tireless service, intense and efficient care, and the concentrated devotion of a lifetime' but never displayed any tenderness: '...still suffering for lack of a husband's love, she heroically determined that her baby daughter should not so suffer if she could help it. Her method was to deny the child all expression of affection as far as possible, so that she should not be used to it or long for it. "I used to put away your little hand from my cheek when you were a nursing baby," she told me in later years... She would not let me caress her, and would not caress me, unless I was asleep.'

Little wonder, then, that Gilman suffered what might now be diagnosed as postnatal depression after the birth of her own daughter. In 1884 she had married the artist Charles Stetson, and their baby, Katharine, was born the following year. Even before the birth, despite her husband's solicitude, she was sinking into depression. 'A lover more tender, a husband more devoted, woman could not ask. He helped in the housework more and more as my strength began to fail, for something was going wrong from the first... A sort of gray fog drifted across my mind, a cloud that grew and thickened.' After the birth her depression worsened, and Charlotte's mother arrived 'to take care of the darling, I being incapable of doing that - or anything else, a mental wreck... I lay all day on the lounge and cried.'

Gilman was diagnosed as having 'nervous prostration', though her suffering was far more intense than the phrase suggests: 'This disorder involved a growing melancholia, and that, as those who know who have tasted it, consists of every painful mental sensation, shame, fear, remorse, a blind oppressive confusion, utter weakness, a steady brain-ache that fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress.' Saddest of all, given Gilman's own upbringing, starved of affection, she now found herself weeping while breastfeeding her baby: '...instead of love and happiness, [I would] feel only pain. The tears ran down on my breast... Nothing was more utterly bitter than this, that even motherhood brought no joy.'

After consulting Dr Mitchell - 'at that time the greatest nerve specialist in the country' - Gilman was ordered to take 'the rest cure'. 'I was put to bed and kept there. I was fed, bathed, rubbed... after a month of this agreeable treatment he sent me home, with this prescription: "Live as domestic a life as possible... And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live."' She returned home, followed Dr Mitchell's instructions, 'and came perilously near to losing my mind... I would crawl into remote closets and under beds - to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress.'

Eventually, in 1887, Gilman decided that the only way to recover was to separate from her husband, and she set off to California with her daughter to earn her own living. 'There was no quarrel... but it seemed plain that if I went crazy it would do my husband no good, and be a deadly injury to my child.' Feminists have ascribed her recovery to this decision to become an independent woman, yet Gilman herself described her subsequent years as 'a crippled life'. True, she became a successful writer and lecturer, but when her daughter was nine she sent her back to the East Coast to live with her ex-husband and his second wife.

Gilman justified her decision as being entirely rational: 'Since her second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways perhaps; since the father longed for his child and had a right to some of her society; and since the child had a right to know and love her father - I did not mean her to suffer the losses of my youth - this seemed the right thing to do.' What she did
not seem aware of was that in some complicated, contradictory fashion, she was reworking the pattern of her own childhood;
as if in the belief that she could prevent her daughter's suffering by denying her the physical presence of a loving mother.

Yet, unlike the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman did not become a creeping lunatic, hidden away from the world in a top-floor bedroom. She travelled widely, remarried (to her cousin, Houghton Gilman), and became a role model to subsequent generations of women (despite her somewhat unsavoury views on racial purity, about which academic debate still rumbles). But perhaps her lasting achievement should not be as feminist heroine, but as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper - and the survivor who unlocked the door of the madwoman in the attic, and lived to tell the tale.

'The Yellow Wallpaper' (Little Brown), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1516;
books.telegraph.co.uk) at £7.99 plus £1.25 p&p

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the pattern of despair

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's eerie 19th-century novella 'The Yellow Wallpaper' became a classic of feminist fiction, a pioneering portrait of the trauma of postnatal depression. As the book is reissued by Virago, Justine Picardie investigates the life of its author, who, unlike her heroine, broke free from the oppressive shackles of her mind.

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The Yellow Wallpaper

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Critical Response

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Feminist Gothic in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

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Lone Star College was founded in 1973 and offers Associate Degrees, Workforce Certificates and Transfer Credits.

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By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)
This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in theNew England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.
Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?

Now the story of the story is this:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.

But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for courses in The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Last modified: Tuesday 8 June 1999.

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Gilman, Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper

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This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner. Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in theNew England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

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Notes on TYW

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Struggling with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper? Check out our thorough summary and analysis of this literary masterpiece.

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PDF of text

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Notes on TYW

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Home → SparkNotes → Literature Study Guides → The Yellow Wallpaper

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Comment

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, activist and feminist best remembered for her story The Yellow Wallpaper published in 1892, although she wrote over 200 others. An article I read recently described the story as the archetypal feminist horror story.
​I'm not so sure.There's no doubt that it's a feminist work, the interior monologue of a thoughtful but increasingly troubled woman, confined for her own good by a husband who apparently means well. It's an unsettling read. The narrator's obsessive, paranoid account of her confinement in an attic room decorated with strange, faded yellow wallpaper and her growing obsession with it, grows increasingly tense with every feverish word.

'It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups but old foul, bad yellow things.'

​Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a forensic first person account of a descent into madness in the form of postpartum depression. She had many things to say about the treatment of women in society - both in sickness and in health - as well as the damage caused by confining their role to marriage and motherhood. This is a study of the loss of a woman's sanity and a misunderstanding of how to treat it.
​It is horrific, but is it horror?

'I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot loose my way.'

There is method to the story's madness. Gilman suffered from crippling bouts of depression throughout her life and it shows in every pressured line and troubling pattern emerging from the wallpaper of this story.

However, The Yellow Wallpaper is not only a literary examination of insanity, but an indictment of the treatments available in particular to women suffering from mental health problems in the later 19th century.

The rest cure was commonly prescribed for women diagnosed with hysteria or neurasthenia at that time. This treatment consisted of isolating the patient, putting them on bed rest and feeding them a high fat diet.

Extraordinarily, Gilman actually named the doctor who pioneered the rest cure for women, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell and sent him a copy of her story on publication. She had been sent to him for treatment in 1887 following the birth of her daughter. She had come away from her treatment with a recommendation that she desist from all creative pursuits and devote herself instead to domestic life. She discusses her treatment in her essay Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper. Virginia Woolf was another female writer prescribed this treatment.

I might call this a feminist gothic story, a reworking of the madwoman in the attic trope. And as we're on the subject of the gothic - again - I'd make the distinction that Ann Radcliffe made between horror and terror in her essay On the Supernatural in Poetry, 1826.

She considered terror the higher form, using 'obscurity' to lead the reader towards the sublime, whereas horror 'nearly annihilates' the reader with specific atrocities. This state of 'awful apprehension' seems to be what Gilmore Perkins has captured in The Yellow Wallpaper.

But then again the story is as extraordinarily modernist in structure, spirit and tone as it is gothic. It could equally well have been written in 1942 as 1892, so slow were the advancements in psychiatric medicine.

At the end of the ordeal Gilmore refuses to resolve the situation, instead leaving the reader in a state of brooding ambiguity. Has the narrator achieved freedom? And if so what form does that freedom take? Is she alive or is she dead?

'Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!'​

It simply isn't clear.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, activist and feminist best remembered for her story The Yellow Wallpaper published in 1892, although she wrote over 200 others. An article I read recently described the story as the archetypal feminist horror story.