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The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period.[2] The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the 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."[3]

In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "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 lose my way."[4]

Contents [hide]

1 Plot synopsis

2 Interpretation

2.1 Feminist interpretation

2.2 Gilman's interpretation

2.3 Other interpretations

3 Media adaptations

3.1 Art

3.2 Audio plays

3.3 Film

3.4 Music

3.5 Television

3.6 Theater

4 Notes

5 References

6 Further reading

Plot synopsis[edit]

The story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The antagonist's husband, John, believes that it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure after the birth of their child.

The family goes to spend the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it." She is confined to an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery, as the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. However, she comes to suspect that another woman was once confined here against her will. The reader is left unsure as to whether the damage she describes in the room is in fact being done by the narrator herself rather than by previous occupants – at one point she bites the wooden bedhead – and the bars may have been placed on the windows by her own husband as a precaution[citation needed].

The narrator devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper in the room—its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the various missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight. With no stimuli other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing that she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the narrator begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.

On the last day of summer, the narrator locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I've got out at last," and her husband faints[citation needed] as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each time she passes. There are various interpretations of the ending of the short story, some believing the narrator has killed her husband, and it is his corpse she is crawling over[citation needed].

Interpretation[edit]

Feminist interpretation[edit]

This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of the 19th-century medical profession.[5] The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, that she should engage with society instead of remaining isolated, that she should attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as irrational and, therefore, unqualified to offer ideas about her own condition. The feminist interpretation has drawn on the concept of the "domestic sphere" that women were held in during this period.[6]

Modern feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the story: while some may claim that the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a woman's assertion of freedom in a marriage in which she felt trapped.[7] The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found that for which she was looking – an escape. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband John lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her sanity.

Susan S. Lanser in her article Feminist Criticism ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and the Politics of Color in America praises contemporary feminism and its role in changing the study and the interpretation of literature.[8] During the rise of feminism in the sixties and seventies, academic women studied the books of the men and few women part of the standard curriculum. In conclusion, these women came to find literature is greatly political and compassed by patriarchal ideology. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was part of many books that were lost in time because of the ideology which determined the works' content to be disturbing or offensive.[8] Feminist criticism sought to denounce this ideology and the re-discovery of the “lost” short stories such as “ The Yellow Wallpaper” which was denounced, proved that literature and history was political. Critics such as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly “italic text” rejected the short story because “[he] could not forgive [himself] if [he] made others as miserable as [he] made [himself].” Lanser argues that the same argument of devastation and misery can be said about the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but his work is still printed and studied by academics.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provided feminist the tools on how to interpret literature in different ways. Lanser says the short story was a “ particularly congenial medium for such a re-vision…because the narrator herself engages in a form of feminist interpretation when she tries to read the paper on her wall”.[8] The narrator in the story is trying to find a single meaning in the wallpaper. At first she focuses on contradictory style of the wallpaper, it is “flamboyant” and also “dull”, “pronounced” yet also “lame” and “uncertain” (p. 13). She takes into account the patterns and tries to geometrically organize them but she is further confused. The wallpaper changes colors when light reflects and notices a distinct odor in which she cannot recognize (p. 25). At night the narrator within the complicated design of the wallpaper is able to see a woman behind bars. Lanser argues that narrator was able to find “a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection”.[8] Lanser creates a relationship between the narrator and the reader. Just like the narrator as a reader, when one comes into contact with a confusing and complicated text, one tries to find one single meaning. “How we were taught to read” as Lanser puts it, is why a reader cannot fully comprehend the text.[8] The patriarchal ideology has kept many scholar from being able to interpret and appreciate novels such as “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Thanks to feminist criticism “The Yellow Wallpaper” has become a fundamental reading in standard curriculum. Feminists have made a great contribution to the study of literature but according to Lanser, are falling short because, “we acknowledge the participation of women writers and readers in dominant patterns of thought and social practice then perhaps our own patterns must also be deconstructed if we are to recover meanings still hidden or overlooked.[8]

Martha J. Cutter in her article "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction" discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women" (Cutter 1). Gilman's works challenge the social construction of women in patriarchal medical discourse by displaying women as “silent, powerless, and passive” who refuse treatment. At the time in which her works take place, between 1840 and 1890, women were exceedingly defined as lesser than—sickly and weak. In this time period it was thought that “hysteria” (a disease stereotypically more common in women) was a result of too much education. It was understood that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. In fact, many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as the result of a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must “assume a tone of authority” and that the idea of a “cured” woman is one who is “subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician” (Cutter 3). A hysterical woman is one who craves power and in order for her to be treated for her hysteria, she must submit to her physician whose role is to undermine her desires. Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to “tame” them and basically keep them imprisoned. Treatments such as this were a way of ridding women of rebelliousness and forcing them to conform to social roles. In her works Gilman highlights that the harm caused by these types of treatments for woman i.e. “the rest cure” has to do with the way in which her voice is silenced. Paula Treichler explains "In this story diagnosis 'is powerful and public...It is a male voice that...imposes controls on the female narrator and dictates how she is to perceive and talk about the world.' Diagnosis covertly functions to empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patent's". The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not allowed to participate in her own treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says. The male voice is the one in which forces controls on the female and decides how she is allowed to perceive and speak about the world around her.

Gilman's interpretation[edit]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman circa 1900

Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her writing to express herself in a time when contradicting ideas of “True Womanhood” and “Women’s Rights” existed. Her writing’s purpose was to work toward her own rights as well as women’s rights on the whole. Through her various roles in society including author, philosopher, socialist, and feminist, Gilman embodied the fight to progress from true woman to free woman. As both woman and author, she observed the role of women in society through a critical lens. Gilman analyzed the mental decline and breakdown of women from factors including the lack of a life outside of the home, the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society, and the absence of progression due to the dominant concept of a woman’s sphere of the household. Through her work laying the foundation of contemporary women’s literature, Gilman paved the way for future writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath. [9]

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman portrays the main character’s insanity as a way to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were being depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time, Women’s rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an identity, and become a form of defiance for them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few rights.[9]

Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways".[10] She had suffered years of depression, and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible." She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil or brush and allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.

After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response.

She added that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – sixteen years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.[11]

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