The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper
1997 Dover Publications cover
Author	Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject(s)	Feminism, women's health, autobiography
Genre(s)	Short story
Publisher	The New England Magazine
Publication date	1892
Pages	15 pages, 6,000 words
ISBN	0-486-29857-4
OCLC Number	36892894

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by 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.

The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries, the narrator 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 entries 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 that 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 1 Plot synopsis 2 Interpretation 2.1 Feminist interpretation 2.2 Gilman's interpretation 2.3 Other interpretations 3 Media adaptations 4 Notes 5 References 6 Further reading

[edit] Plot synopsis

Told in the first-person perspective as a series of journal entries, the story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband, John, believes it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure, since he only credits what is observable and scientific. He serves as his wife's physician, treating her like a powerless patient. The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would now be called postpartum psychosis.

While on vacation for the summer at a colonial mansion, the narrator senses "something queer about it." Confined to an upstairs room, she devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper—its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" scrawling pattern, the various patches it is missing, and the fact that it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. (Said yellow smears are found on her clothing, suggesting that all along it was she that was shredding the wallpaper). Obsessing over the hatred she believes radiates from the room, she supposes that it must have once been a nursery, and that the children who lived in it hated the wallpaper as much as she did. She notes a patch of wallpaper has been rubbed off at her shoulder height early in the book, and after lapsing into insanity confirms that she was the one who had done all the damage to the room, although she is oblivious to this fact herself. 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 other stimulus than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs on the wallpaper become increasingly intriguing, and a figure soon appears in the design. She eventually reaches the conclusion that the figure is a woman creeping on all fours behind the pattern, trying to escape the bars from the shadows.

After "realizing" she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, she begins to strip the remaining designs off the wall. While working on peeling away the wallpaper, she tries to hide her obsession with it due to her paranoia and fear that John may re-diagnose her, and his sister will remain with them. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, the woman refuses to unlock the door and tells him to go fetch the key from outside her window where she threw it earlier. Once he returns with the key and opens the door, however, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I’ve got out at last," her husband faints, as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each 'lap' around.

[edit] Interpretation

[edit] Feminist interpretation

This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of 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, not qualified 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 the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a female'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 was not allowed to write in her journal nor read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found what she was looking for: an escape. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes 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, notwithstanding that she lost her sanity in the process.

[edit] Gilman's interpretation

Gilman indicated 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".^[8]

Gilman had suffered years of depression, and Mitchell had been consulted as a specialist. He put her on a rest cure, urging her to "live as domestic a life as possible." She was forbidden to touch a pen, pencil or brush ever again, and only allowed two hours of stimulation a day.

After three months and almost completely giving up, Gilman decided to go against her diagnosis and continue to work again. After realizing how close she had come to worse mental illness, she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her point of misdiagnosis. She sent a copy to Mitchell, but never received a response.

She further added that her purpose in writing "The Yellow Wallpaper" was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." Many years later, Gilman learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods. ^[9]

[edit] Other interpretations

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness.^[10] Alan Ryan, for example, introduced the story by writing "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not."^[11]

Another interpretation is to doubt the veracity of many of the narrator's early statements. There may never have been a husband, sister, baby, or any other characters as described in the story, meaning the entire story (or a large part of it) is the product of a deluded mind, so the reader cannot know what is true and what is not.

[edit] Media adaptations

• A version of it was performed twice on the radio program Suspense by Agnes Moorehead.
• In 1977, a short film adaptation was produced by Marie Ashton through Women Make Movies.
• Produced by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) for a series then entitled Masterpiece Theatre, a television film was adapted in 1989. It was adapted by Maggie Wadey and directed by John Clive.
• An audio book of The Yellow Wallpaper additionally was produced by Durkin Hayes, and read by Win Phillips in 1997. This Radio Tales version can also be heard on Sonic Theater on XM Radio.
• BBC Radio dramatized the story for the series Fear on Four.
• A stage adaptation was performed at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
• The Yellow Wallpaper (film)
• Song "Yellow Creep Around" on the Mary's Danish album Circa, published one century after the original.
• An adaptation of the original short story was scripted and directed by Sarah Elaine Stewart in 2008. 'The Yellow Wallpaper' has been performed at The Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, July 2008, The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 2008, Midnight Matinees at the Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden, December 2008. A revised version was performed at the New Wimbledon Theatre Studio, March 2009. Written and Directed by Sarah Elaine Stewart, Costumes by Lauren McCarthy, Sound by Joseph Olney, Charlotte played by Emmeline Creswell, John played by Thomas Kirkin, The Woman in the Wallpaper played by Joanne Clarke, Jennie Played by Emma Rachel Blackman (courtyard, edinburgh, bates) and Tara Quinn (wimbledon)
• ShadyJane Theatre Company will be performing their adaptation, "Her Yellow Wallpaper" at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2009

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading