The Yellow Wallpaper(A Short Story) written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman PDF

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER Charlotte Perkins Gilman About Author Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860 Beecher Perkins (Librarian) A. Fitch Shifted 19 times in 18 years The childhood of Gilman was one of emotional deprivation as the father was absent and the mother, stung her desertion withheld open displ...

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER - By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

About Author  Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860  Father-Fredrick Beecher Perkins (Librarian) Mother-Mary A. Fitch  Shifted 19 times in 18 years  The childhood of Gilman was one of emotional deprivation as the father was absent and the mother, stung by her husband’s desertion withheld open display of affection and grew to be a disciplinarian.  She said - “Were I to marry, my thoughts, my acts, my whole life would be centered in husband and children. To do the work that I have planned I must be free.”  But later she married Charles Walter Stetson.  Stetson expected her to conform to the conventional role of a wife & mother & didn’t appreciate her professional ambitions.  It pushed Charlotte towards depression, which worsened after the birth of their daughter Katharine in 1885 – forced her to seek medical assistance from the leading physician, Weir Mitchell.  He suggested “Rest Cure”* with only “2 hours intellectual life a day” & strict instructions to stay away from “pen, brush or pencil…..as long as I lived.”  The treatment didn’t help her at all.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” - draws upon Gilman’s own experience.  In 1888, she left her husband and went to California.

{*Rest Cure: - extended and total bed rest; isolation from family and familial surroundings; overfeeding, especially with cream, on the assumption that increased body volume created new energy.}

 The decision to leave her husband allowed Charlotte to rediscover herself & build her career as an important writer and reformer of late 19th & 20th century America.  The key issues in her work relates to women’s economic independence.  As a child she had witnessed her mother’s struggle to cope with the precarious financial position of the family in the face of father’s desertion and realized the need for women to work, to be self-reliant.  In “Women & Economics” (1898) she argued that women should be paid for domestic labour, that the idea of “home” should be reinterpreted so that “we may all have homes to love and grow in without the requirement that half of us shall never have anything else.”  She insisted that her struggle aimed at the betterment of entire human race.  In 1900, she married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman, who was supportive of her aspirations and choices.  In 1932, she was diagnosed with cancer. No longer willing to fight a lonely & painful battle, she committed suicide in 1935.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS  Autobiographical in nature.  Published in 1892. Initially read as a supernatural or horror story.  Interpreted as a metaphor for the condition of women at the end of the 19th century, particularly women who were torn between their desire to write & the dictate of their society - to curb that “unnatural desire “a concern which continued by later generation of women writers.  Gilman says - “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, & it worked.  A critic’s nasty statement on this story implies the thought that any woman who would go against the grain of society might as well have been insane for writing it in the first place.

 The women who refused conventional role & chose a life of selfexpression & freedom from the social constraints suffered ridicule & punishment from their peers.  Through this story, Gilman wrote an autobiography of her emotional and psychological feelings of rejection from society as a free thinking woman.  Gilman & the protagonist of the story suffered from the Post-Partum depression.  Doctors of that time were not versed about the female hormonal system all nervous disorders were associate with “hysteria” a reference used for women with emotional problems.  Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the nationally recognized neurologist who specialized in the nervous diseases of women.  The women, Dr. Weir Mitchell treated were basically taught an extreme version of how to be domestic & submissive according to the society outside of the sanitarium.

Contemporary Medical Discourse and the Position of Women  The protagonist is an upper middle class woman who, seems to have accepted conventional ideas about women, about marriage as an institution & women’s position in it.  Through the figure of husband, John, a physician, & therefore in “control “of his wife’s treatment – the story draws attention to the way in which contemporary medical discourses sought to define women.  The biological difference between the two sexes became a means to justify women’s exclusion from spheres of higher education and work.  Grace Farrell said in 19th century“all female ailments…..were connected to the female reproductive organs”

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& it was suggested that women’s greater participation in intellectual/mental work would interfere with the proper growth of reproductive system & thus, affect their primary role as procreators. In the story, the author says- “He combines the diagnostic language of the physician with the paternalistic language of the husband to create a formidable array of controls over her behavior.” “The windows were barred for little children, & there are rings & things in the walls.” - This line suggests existence of sinister past, of the possible other, less than benign uses to which the room makes its impression as a “prison” in the present rather than recuperation for the protagonist. The protagonist feels that “congenial work” would aid her recovery rather than obstruct it. Her protesting voice is suppressed by the conditioned self of the protagonist, whose tenacious hold is reflected in frequent references to what “John says”. The denial of pen & paper by physician-husband is a denial of the protagonist’s right to represent herself and thereby challenge his misrepresentation of her as either childlike, hence in need of male guidance, or hysterical & neurotic, & so in need of supervision. The protagonist’s desire to write & demonization by John (& by extension, her society) forces her to double life. The act of writing, of recording her thoughts & feelings, unburdens her because it provides her with an outlet for saying what is unsayable - her fancies & fears, the so-called irrational ideas which are dismissed by her husband who is “practical in the extreme.” The sudden breaks in the narrative reflect the forced breaks in her private journal, necessitated by the arrival of John or his sister – the form her story takes reflects the conditions under which she writes as well as her increasingly disoriented mental state. The protagonist bemoans the lack of “any advice or companionship about….work”, thereby raising the question of the effect of “lack of tradition upon the mind of woman writer.”

Wallpaper as a Metaphor  The protagonist’s loneliness, forced inactivity and lack of normal relations with her husband (reference to two beds) begin to unhinge her.  He wants her to control her “fancies” and “irrational ideas”.  The protagonist’s changing reactions to the wallpaper are a measure of her state of mind.  “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” - Unable to confront and challenge her husband & the larger social system that he symbolizes, the protagonist seems to displace or redirect her feeling of resentment towards other objects, in this case the wallpaper.  At first, wallpaper seemed as an instrument of surveillance, with its “absurd, unblinking eyes….everywhere”, reflecting her sense of being kept under watch all the time.  Her mind begins to “see” a figure of a woman, who becomes an embodiment of the protagonist’s literal &metaphorical imprisonment in a particular setup.  Protagonist tried to set free this “woman” by ripping the wallpaper apart. “I pulled & she shook, I shook & she pulled & before morning, we had pulled yards of that paper.”  The recognition & identification with “the woman” behind the bars is a crucial first step towards freedom, freedom from her own conditional self & from the law of the husband & patriarchal order.  J Wolter said - The protagonist “begins to decode the pattern (of her husband and his world) destroys it & constructs a reading and a world of her own.”  Initially she is tormented by a feeling of guilt & reproaches herself for failing in her duties as a wife; she shed that meekness, finally addressing him as an equal.

 The last scene of the story does not necessarily signify release for the protagonist. After all, the final image of the story hardly generates hope – a woman creeping round & round, “securely fastened by a rope.”

Race & Class Politics in “Yellow Wallpaper”  “The Yellow Wallpaper” reflects the race & class bias of its writer.  The story is embedded in the race politics of America at the end of 19th century, which saw a huge influx of immigrants from China, Southern & Eastern Europe, etc.  It gave rise to “a mass anxiety about the Yellow Peril” & calls for immigration control which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  Taken as anti-immigrant & racist rhetoric.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” challenges systematic expressions of women, on the other, it participates in oppression of another kind, based on race & ethnic difference.  The connotations of the “unclean yellow”, it link with the supposedly unclean habits of non-white migrants, would have been obvious to the contemporary of Perkins.  “If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions.”  This can be read as a reference to growing immigrant population which might soon outnumber the whole Americans.  “Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, to dress & entertain & order things.”  To say this is not to belittle the agony of a woman who is forced to live in a state of passive dependence & whose creativity is stifled, it is to say that the turmoil she experiences is representative of a certain

class of women only & is based on a certain set of class related assumptions....