Feminist Gothic in "The Yellow

Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had no way of knowing that a story she wrote in
1892 would one day be regarded as a classic in feminist literature. The
gothic tale of “The Yellow Wallpaper” has become just that, although it
took nearly a century to find a truly understanding audience. Early
readers were appreciative of the sheer horror of the tale, and, indeed, it
still stands as a wonderful example of the genre. But it was not until the
rediscovery of the story in the early 1970’s that “The Yellow Wallpaper”
was recognized as an early feminist indictment of Victorian patriarchy.
This story contains many typical gothic trappings, but beneath the
conventional façade lies a tale of repression and freedom told in intricate
symbolism as seen through the eyes of a mad narrator.

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining

the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an
account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the Victorian “rest-
cure,” a once frequently prescribed period of inactivity thought to cure
hysteria and nervous conditions in women. As Gary Scharnhorst points
out, this treatment originated with Dr. Weir Mitchell, who personally
prescribed this “cure” to Gilman herself. She was in fact driven to near
madness and later claimed to have written “The Yellow Wallpaper” to
protest this treatment of women like herself, and specifically to address
Dr. Weir Mitchell with a “propaganda piece.” A copy of the story was
actually sent to Mitchell, and although he never replied to Gilman
personally, he is said to have confessed to a friend that he had changed
his treatment of hysterics after reading the story (15-19).
Although the autobiographical aspects of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are
compelling, it is the symbolism and the underlying feminist connotations
that lead best to discussion. First is John, the narrator’s husband. He could
be viewed as the patriarchy itself, as Beverly Hume says, with his
dismissal of all but the tangible and his constant condescension to his
wife, but some critics have viewed this character as near-caricature (478).
Many of the passages concerning the husband can be interpreted as
containing sarcasm, a great many contain irony, and several border on
parody (Johnson 528). It is true that the husband’s language is
exaggerated at times, but dismissing the husband’s character as
caricature seems extreme. He is instead the natural complement to the
narrator’s madness and uncontrolled fancy: the character of
John is control and “sanity” as defined by Victorian culture and is
therefore the narrator’s opposite. Greg Johnson notes that John exhibits a
near-obsession with “reason,” even as his wife grows mad. He is the
narrator’s necessary counterpart, without whose stifling influence her
eventual freedom would not be gained. And he is also transformed at the
end of the tale—in a reversal of traditional gothic roles—because it is he,
not a female, who faints when confronted with madness (529).

Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that
the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom.
Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the
narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,”
a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her
husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is
papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s]
every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and
she begins to see more than just the outer design. At first she sees
“bulbous eyes” and “absurd unblinking eyes . . . everywhere”(427),
phrases suggestive to John Bak of a panopticon, an “alternative” prison
developed by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century to replace the
dank English prison of the time (39). Further, according to Bak, this new
prison, as described by Michael Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975),
involved observance of prisoners at all times (40). This all-seeing prison
symbolism is echoed according to Bak in the narrator’s observation of
“gates that lock” and the constant surveillance of John and the
housekeeper, Jennie (42). Bak goes on to suggest that the nursery room,
with its barred windows and rings in the wall, was designed for the
restraint of mental patients, but other critics assert that these were in fact
common safety precautions used in Victorian nurseries and that such
interpretations are extreme.

The wallpaper gradually consumes the narrator’s being, offering up more

complex images as time passes. She first notices a different colored sub-
pattern of a figure beneath the “front design.” This figure is eventually
seen as a woman who “creeps” and shakes the outer pattern, now seen to
the narrator as bars. Gary Scharnhorst says that this woman-figure
becomes essentially the narrator’s “doppelganger,” or double, trapped
behind the bars of her role in the patriarchy (17). As the story progresses,
the narrator identifies more and more with the figure in the wallpaper,
until (in one of the most controversial statements in the entire text) she
refers to herself in the third person. In this statement the narrator says,
“‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane’”(436); this
statement allows for many different interpretations—some of which
change the entire nature of the story, or at least the very ending.
Probably the most common interpretation of this line assumes Jane to be
the previously unmentioned name of the narrator. This seems by far the
simplest and most reasonable explanation, but this brief statement has
produced some wild theories ranging in scope from a misprint of the
name “Jennie” or “Julia” to a deliberate connection to Jane Eyre by
Charlotte Bronte (Owens 76-77). There are indeed parallels between the
madwoman in Jane Eyre and the madness exhibited by the narrator in
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” but it seems unlikely that the more unusual
theories would bear up under close scrutiny. With that in mind, we will
assume for convenience sake that the name Jane does in fact refer to the
narrator herself.

Another feature of the prison/nursery in which the narrator observes her

wallpaper is the heavy bedstead, which is nailed to the floor. The
interpretations of this feature are variations on a theme, ranging from an
image of the narrator’s “static sexuality” (Scharnhorst 19) to “a sexual
crucifixion” (Johnson 526). These statements ring true regarding Victorian
sexuality; it was as immobile as the unmoving bedstead. A Victorian wife
belonged to her husband and her body was his to do with whatever he
pleased. Victorian women were counseled that conjugal relations were a
woman’s duty simply to be borne until a sufficient number of children
arrived and it was no longer necessary. In this context, the image of the
nailed-down bed becomes perhaps the most understandable symbol in
the entire story.

What of the narrator herself and her madness? An interesting way to view
her actions is, in the words of Greg Johnson, as “an expression of long-
suppressed rage”(522). Johnson goes on to suggest that the narrator’s
madness may in fact be temporary, as the author’s own breakdown was
in real life. The narrator is presented as an artist (at least in a small way)
and a writer and it is through her writing, Johnson says, that her
suppressed rage becomes apparent (522). There is further justification in
believing her madness to be temporary. After the narrator becomes
free/becomes the creeping woman in the paper, she says, “I suppose I
shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is
hard!”(436). Since the narrator had seen the pattern as bars with the
creeping figure behind them, perhaps this statement may allude to an
eventual return to a societal norm of behavior—Jane, the narrator, may
get back behind the bars of Victorian womanhood, but “that is hard!”

There is also the interesting connection between the mad narrator of “The
Yellow Wallpaper” and the character of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in
the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Almost all writings on the story
have a alluded to this connection; some discuss it at length. Perhaps the
comparison is inevitable, as Bertha Mason is probably the most well-
known example of a gothic madwoman. When viewed as a polarized or
split identity, the link between Jane Eyre/Bertha Mason and Narrator
Jane/Wallpaper figure is quite clear. The first in both pairs is the
conventional self, the “rational self,” and the second is “the raging and
uncontrolled madwoman” (Owens 77). Greg Johnson says it is the anger,
the boiling rage, of these alter egos that results in eventual triumph over
their patriarchal influences (522). By reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” in
this light, we can view the story as an interaction between the protagonist
and her “shadow self” (King and Morris 29). There is another similarity
between Bertha Mason and the narrator of our tale: they both “creep,” or
crawl about on all fours. This may be an identification with animal
behavior or a way to explain that both characters have lost touch with
civilization or the patriarchy. However, as king and Morris add, it may
simply be an expression of the narrator’s “self-suppression,” a
suppression carried to the point of regression: the narrator ends the story
sleeping most of the day and creeping around a nursery room like an
infant (30).
Bronte’s madwoman may be more animal than infant, but the opposite is
more likely true of our narrator. The question of the narrator’s fate still
remains. Is she truly an unreliable narrator, sinking steadily into
irretrievable madness? Or is she exhibiting the only sane response to an
insane world order? Does she find doom in her madness? Or triumph and
freedom at last? The story cannot be viewed in purely supernatural terms,
with a real phantom behind the wallpaper; thus the narrator’s madness is
undeniable. However, as both Johnson and King and Morris point out, it is
this response which grants her freedom in the end. It is her rebellion
which is her redemption, and even if her conventional self is completely
obliterated, her “survival” is assured by the survival of her writing, her
text (527;30-31). As we read the story, the narrator “reads” the wallpaper,
and she sees in it her own “suppressed self” (King and Morris 32). So
when the narrator destroys the paper and pulls it down in the end, it
might be symbolic of the destruction of her other self.

In fact, it is significant that the entire story revolves around wallpaper,

which would be considered by many to be merely feminine frivolity. Greg
Johnson recounts a story in “Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and
Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'” about Emily Dickinson’s mother. In
the story, the pregnant woman had requested that the wallpaper be
changed in her room. When denied the change by her husband, the
woman secretly arranged the re-papering herself, her “only recorded act
of wifely defiance”(521). The Victorian wife had so little control over her
own life that it was through these “frivolities” such as clothing and even
wallpaper that these women exercised their autonomy. It seems
significant, therefore, that the narrator’s madness is expressed through
the chiefly feminine symbol of wallpaper.
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” though a wonderful and frightening gothic tale,
will probably continue to be thought of in feminist terms—and probably
rightly so. Modern women, by reading such texts, can gain a new
perspective on our present situation. We can also learn to avoid past
pitfalls. By reading of and understanding the madness in “The Yellow
Wallpaper,” we can perhaps prevent such psychic horrors in the future.
The Femme Fatale and the Yellow Wallpaper: When Feminism and
the Gothic Collide

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is only a short story and yet, in my opinion, despite its length,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work is far more evocative than many a longer work in the
Gothic genre. Gilman’s work details the desperation and mental breakdown of the female
first person narrator, who finds herself confined to an ancestral hall for the summer. Her
husband John, a physician, convinces her that she is merely suffering from “nervous
depression” due to her “imaginative temperament”, and that the best cure is for her to be
relieved of undue stimulation and exertion, as she is even prevented from expressing
herself in writing. This is one of the main ways in which Gilman maintains the tension in her
work – the narration itself gives a claustrophobic feel because the act of writing is forbidden
and therefore must be clandestine.

The main focal point of the story is the “yellow wallpaper” of the title, which hangs in the
room at the top of the house, which the narrator is forced to take over one downstairs by
her husband, despite her aversion to the décor. She describes it as “one of those sprawling,
flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin”, in a “smouldering unclean yellow”. Yet,
far from being a mere eyesore, the paper begins to haunt the narrator, as it takes on a
personality of its own – she writes, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing”.
In fact, she even describes her attempts to follow the bewildering pattern in terms of a
physical battle – “it turns a back-somersault…it slaps you in the face, knows you down, and
tramples upon you”. However, as the text moves on, she develops a perverse delight in the
secrets of the wallpaper’s pattern. Near to the end of the narrative, she seems to exhibit
some improvement in her health and and laughingly dismisses her husband’s remark about
her “flourishing in spite of her wallpaper”, only to admit in her writing, “I had no intention of
telling him it was because of the wallpaper – he would make fun of me, he might even want
to take me away”. One wonders whether her obsession is exacerbated by the fact that the
wallpaper and her curious connection with it are the only things which the narrator has for
herself, as she is constantly watched by her husband and his sister.

Indeed, her husband’s domination is at the heart of the narrator’s mental distress. Of
course, she exhibits obvious signs of what would now be diagnosed as depression – a lack
of energy, a tendency to “cry all the time…and cry at nothing” and a general dissatisfaction
with her situation. Gilman subtly implies with her description of the room, with the bed
“nailed down”, looking “as if it had been through the wars”, the “barred windows” and “the
paper stripped off the wall in patches” that the room was previously used as a lunatic’s cell.
In fact, we may interpret the narrator’s condition more specifically as post-natal depression,
from her confession that she “cannot be with” her baby as “it makes her so nervous” –
indeed, Ellen Moers in the Female Gothic section of her seminal work, ‘Literary Women’,
calls ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ a “macabre post-partum fantasy”. Yet, although she suffers
mental distress from the beginning of the story, what is truly damaging is her husband’s
dismissal of her condition – “if a physician and one’s own husband, assures friends and
relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but…a slight hysterical tendency,
what is one to do?”. Here, the narrator’s rhetorical question conveys her desperation.
Furthermore, John plays upon her low self-esteem and depressive guilt by causing her to
feel “ungrateful” and “fanciful” whenever she defies him by writing or voices her feelings.
Thus she is robbed of freedom and subject to a cruel form of manipulation. We also see that
this is specifically a representation of female experience, not merely because it may be read
as a tale of post-natal depression left to fester into psychosis, but because her mental
anguish dismissed as mere “hysteria”, which is an inherently misogynistic term, literally
meaning “womb fury”. This was a catch-all term in the Victorian period for any nervous
female condition, reinforcing the stereotype of women being overemotional and defining the
narrator’s condition through the vocabulary of the patriarchy.

Perhaps the true source of horror in the text is not the wallpaper or the narrator’s mental
disintegration, but the patriarchal values which confine her and finally push her over the
edge. Not only is she stifled by her husband, but she is also labelled by him and other
physicians as a mere “fanciful woman” – she is not in control of her own destiny, nor does
she have any say in her diagnosis, as she is not allowed to “say what she feels”. As she
focuses on the moonlit pattern every night, she begins to see it change, as it “becomes
bars”, and the “dim sub-pattern” morphs into “a woman” who “takes hold of the bars and
shakes them hard”. When confronted with this image of female oppression, it is impossible
to ignore Gilman’s feminist message at the heart of this text. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
becomes even more unsettling when one learns that it was semi-autobiographical. The
authoress herself suffered from depression for many years, and was referred to the care of
Dr S. Weir Mitchell – whom she mentions by his real name within the text – who prescribed
a “rest cure” and forbade her to write, yet this only caused her condition to worsen. In her
article ‘Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper’, Gilman wrote that she herself had “come so
near the borderline of utter mental ruin that she could see over” and that she had written
the tale “not to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy”. However,
the protagonist of her short story is not saved from this fate, in fact her obsession becomes
so severe that she loses all sense of reality. Not only does she hallucinate the woman from
behind the wallpaper “creeping” all around the house, but she herself begins to “creep”
around the room, and yet she is not aware of her actions. She begins to associate herself so
strongly with the woman whom she views as an ally, perhaps because they are equally
oppressed, that she begins to think that they are one and the same person.

It is my view that this final fragmentation of the self is caused by her situation – having her
freedom and her creative outlet taken from her, her identity in effect begins to disintegrate.
Perhaps what Gilman truly wanted to convey was not merely the plight of the depressive,
but the idea that, under the pressure of male-dominated structures, the feminine identity
could not survive and would eventually collapse. The situation was perhaps not as serious
for all women in the Victorian period, but ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ certainly has a wider
message beyond the sphere of the Psychological Gothic, one which applies to society as a
whole.
 The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman: a gothic story of
postnatal psychosis – psychiatry in
literature

When feminist activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her

epistolary short story The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892, she meant it as a
protest work. The story chronicles her postnatal psychosis and is
highly critical of her treatment. Subversion begins with her title,
suggesting domestic design manuals, hinting at papering-over of
cracks. Gilman's eponymous wallpaper becomes a character, stripped
of agency. Things happen to it, a metaphor for an unwell woman's
passivity, while male doctors enforce rest.
Confined to her nursery-bedroom for a ‘rest cure’, Gilman's
surreptitious diarist smuggles biographical horrors into a gothic
haunted-house story: ‘A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would
say a haunted house’. This genre allows metaphysical explorations of
the wallpaper-thin borderline between sanity and madness.
Incarceration in the attic, by physician-husband John, evokes the
Grimms' fairytale Rapunzel in the Tower; the yellow wallpaper is a
surrogate for Rapunzel's coils of golden hair, which both trap and free
her. It is reminiscent, too, of Charlotte Brönte's Bertha Mason. A key
distinction is that Bertha Mason was voiceless; Gilman's narrator
claims her voice through her diary, her namelessness a statement
about the anonymity of motherhood.
Juxtaposing alienation with domesticity is characteristic of
‘homely gothic’, developed in the 19th century, a genre which often
features doubles and mirrors. Gilman's narrator and wallpaper become
doubles, mirroring each other's fragmentation, ultimately becoming
one. Gilman fashions a nameless writer, banned from writing, writing
about going mad, going mad as she writes. Weir Mitchell is both the
real psychiatrist who diagnosed Gilman with postnatal depression and
prescribed his ‘rest cure’1 and the psychiatrist in Wallpaper: ‘John says
if I don't pick up any faster, he shall send me to Weir Mitchell’.
Mitchell's rest cure itself becomes a work of gothic fiction, which can
make for uncomfortable reading for a psychiatrist.
Her narrator is surrounded by men of science. John, ‘a physician of
high standing, and one's own husband’, 2 and her brother, ‘also a
physician, also of high standing’, are paternalistic and condescending.
Ultimately, as the door closes on John, his wife's diary opens doors to
understanding madness.
There is a formal parallel between the breakdown of Gilman's story
and her narrator's mental breakdown. Written sections get
progressively shorter as postnatal psychosis and persecutory
delusions take over. By the final ambiguous section, Gilman's narrator
has both peeled off and become part of the titular wallpaper, engulfed
by a domestic symbol, part of the pattern that she writes ‘cannot be
understood’. John has been locked out, his narrator-wife escaping the
ownership of his medical gaze.
Death is unnamed at the end, although suicide is suggested in a
description of wallpaper pattern, ‘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’. 3

Gilman's concluding darkness is intensified by uncertainty over

who is diarising if her narrator has killed herself. Who is left to say she
has to step over John? She evokes a voice beyond the grave, the
possibility that her narrator is a ghost. This reminds us of the potential
horror of postnatal psychosis, that it can leave children motherless,
their fathers widowed, ever haunted.