The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictional collection of diary entries from an unnamed woman. She writes of her husband John, a physician, who has rented an old mansion for them to stay in the summer. Her husband has told her she is suffering from a "temporary nervous depression ". Her husband commits her to S. Weir Mitchell's "resting cure" as treatment, and his wife writes how she takes "phosphates or phosphites - whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise" and how she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work'" until she is well again. She writes "Personally, I disagree with their ideas..." This quote displays how the woman is passive towards the authoritative voices of her husband, her family and the medical institution's ideas as a whole, despite disagreeing with them. She has no power to change her situation as a woman in society, and can do nothing but obey her 'superiors'.
She claims "I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says..." This shows how engrained her husbands authority is within her, that his reasoning even interrupts and dominates her innermost thoughts. Following this train of thought she writes how she will leave this idea alone, and instead "talk about the house." She talks of how she is unable to see her newborn child and how she is to stay in the mansion for a few weeks in summer with her husband and how she is left alone in the place while he goes to work.
In this mansion the woman is kept in an old nursery, once for children. It has windows that have bars on as so the children could not have escaped, a "gnawed" "immovable" wooden bed and of course, the walls are covered in the novel's namesake - yellow wallpaper. It has been ripped and torn in several places, obviously by the children who had lived their before. She has a hatred for this garish wallpaper, and it feeds her growing insanity: "There is a reoccurent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down."
She stares at the paper all day long with nothing to do but secretly write in her journal, which she hides from her husband and his sister, Jennie, (who is with them in the mansion) who deem writing in it as too much "work". The narrator continues to be fixated with the wallpaper: "There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern...I wish John would take me away from here!" She is convinced she can see the shape of a woman behind the wallpaper, especially at night in the moonlight - moonlight being a symbol for madness- and she thinks she can see the woman shaking the wallpaper, attempting to crawl out. She later claims she sees women who have escaped the wallpaper creeping about during daylight outside of her window. She writes "I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" Here she makes the final connection that she feels she is one of the women to have climbed out of the wallpaper.
After weeks of living in the mansion, it is finally the narrator and her husband's last day staying there. On this day the unnamed woman has locked herself in the nursery. She pulls down as much wallpaper as she can, attempting to help the woman within it escape. When her husband finds the key to the door and opens it, the woman exclaims "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" He faints and the story finishes with the woman writing that as he had fainted "right across my path by the wall" she "had to creep over him every time".
This horror is a considered an important work of early feminist literature, as the women in the wallpaper are metaphors for the women in oppressive marriages. The conclusion of the narrator realising she is one of the women in the wallpaper confirms this. The fact that her husband faints as a response to her 'escaping' the wallpaper may suggest that escaping the rules of her relationship shocks her husband. The colour of the wallpaper is also symbolic as yellow symbolises insanity.
She writes early on in the book how once she voiced her opinions to her husband and he "laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." The irony in this line is that this is not at all expected in a healthy marriage, but disturbingly it must of been expected in the average middle class marriage of the Victorian era - considered the norm. The fact that the narrator's opinions are overruled by her husband's also shows how he is superior in authority to her in the marriage, and that they are in an unequal relationship. It could also be argued that women are forced into a childish state of ignorance by their husbands. This can be shown through the narrator's husband, John, who refers to her as "little girl" when she frets over the wallpaper, and says to her "Bless her little heart!" The irony of referring to his wife in the third person using the pronoun 'she' could be Gilman showing how he could be referring to any of the women who were trapped in the wallpaper. He ignores her argument that she is not getting better through this "resting cure" and continues to leave her in the room for her to dwell on the wallpaper. The fact it is said she has also had a baby could suggest she is also suffering from postnatal depression.
This book highlights how badly mental health was treated in the 19th century and leaves me grateful for the support people suffering from mental health issues are given now - despite mental healthcare still needing to improve further, it has came a long way since Gilman herself had been treated with this supposed "cure". This short story calls to your attention the manipulation of women in marriage and presents a worse case scenario of what could occur due to it. This haunting read will leave you inspecting your own wallpaper for any tears...
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