1
Smith
Pat Smith
Professor Summer
English Composition II
15 November 2006
Freeing the Woman behind the Wallpaper: The Symbolic Meaning of the Yellow Wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” firstpublished inThe New England Magazine in 1892, illustrates the damaging effects of the rest cure, a popular treatment for women suffering from mental and physical ills that was prescribed by male psychiatrists. The nameless female narrator in Gilman’s story, an upper-middle class wife, suffers from a nervous disorder after having a baby. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, prescribes the rest cure, removing her from social contacts and normal intellectual activities. She is confined to a room with the yellow wallpaper, the central image in the story.
The longer she observes the gaudy pattern of the wallpaper, the more it generates disturbing images until she crosses the line from sanity to madness. Critics have interpreted the yellow wallpaper in many ways: three popular interpretations of its symbolism are (1) the wallpaper as a way of evaluating the narrator’s deteriorating mental state as she becomes increasing detached from reality (2) the wallpaper as a “pattern” of social and economic dependence which reduces 19th Century women to domestic slavery, and (3) the wallpaper as a symbol of the confining values of the ideal of “True Womanhood.” In all of these interpretations, the wallpaper is a symbol of the repression of the 19th century woman and her response to the society that confines her.
The narrator of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is diagnosed with postpartum depression, a type of depression that occurs in women after they have a baby, and she is put on the rest cure for the summer. The rest cure, designed by the famous psychiatrist Dr. Mitchell, required complete inactivity and weight gain over the period of a few weeks. Gilman underwent such a cure after giving birth herself and barely avoided a mental breakdown (Gilman, “Why”). Confined to a former nursery with barred windows in an isolated mansion, the narrator is told not to read or write, or go outside. These extreme conditions make her focus on the wallpaper in her room in an obsessive way. Elaine R. Hedges explains in “Afterword” that the narrator’s “total rest and total emptiness of mind, the fatigue and the subterfuge are unbearable. Increasingly, she concentrates her attention on the wallpaper in her room—a paper of a sickly yellow that both disgusts and fascinates her” (106). Jonathan Crewe claims that “the exasperating effect of pattern wallpaper on invalids was a medical commonplace of Gilman’s time” (qtd. in Roth). Rae Beth Gordon writes of Gilman's tale that "had he [the doctor-husband] read [Paul] Souriau or [Gaetan Gatian de] Clerambault, he would have known that there is 'nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like [hers]' as this contemplation of decorative pattern, so apt to float between reality and hallucination” (qtd. in Roth). Clearly, the rest cure seems sure to exacerbate, not cure the narrator’s problem.
The wallpaper becomes the narrator’s focal point. She states, “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and 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” (Gilman, “Yellow” 5). It is dull and ugly, but she watches it closely for extended periods of time. These “unheard of contradictions” and chaotic patterns reflect the narrator’s own confusion about the contradictory forces in her own life: “her need for security yet fear of dependency and entrapment, her acceptance of the American Dream (marriage, family, house) amidst the nightmare of reality; her passive acceptance of duty but rising protest” (Berman 199).
The narrator makes an effort to follow John’s recommendations in order to get better, but she feels the need to express her feelings. The wallpaper seems to provide an outlet for self-expression as she resolves to “follow the pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (Gilman, “Yellow” 10). She also thinks that there must be a better treatment for her depression. As John is dismissive of her needs, she protests silently against the cure. She continues to write a journal in secret, hiding it from John and his sister. The increasingly violent imagery in her narrative expresses her suppressed anger and foretells her oncoming madness. She observes that the curves in the wallpaper pattern plunge violently and she hates the faded color, design, and its overall ugliness: “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman,“Yellow” 5). The pattern is “a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions” (13). The color yellow in this wallpaper is not a sunny yellow, but reminds one of fungus and decay. The flowers in the gaudy pattern appear to be poisonous mushrooms that multiply endlessly. She starts seeing shapes behind the pattern as well: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it” ( 8). As she watches the wallpaper, it returns the gaze in the form of a monstrous face with bulging eyes. She is watched over by this paper, much like her husband and his sister watch over her. It angers her. Upon closer observation, the narrator notices “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous design” (9). The chaotic patterns reveal the shape of a woman creeping behind the pattern, her double. Much like the woman lost in the wallpaper, the narrator is imprisoned in a hostile environment and helplessly fights her own confinement.
Whereas the wallpaper can be interpreted as a reflection of the narrator’s individual struggle to maintain her sanity in extremely stressful conditions, the wallpaper pattern can also be seen as a symbol of the social and economic dependence of women, or even as prison bars that confine women to the domestic sphere. Paula A. Treichler views the woman in the wallpaper as a slave in the domestic sphere. She argues that “the yellow wallpaper represents
. . . the “pattern” of social and economic dependence which reduces women to domestic slavery. . . all women” (190). Gilman has created a world of women who try to free themselves of man’s dominance. The narrator writes about her discovery that not one but many women are hidden behind the pattern:
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so: I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad. (Gilman, “Yellow” 16)
The narrator sees the wallpaper as a pattern of "bars" that prevent the woman or women inside from coming outside. She tries to remove the bars or slide through them, but the bars actively prevent it. They actually strangle those who attempt to escape. The victims’ heads are then trapped and turned upside down. This is a striking image of what patriarchy does to the women who refuse to conform to its rules: “The pattern is torturing” (13). Not only does the narrator suffer from being confined, but she is also tortured by the menacing pattern, and may easily be strangled by it. The disempowerment of the nineteenth-century woman, her lack of rights, including the right to be outside the house, and lack of pay for domestic labors do make women appear as slaves, or prisoners, in their own homes. The narrator can only be free in the world of her own imagination.
A newly defined role model for nineteenth-century women evolved as men increasingly went out of the home into the workplace to become the providers while women became keepers of the home, a peaceful retreat for their families. The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood, the new myth, described a perfect mother and wife who works at home without effort, does not complain, remains modest and is always loving towards her family. This ideal was propagated in women's magazines, religious journals, newspapers, and fiction, and it consisted of four features a young woman should display: “piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness” (Welter 313). The yellow wallpaper is the perfect symbol of The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood, since it is an element of domestic decor, suggestive of a woman’s ties to home and family. Deborah Thomas notes that in Charlotte Gilman’s view, “women were constricted to the set parameters that men determined. . .[and]conditioned to accept these boundaries and remain in place, in the private sphere.” However, Gilman slyly subverts the ideal, since she makes the wallpaper repulsive and uses it to reveal figures of women trapped in the home, unhappy behind the superficial and sickening design. The very idea of women’s freedom and perhaps even rebellion was not considered a normal behavior at the time, so Gilman explores them covertly through the domestic symbol of the wallpaper and, of course, the narrator’s insanity.
The worship of children, which was an integral part of the values of True Womanhood, is also indirectly criticized by Gilman. Berman explains that there is an unexplored link between the pattern of the wallpaper and the narrator’s actual fear of children (199). The narrator refers to her child only once in the context of the nursery she occupies with her husband, “If we had not used it, the blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds” (Gilman, “Yellow” 11). The narrator expresses her love and concern for the absent baby. However, Berman argues that we know that she has unconscious aggression towards her husband and wonders if she feels aggression towards the child as well (199). The baby seems present in the wallpaper: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and the two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” This might be a child or a fetus. The eyes stare at the narrator insistently and she gets “positively angry with the impertinence of it and everlastingness” (Gilman, “Yellow” 8).
Berman suggests that the baby in the wallpaper seems to demand attention and nurturing that the mother is reluctant to give. She cannot escape from the child because it is firmly embedded in the pattern. She obviously cannot easily reconcile her tender feelings and resentment for it. The child is the reason she is confined. The narrator is kind towards her own child, but not towards the former inhabitants of the nursery. She observes the damaged furniture and says “I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.” The floor is “scratched, gouged and splintered,” whereas the plaster “is dug out here and there” and the bed “looks as if it had been through the wars” (8). Berman argues that “Interpreted according to dream logic, the wallpaper recreates the mother’s inescapable horror of children” (199).
Elaine Showalter would disagree with the interpretation of the demonized baby that poses a threat to the mother; using a feminist approach, she emphasizes the social and economic conditions that bind women and drive them into insanity. According to her, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is “a woman driven mad by her enforced confinement and passivity” and the rest cure “is a sinister parody of idealized Victorian femininity: inertia, privatization, narcissism, dependency. In particular, the weight gain that was considered an essential part of the cure was a kind of pseudo-pregnancy” (247). The narrator is on the brink of insanity, not because of her own weakness, but because she is driven into insanity by unreasonable and unfair expectations.
Paula A. Treichler, on the other hand, explains that the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of her society. As a writing woman and an artist, the narrator manages to record her own resistance to John’s diagnosis and its treatment (188); so in Treichler’s view, the wallpaper becomes a kind of an imaginary text the narrator creates. John is dismissive of her creativity and habit of writing; indeed, he forbids it as part of the rest cure, the narrator secretly keeps a journal and records her observations of the wallpaper. She reports that John has told her “that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency” (Gilman,“Yellow” 7). From the beginning, she does not believe the confinement will cure her. Treichler observes:
. . . the diagnosis of hysteria or depression, conventional “women’s diseases” of the nineteenth century, sets in motion a therapeutic regimen which involves language in several ways. The narrator is forbidden to engage in normal social conversation; her physical isolation is in part designed to remove her from the possibility of overstimulating intellectual discussion. She is further encouraged to exercise “self-control” and avoid expressing negative thoughts and fears about her illness; she is also urged to keep her fancies and superstitions in check. Above all, she is forbidden to “work”—to write. (188)
The narrator learns to express herself in a self-censored way to meet this requirement. In Treichler’s words, “she develops an artificial feminine self who reinforces the terms of her husband’s expert diagnosis” (188). Her journal is curiously free from condemnation of her treatment, her husband’s recommendations, or anything else. She forces herself to appear quiet, submissive and eager to help. Because she cannot speak truthfully “to a living soul,” she records her thoughts in a journal she calls “dead paper.” Treichler suggests that “The only safe language (for a woman) is dead language” and that the story is inevitably concerned with the complicated relationship between women and language (189).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s metaphor of the yellow wallpaper continues to stimulate the readers and inspire new interpretations of it. The wallpaper, a simple, common object, stands for a profound critique of nineteenth-century society as it represents entrapment, oppression, and imprisonment of women due to the flawed reasoning of the male-dominated society in that time period. Does the symbolism suggest that the narrator escapes into madness when she finally rips the wallpaper down? Greg Johnson says this about the story, "Rather than simply labeling the narrator a madwoman at the story's close, we might view her behavior as an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown . . . but which represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption” (521-30). Johnson does not think the narrator exits the confinement into insanity when she finally rips down the paper, but goes through a crisis which will allow her to reemerge as an independent artist, free to create as she pleases. Certainly, Gilman’s rich symbolism in “The Yellow Wallpaper” encourages multiple interpretations, but all are concerned with expressing—and changing—the status of women in the nineteenth-century, male-dominated society.
Works Cited
Berman, Jeffrey. “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Talking Cure: LiteraryRepresentations of Psychoanalysis. By Jeffrey Berman. New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1985. 33-59. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Paula Kepos. Vol. 37. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1991. 198-200.Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow
Wallpaper and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Print.
. . . . ”Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Golden, Catherine. The
Captive Imagination: a Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. New
York: Feminist Press, 1992. Print.
Hedges, Elaine R. “Afterword.” The Yellow Wallpaper. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 1973. New York: The Feminist Press, 1973. 37-63. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 9. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1983. 105-107. Print.