The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

Name:

Institutional Affiliation:

Date:

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a woman who suffers from depression and finally goes insane. The narrator is the woman herself expressing her various emotions. She is married to John, who is a doctor. They travel for a vacation because John thinks that his wife needs air and rest so that she can get better. The narrator who is John’s wife heartily disagrees, but she cannot make this known to John who is a doctor because no one would believe her word over his. Her brother is also a doctor and agrees with John’s opinion. John does not want his wife to exert herself in any way and always warns her against letting her wild imagination get the better of her. The narrator keeps her thought and feelings to herself and sneaks some time to write the story which chronicles her everyday experiences. The main themes in the story are the importance of self-expression and the oppression of women in marriage (Gale 2016).

The story begins with the narrator’s description of their vacation home. The grounds are described to be magnificent, and the house itself is enormous. She thinks that it belonged to some aristocratic family. However, she links to think that it is haunted so that it can deepen the mystery and make her wonder what happened there. She says, “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house…”(Gilman 1999) when she tells her husband about it, he laughs at her, but she is not offended. She says that it is to be expected in marriage. According to the narrator, she settles for the thought that there is something queer about the house, which relates to her illness, which is nervous depression (Callahan 2018). She confesses that her husband belittles her generally, her ideas and thoughts seem farfetched to him. Being a doctor, he is more practical and rational. He forbids her from doing any work that would exert her, but she thinks that some work.” and exercise would be good for her. The narrator yields to his wishes explaining that, “. “So I take phosphates or phosphites–whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.”

Her journal is a way of escape, and she keeps this a secret from John. She then launches into a description of the house which used to be a nursery, then a gymnasium because of the rings on the wall. Of most concern to the narrator is the ugly wallpaper on the walls of her room. “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.”(Gilman 1999)She thinks that the surrounding of the house is quite beautiful with gardens of flowers. Soon she hears her husband coming, and she is forced to stop her writing.

Weeks pass at the summer house, and the narrator becomes good at hiding her writing from John. She dwells a lot on the wallpaper. At first, John was willing to change it for her sake then changed his mind. He explained that changing it would only yield more complaint from his wife because of her neurotic condition. She starts to imagine people walking around the house which reminds her of her childhood terrors. She focuses on the wallpaper that is torn in some parts and the heavy furniture fixed on the ground. She wanted to take a room on the ground floor, but John wanted an open place for her.

During the Fourth of July holidays, her family comes to visit, leaving her exhausted. Her husband threatens to send her back to the doctor under whose care she suffered a nervous breakdown. She spends most of her days alone, and the wallpaper is the center of her attention. She has made out a pattern on the paper of a woman stooping down on the background. “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.” The main pattern shows the bars of a cage. She gets scared and tries to get John to have them leave, but he always dismissed her concerns (Liu 2018).

The narrator hides her fixation so that no one can investigate it. Jennie, the nurse one day examines the paper because she found yellow stains on the narrator’s clothes. John thinks that his wife’s tranquility is because of her improving condition but she gets less sleep at night and the smell of the wallpaper dominates her senses even when she is outside. She sees the woman in the wallpaper shaking the bars of the cage and manages to escape briefly. The narrator writes, “The front pattern does move–and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 1999) The narrator herself also creeps around the house sometimes.

She becomes paranoid that John and Jennie have discovered her obsession with the wallpaper and she decides to peel it off during the night. The next day, went into a frenzy tearing the paper in an attempt to free the woman stuck inside (Payne 2017). The narrator goes insane, seeing many creeping women and believing herself to have merged from the wallpaper. When her husband comes home and sees her, he faints, and the narrator feels inconvenienced that she has to creep over his body. “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman 1999)

From reading Gilman’s story, the central theme is the importance of self-expression. The narrator was kept under mental and physical constraints so that she could not express herself. The first instance where this is shown is when John laughs at the narrator after she tells him that the house might be haunted. “He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.”(Gilman 1999) The narrator is more imaginative and likes to make stories up in her mind, a fact that John hates and dissuades her from it. John does not believe that his wife, the narrator is actually sick. He tells her family and friends that there is nothing wrong with her, that she only has temporary nervous depression. No one would believe her because both her brother and husband are famous physicians and they have the same diagnosis for her.

The doctors propose that for Gilman to get better, she should take a journey and get plenty of air. She should also avoid all forms of work. She is not given a chance to say what she thinks. She writes, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”(Gilman 1999) Because of this, she takes up writing as a hobby, but she has to keep it a secret. She describes their new summer home, a magnificent mansion but which she thinks must be haunted. When she tells this to John, he tells her that she must be catching a cold and closes the window. When they moved into the house, she had preferred a downstairs room, but her husband would not let her choose. He said that she needs a big airy room with lots of space and therefore they took the room upstairs. The narrator spends her days looking around the house and the grounds and writing about them, but she must put away her writings when she hears her husband. He does not allow her to write because he thinks that she will overexert herself and not get better (Payne 2017).

Gilman gets so fixated on the wallpaper that is yellow and torn in some places. John was willing to have the room repapered so that she would feel better, but later he changed his mind. He told her that she was letting her fancies get the better of her and it would be wrong to give in to the whims of a patient like her (Dennis 2019). After this, the narrator feels guilty for being such a burden on her husband who takes such good care of her; she wishes she could be of better help to him. The narrator also feels very discouraged that she has no one with whom to discuss her writings; she spends most of her days alone. John promised that she could have visitors over when she got better.

Because the narrator has nothing else to do, her days are spent focusing and obsessing on the wallpaper. She begins to make out patterns on the paper, at the forefront there is a cage, and there is a woman behind it. The woman often shakes the bars of the cage trying to escape. Her current imaginations remind her of her childhood when she would lie awake for hours because of her fantasies. She says, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls, and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.” (Hood 2017) She hears Jennie, the nurse, coming up the stairs. Jennie keeps an eye on the narrator and her baby to make sure that she doesn’t exert herself. The narrator describes Jennie as an excellent housekeeper but has no dreams for any other profession (Marston & Rockwell 1991). Jennie is John’s brother and shares his opinion that writing is what made the narrator sick in the first place. Jennie would have been the perfect companion for the narrator, but she is also keen to ensure that the narrator is subdued.

The only time that the narrator was allowed to have guests was during the Fourth of July holiday. Afterward, she was worn out, and her husband thinks of sending her back to Mitchell, a doctor who treated one of his wife’s friends. The narrator is terrified at this thought and cries a lot when she is by herself. However, when her husband is around, she is careful to show herself to be happy and calm. Jennie leaves her alone most of the time, and she lay on the bed focused on the wallpaper. She concentrates on trying to make out the patterns in the wallpaper that sound scary and alarming. She writes, “I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.” (Golden 2013)

The narrator tires of lying down all the time and tries to convince her husband to let her visits her cousins Henry and Julia, but John adamantly refuses to let her go. She cried after, and her husband carried her up to the bed and urged her to calm down. Another day she tried to tell him that she wasn’t improving much in the summer home and they should go back home. John said to her that their home was not yet repaired; therefore they would stay on for a few more weeks. After this, the narrator saw the woman in the cage on the wallpaper trying to escape. She resolved to tear down the wallpaper because she suspected that Jennie and John had discovered her obsession with it. She peeled it off one night, and the day after that, she became insane. She believed that the woman in the wallpaper had escaped with others and they were now creeping around the house (Hood 2017). The narrator similarly began creeping around the house and locked herself in her room.

From the story, the narrator was never allowed to express herself in any way. From the beginning when she got sick, she thought that some work and exercise and work would do her good but her husband and brother had a contrary opinion. When they got to the new summer home, her husband would not let her choose a room of her liking (Gale 2016). He warned her against entertaining her wild imaginations as she was very fragile. She had no choice but to keep her writing a hobby. Her writing would have been an outlet for her pent-up emotions, and she would not have felt so confined. If the narrator had been allowed to express herself, she would have done what she knew would make her heal faster. If John had removed the wallpaper as his wife requested she would not have gone into a frenzy and eventually gone insane. John is primarily to blame for his wife’s insanity; he continually refused to grant any wishes that she made including visiting relatives or even a little work (Liu 2018). Self-expression would have kept her sane.

References

Callahan, A. (2018). Sickness and contamination in The yellow wallpaper and Maggie: a girl of the streets.

Dennis, C. E. (2019). Creativity and Madness: The Misunderstandings Behind Mental Health.

Dosani, S. (2018). The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: a gothic story of postnatal psychosis–psychiatry in literature. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 213(1), 411-411.

Gale, C. L. (2016). A Study Guide for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s” Yellow Wallpaper”. Gale Cengage Learning.

Gilman, C. P. (1999). The yellow wallpaper (p. 328). Project Gutenberg.

Golden, C. J. (2013). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow wall-paper: a sourcebook and critical edition. Routledge.

Hood, R. M. (2017). Invisible Voices: Revising Feminist Approaches to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s” The Yellow Wallpaper” by Including the Narrative of Mental Illness.

Liu, L. (2018). The Women’s Struggle in a Patriarchal Society.

Marston, P. J., & Rockwell, B. (1991). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Rhetorical Subversion in Feminist Literature. Women’s Studies in Communication, 14(2), 58-72.

Payne, S. (2017). Monstrous Maladies”: Oppression, Transgression, and Degeneration in The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Yellow Wallpaper.