Literary Analysis Of The Feminist Text "The Yellow Wallpaper" By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
According to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper" has been first published 1899 by Small & Maynard, Boston, MA. "The Yellow Wallpaper” was a feminist break though and interpretation of the symbolism and it was regarded primarily as a supernatural tale of horror and insanity in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. Charlotte Perkins Gilman based the story on her experience with a "rest cure" for mental illness. The "rest cure" inspired her to write a critique of the medical treatment prescribed to women suffering from a condition then known as "neurasthenia" (Golden).
In fact, it praised the work as "one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century the woman who directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship". Nearly all of these critics acknowledge the story as a feminist text written in protest of the negligent treatment of women by a patriarchal society. However, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator suffers from depression following the birth of her child. Her husband, John, diagnoses her behavior as “hysteria.” He prescribes her rest and leases a house in the country for her convalescence, and it was on its surface, about a woman driven insane by postpartum depression and a dangerous treatment.
However, an examination of the protagonist’s characterization reveals that the story is fundamentally about identity. The protagonist’s projection of an imaginary woman which at first is merely her shadow against the bars of the wallpaper’s pattern fragments her identity, internalizing the conflict she experiences and eventually leading to the complete breakdown of the boundaries of her identity and that of her projected shadow.
On July 3, 1860, Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the leading intellectual in the women’s movement during the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Her father was Frederick Beecher Perkins, and her mother was Mary Fitch Westcott. The Beecher’s, including her early role model, Harriet Beecher Stowe, influenced her social convictions. In her later life as a writer, she was continued to distrust her imaginative side, although she occasionally gave it freedom.
In 1882 Gilman met Walter Stetson, who proposed marriage less than three weeks after their first meeting. Although Stetson respected Gilman and understood her objections to a traditional marriage, it was not to be a happy union. Gilman was pregnant within a few weeks, and she was subject to extreme fits of depression throughout the pregnancy and afterward. She began to feel more and more a prisoner—not of her husband but of the institution of marriage—and trial separations and treatment of her “nerves” failed to help.
In 1886, Gilman had a breakdown and was treated for hysteria by neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who prescribed totaled rest and abstinence from work. Despite the treatment, Gilman grew worse and feared for her sanity. She decided to take matters into her hands, separated from Stetson, and moved to California, where she began to publish and lecture on the economic and domestic dependence of women. Next, the failed marriage was to be the inspiration for several poems that helped established Gilman’s reputation and for her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which has become her most widely anthologized work. At the time of its publication in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" got the most out of reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is important to grasp the historical context of Gilman’s story. Since that time, Gilman's story has been discussed by literary critics from a wide range of perspectives, including biographical, historical, psychological, feminist, semiotic, and socio-cultural.
During the late 19th century, women were considered weaker than men, both physically and mentally, and were allowed very little personal agency. Through the narrator of the short story realizes she has an illness; her husband’s feelings of expertise and superiority prevent her from obtaining treatment. Even her diagnosis of “hysteria” is rooted in her society’s understanding of women’s health and anatomy. Late 19th-century expectations regarding marital roles and mental health laid the groundwork for this story. During the 1890s, Gilman published the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” based on her breakdown and rest treatment. Hereafter, Gilman suffered bouts of depression stemming from her desire to work as artist, writer, and advocate of women’s rights and the conflict between this desire and her more traditional role as wife and mother.
One strategy Gilman uses is the wallpaper as a symbol of the narrator’s confinement. The wallpaper can also be seen to symbolize the narrator’s mind. After some time, the narrator sees the pattern of her bedroom’s yellow wallpaper as a series of bars, imprisoning the shape of a woman behind them. The narrator and the trapped woman can be interpreted. For example, she writes," I pulled, and she shook, and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” Her audience values the yellow wallpaper on a personal level as a wife with a controlling husband and on a systemic level as a woman in a controlling society.
Symbolically, this reflects the values of the society in which the narrator lives. They value this because when the narrator pulls at the yellow wallpaper, the trapped woman shakes it. Conversely, when the narrator shakes it, the trapped woman pulls. The woman trapped behind the wallpaper’s pattern mirrors the repressed female self-trapped in a patriarchal society. Although the narrator may not realize it, her act of pulling down the wallpaper serves as an act of defiance. By trying to free this woman, she is trying to free herself. On a larger thematic scale, her act demonstrates how she wants to break free of the societal restrictions holding her back. The narrator’s eventual assumption of the trapped woman’s identity can be read as symbolic of the narrator's reclamation of her independence, grim as it may be.
Thus, by using the word choice” creeping” done by the woman in the wallpaper is a physical display of the childlike helplessness the narrator has been pushed into by her husband and her illness. When it is later revealed that the narrator herself has been creeping around her room, it becomes ambiguous whether the narrator is consistently seeing the shape of a woman in the wallpaper or is, in fact, reacting to her shadow. John’s frequent absences and the eventual revelation that he is aware of the narrator’s nighttime wakefulness allow for the possibility that her delusions have been brought on by interacting with her shadow. If this is true, the ultimate truth of the story—that the narrator is the woman in the wallpaper—carries a physical as well as psychological dimension. For example, she wrote: “It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” experiences her struggle in a deeply personal arena: her home and mind. However, passages such as this one suggest that she recognizes the broader implications of her experiences and the potential effects they have on other women. In specifying that “most women do not creep by daylight,” she seems to suggest that most other women do still “creep,” or crawl, just not when they can be seen. While the narrator goes on to describe herself crawling around her room, the phrasing prompts readers to consider how all women are reduced to creeping in some ways, even if they take great care not to be noticed. This passage reinforces the symbolism of “creeping” as an act of subjugation and shows the narrator’s growing awareness that many elements of her confinement are because of her gender.
In the second rhetorical element of the start of the story, another strategy Gilman uses the house in which the narrator and her husband stay symbolize the society that confines the narrator. The house can be read as a physical representation of the relationship between the narrator’s body and mind. Initially, the narrator wants a room on the first floor of the house with roses by the window. She also wishes to engage with the world outside herself: she wants to see friends and work on her writing. Instead, the narrator is forced to stay on the second floor of the house in a large, disordered room with visible damage and distractingly ugly wallpaper. Similarly, the narrator is denied creative stimulation and driven to fixate on her mental state.
Another strategy Gilman uses dramatic irony in describing the narrator’s relationship with her husband. Although John seems to care about his wife’s well-being, he actively hampers her treatment by placing her on a rest cure. While he insists that she needs to stop “working” until she recovers, the narrator suffers from boredom and becomes easily exhausted by having to keep her writing secret. Her lack of agency exacerbates her condition, driving her to tears and hopelessness. Over time, as the narrator’s independence grows through her solitary struggles with the wallpaper, she seems to become aware of the irony of her situation: that her husband, the medical expert, is completely unaware of his wife’s true state. However, she uses is assumptions the conventions of the psychological horror tale to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially as practiced by the “respectable” classes of her time.
When the story was first published, most readers took it as a scary tale about a woman in an extreme state of consciousness—a gripping, disturbing entertainment, but little more. After its rediscovery in the twentieth century, however, readings of the story have become more complex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their full development. John’s assumption of his superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her.
The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she retreats into her obsessive fantasy, the only place she can retain some control and exercise the power of her mind. Gilman uses metaphors, images, and the basic plot of the story leave a reader with a female character that has broken out in triumph over an oppressive set of male characters. She makes her way through a hobby of writing and finds individuality against the norms of her society.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text because it promotes new ideas from Gilman and challenges old ideas about women’s position in society. Gilman shows a female heroine that overcomes oppression in many forms to find her opportunities for personal choice. The text inspires its reader at many levels, but most importantly, it exposes ugly and unnoticed social conventions that are second-nature to its male characters. The story promotes Gilman’s agenda for change, and it illustrates a woman’s struggle to find equal opportunity in society.
