THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" was rejected by the editor of Atlantic Monthly because the story made him miserable. It was originally seen as a Poe-like gothic tale, but it is now considered a classic story of a woman suffering postpartum depression and improperly treated with isolation and inactivity. Narratives of supernatural horror were a staple of magazines at the turn of the century, and Gilman's story—published in 1892 in The New England Magazine, in 1899 as a chapbook, and later by William Dean Howells in a 1920 story collection—was read without attention to the gender of the unnamed protagonist. It was revived by Feminist Press after being out of print for 70 years and is now one of the most often read and written-about stories of feminist consciousness.

Gilman, an influential economist, lecturer, and publisher, experienced depression from the time of her first marriage to Charles Walter Stetson, and the depression intensified after their daughter was born. Like Winifred Howells, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams, Gilman was sent to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, whose "cures" for women were world famous. But Mitchell's treatment—a rest cure that depended on seclusion, massage, immobility, and overfeeding, with some women gaining 50 pounds during the six weeks of hospitalization—had at its root complete mental inactivity. Along with the pervasive medical attitude that women's problems all stemmed from hysteria and were based on the womb, it was this stricture that bothered Gilman the most.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" shows how well cared for the unnamed protagonist is by her authoritarian husband John, who is conveniently a physician, and her physician-brother, as well as by her stereotypical, loving sister-in-law, who enjoys caring for the new baby as well as for the sick protagonist. But the woman's own views of what she would like—to see friends, to write, to read—are completely discounted, and her husband's treatment, like his language throughout the tale, is truly patriarchal. His wife is his child, and she does not know even the simplest things about what ails her. His use of diminutive names for her ("blessed little goose," "little girl") parallels his unresponsive replies. Listening to her is the last thing on his mind. Gilman provides several interchanges so that the self-serving qualities of his role are clear. After the woman tells him that she is no better, contrary to his reassurances, he replies: "Bless her little heart! She shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"

Shut off from all normal interaction and locked into what John calls a nursery but what smacks of a space used previously for incarceration, the woman fantasizes in a particularly meaningful way. She sees imprisoned women who are trying to escape from the morass of crumbling, yellowed wallpaper that covers the surfaces of her prison. The diseased and stifling yellow, the meaningless patterns—which the bored woman tries to make sense of and which, therefore, create the narrative of the trapped imaginary women—and the omnipresence of the gloomy wall covering and its moldy smell would predictably augment a depressed person's malaise. The paper comes to symbolize her utter lack of power in the social construct. Her husband John has the knowledge, earns the money, and makes the decisions. She has no role except to be his wife and the mother of his child, and when she rejects these roles through the excuse of illness, he is more angry than concerned.

Gilman's brilliant use of the unnamed protagonist's voice, during a period when very few texts were written in any kind of first person, involves the reader in the woman's process of figuring out what is happening to her. At first she writes with humility, carefully sneaking out her forbidden journal. She says all of the expected things: her husband is understanding and knowledgeable, and she is at fault for not responding to his care. But then a tone of minor complaint enters her writing. Though she does not attack John directly, she knows at heart that her own treatment would have better results than his is having, and her impatience and frustration at his not listening to her colors her narrative.

But her focus then shifts away from herself and her impasse with John and the medical forces he represents, and she begins to explore her fascination with the woman trapped, as she herself is, behind the wallpaper pattern. In the second half of the narrative her attention is focused on seeing whether the woman behind the wallpaper can escape and on whether she can help the woman to escape. The woman then becomes women, and there are many trapped women trying to escape. In this transactional identification the protagonist begins voicing her real anger at her husband and her society. Because she has been convinced that what John does is best for her, she cannot express anger in her own persona, and so she creates a fantasy woman who is also caught in a similar imprisonment of male authority.

By the time she takes action, crawling around the room and tearing off pieces of the hated, imprisoning wallpaper, the reader is firmly in the protagonist's camp. Her triumphal crawling over her shocked husband's body, when he faints at the destruction she has created in the room and at what her behavior implies for her "recovery," seems to be a genuine triumph until rational meaning returns to the reader. Gilman has created so much sympathy for the protagonist that the reader has accepted her mind-set. Just as the woman sees her destruction and her leaving the room as a triumph, so does the reader.

The carefully modulated voice of the protagonist, writing secretly in her forbidden journal, is an amazingly effective means of telling the complicated story. This is a narrative with no simple right and wrong, no clear protagonist and antagonist, for John "loves" his wife and assumes that taking her to the country is a sure way of restoring her strength. In writing it Gilman created a fable that explains inductively that women have rights, knowledge, and talents that need to be respected and employed. One of the primary themes of her book Women and Economics (1898) is that women need work that has value in the marketplace and that their domestic work also needs to be given value. Otherwise, they face the plight of this fictional protagonist, who is nameless, faceless, and characterless, a cipher in the work and the life of the real world.

—Linda Wagner-Martin