The Yellow WallpaperBy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Unit 4

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Background• – Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper after she had a severe

case of postpartum depression• – essentially a response to her doctor, who tried to cure

through a “rest cure”• – “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own

husband assures friends and relative that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervousness depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?... So I take phosphoates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. Personally I disagree with their ideas”

• After Gilman had written “The Yellow Wallpaper” she decided to write an explanation of her purpose or so-what behind the story.

• She says that she based it on her own personal experiences through this disease and “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)

• Here is a quote from that passage that helps explains why Gilman had to publish another article in order to explain why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

• “[A] Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

• Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)

Feminism

• In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author uses a number of literary devices to express the political theme of feminism and the oppression of women.

• To achieve her goal of expressing feminist sentiment in The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman creates a narrator who is at once expressive about her feelings but is also prone to devaluing her own assessments.

• Gilman was a women’s rights activist in the late 1800’s and she used her fiction to raise feminist issues and to bring about a change in their circumstances.

• In The Yellow Wallpaper she tells a story of a woman entrapped within the confines of her marriage and her expected roles as a woman and it is this perhaps that causes the woman’s madness.

Liberation Through Language

• Gilman saw language as a powerful political tool; she wanted to use it to emancipate the Victorian women:

• I wrote to preach…• One girl reads this, and takes fire! Her life is changed.

She becomes a power -• a mover of others - I write for her. [1]• Gilman desired to build a world unknown to her

contemporaries; one where women were not imprisoned within the domestic domain. For her, language was an instrument to incite revolution among women.

• The woman in the story is incarcerated by her female body. She is trapped, having to act out the role expected of her by society.

• She does not feel equipped for a life of being a perpetual wife and mother. Her womanly body is not suited to the impassioned and creative mind that she has.

• Her stillness and stagnation cause her mind to weaken and lose the insight it once had. The tight corset of a Victorian dress tightens and constricts her just as her life style does.

• The narrator’s entrapment within her feminine role is represented by the jail like qualities of the room in which she stays. These are described by the narrator after she asks her husband to remove the offending wallpaper:

• He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead,and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

• John, the narrator’s husband, treats her like a child. The narrator is subject to her subjugation as wife to her husband constantly throughout the story. The bars on the windows and the gate on the stairs represent the lack of freedom she has within her life and marriage.

• The marital bed is nailed down to the floor; this implies that she has no choice but to perform conjugal rites with her husband. She is to remain passive while she is dominated by the male.

The Woman in the Wallpaper

As the narrator deteriorates she begins to see a woman within the wallpaper. At night the woman is seen shaking the bars within the pattern, fighting to break free. These are the barriers that need to be broken down in order to reach a state of female emancipation.

• For the narrator liberation lies within the power of language; language is a symbol of freedom, the freedom to express oneself, and so then, to realize oneself. The narrator uses writing to purge herself of her pent up anxieties:

I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able

And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief. [4]

• The wallpaper and its dizzy pattern represent language. Many feminists critics have said that language is phallocentric (male dominated) and that women have to find a new way of appropriating it in order to express the true sense of their thoughts and emotions.

• The woman trapped within the wallpaper represents the Victorian women trapped within their feminine roles unable to break down the barriers of language to be able to freely express themselves.

• However at the end of the story the woman is liberated so there is hope that through the use of language women could one day be free of their constraints.

• Gilman was able to alter medical practices with The Yellow Wallpaper and says that she has “saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”) She was also using it to represent the oppression of women in a masculine society.

• Also the doctor that had applying the “rest cure” to her altered his treatment for neurasthenia or postpartum depression.

• Gilman was later diagnosed with incurable breast cancer and she killed herself with an overdose of chloroform rather then letting others be in charge of her life.

• You may want to watch this on You Tube:

• The Yellow Wallpaper PBS Masterpiece Theater 1989 ... - YouTube

• There are a few parts……