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The topic of Feminism in literature can start to get as old as topics of racism and
tolerance can. Their social impact has been achieved and literature’s mission has been
accomplished. President Barak Obama, First Lady Michele, Supreme Court Nominee
Sotomayer, State Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton are proof of this. The
stuff that women of fiction did in the 19th century doesn’t seem so unusual compared to
what goes on with real women in the 21st century. In “A Doll’s House,” Nora slams the
door to walk out on her family. The chilling moment of this ending loses its effect today.
Today, Mrs. Mallard’s heart failure in “The Story of an Hour” is almost predictable. But
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is still new when placed next to
other feminist works of literature, even over one hundred years after it was first published
in the United States.
What makes this short story stand apart from other feminist literature? It is
Gilman’s literary achievement. She tells a good story that grabs a reader the way that
Poe’s short stories can. (Snodgrass) Gilman’s mixture in style of psychological realism
with gothic horror establishes her meaning while gripping and haunting her reader. The
psychological realism is intensified in the “diary” (Knight) form of the protagonist who is
suffering a nervous breakdown. Her eerie psyche deepens with the presence of the
gothic, (Snodgrass) the ghost of a creeping woman in the wallpaper of the nursery in the
ancestral house in the garden in isolation behind gates. All of these parts of the setting in
the story add to the psychological realism when they are interpreted. These parts also
create a gothic mood.
Dr. L. Kip Wheeler’s definition of psychological realism matches up to the
woman and the story of “Yellow Wallpaper”: There is a “sense that characters in fictional
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narratives have realistic ‘interiority’ or complex emotional and intellectual depth,
including perhaps subconscious urges and fears they are not aware of.” The woman
reveals herself through both her inner thoughts and outside circumstances as she sneaks
to write her “diary entries” (Knight): “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say
it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—
perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am
sick!” (Gilman). This woman of “intellectual depth” (Wheeler) senses the irony in her
situation because her husband doctor (who believes that she is healthy) is truly the one
making her more and more sick. Early in this feminist story of psychological realism
Gilman has established the “complex emotional ‘interiority’” (Wheeler) and
circumstances of a woman who is up against the two men most closely related to her, a
husband and a brother, and they are both physicians “of high standing” (Gilman). Yet
she has the “subconscious urge” (Wheeler) to write despite her unknown “fear”
(Wheeler) of her brother and husband: She will “write…in spite of them…having to be
so sly about it or else meet with their heavy opposition” (Gilman). Writing in her “diary”
is a way for her to fill her “urge” to escape her “fear”.
D’Ammassa writes of the mental health of the sick woman of the story as “the
psychology of the narrator-protagonist.” Gilman can write so honestly and realistically
as narrator-protagonist because she herself had been treated for “despondency and
postpartum depression” (Werlock). She experienced first hand “the psychological
subjugations caused by some marriages and some entries into motherhood” (Werlock).
Though she speaks of her husband’s tender loving care for her, his overpowering
presence in her life is right there if a reader looks for it. Her “brother…says the same
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thing” as what “John says” and “John says” a lot to his wife in this story. John is a great
talker. John “thought” and “John said”. John “absolutely forbids” her, he “assures
friends and relatives” about her, “John laughs at” her and “scorns openly” her “talk”
(Gilman). “John says” many times over many things directly opposite of what his wife
says. She wants to meet with stimulating company, get out of doors, work, and get
physical activity but John disagrees with all of this. It seems he says much as the
husband master but never listens to his wife subject whose opinion does not count at all.
Finally, “John hates for” her “to write a word” (Gilman). “Deprived of the freedom to
write openly, which she believes would be therapeutic, the narrator gradually shifts her
attention to the yellow wallpaper in the attic nursery where she spends her time”
(Knight).
This is where the gothic aspect of the story starts to kick in. Gilman “concentrates
so completely on the psychology of the narrator-protagonist that the events described
could be either supernatural or delusional” (D’Ammassa). This psychological
concentration makes room for the gothic atmosphere of the story. Gilman’s writing
becomes gothic in its “design…to thrill readers by providing mystery and …accounts
of… villainy …and the supernatural” (Wheeler). John’s actions make him a villain. He
insists on the “rest cure” and limits his wife to loneliness in the nursery. Soon, the pattern
in the wall paper becomes the bars that confine her in her prison. (D’Ammassa) The
power he uses over his wife is like the torturer in a dungeon. And the nursery itself is
“redefined” to make “the home as an alien space, an extension of the gothic dungeon”
(Snodgrass) or a remote castle tower. Gilman’s narrator-protagonist and her husband
John in the “haunted house” form the perfect gothic marriage. The “female characters
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are threatened by powerful or impetuous male figures, and description functions through
a metonymy of fear by presenting details designed to evoke horror, disgust, or terror”
(Wheeler). The setting of the “ancestral halls” of a “colonial mansion, a hereditary
estate” also opens the story with a hint of the gothic. “It is quite alone standing well back
from the road, quite three miles from the village…[and] there are hedges and walls and
gates that lock” (Gilman). According to J A Cuddon, this is another “convention of
gothic literature.” To “include wild and desolate landscapes, ancient buildings such as
castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways;
apparitions, phantoms;…an atmosphere of brooding gloom…” (Wheeler) John and his
sister Jennie seem like the jailers who trap the wife/sister four times over within the
hedges within the walls, within the nursery, within the bed against her will. Snodgrass
explains the meaning behind these gothic suggestions as they relate to the woman
psychologically: “As a symbol of claustrophobic oppression, the author's unnamed
character, a new mother struggling for selfhood, passes through a hedge, locked gates,
and an entranceway before languishing in total seclusion, like a scolded child returned to
a suffocating womb.” That is why the nursery is a symbol. She is being treated like a
child. Werlock calls this “infantilization.” Once the woman reaches this point of
entrapment, according to the rules of gothic writing, the yellow wallpaper becomes the
“metonymy of fear” for both the narrator and the reader.
It is a psychological horror for anyone to be victimized. When the woman
actually keeps a diary that describes step by step her increasing fear and madness it is
both psychological and horrible. Since John says she isn’t supposed to dwell on her
illness and he forces her to rest in her room, she switches her attention to the house and
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then more and more to the wallpaper. Therefore, as a “metonymy of fear,” the yellow
wallpaper becomes the central symbol to this story in a psychological and gothic way.
The woman at first only notices how ugly the yellow wallpaper is after she has described
the rest of the nursery. But the wallpaper slowly becomes her obsession. She describes
it, then personifies it, then gives it a life, then interacts with it. “…the patient nurses a
dormant rage. To vent her fury, she redirects hatred toward the arabesque wallpaper
(Snodgrass). The words of the wallpaper really describe words that are like her
husband’s relationship with her. “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). “She
speaks indirectly of the insidious misery of marriage and hints at coercion and violence in
terms of the hideous wallpaper” (Snodgrass). "You think you have mastered it, but just
as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It
slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream"
(Gilman). In this passage, the reader soon realizes that in her mind the woman connects
the wallpaper to her husband because he has “trampled” her true nature. He refused to
give her space for her creativity, sociability, and independence. She was forbidden to
write, see other company, or work. Behind the psychological portrait is the message
“that institutionalization within four walls to punish sensitive, creative women for being
themselves is a sure route to madness” (Snodgrass). The wife tried to get around her
husband “through a series of rebellious acts” (D’Ammassa) and her final rebellion is to
release the creeping woman from the pattern of the wallpaper.
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Snodgrass calls the creeping woman a doppleganger of the narrator-protagonist.
A doppelganger is a theory and a literary technique that works for both the psychological
realism and gothic of this story. It “describes a character whose divided mind or
personality is represented as two characters” (Quinn). The psychological realism works
if the woman goes crazy and hallucinates about the creeping woman. This is where one
character is imagining a “double image” of herself. On the gothic level, the creeping
woman is a ghost, a second character, trying to escape the wallpaper and the sympathetic
woman is desperate to help her out. Either way, Gilman achieves both effects on the
reader to double the spookiness they feel. If the woman has gone out of her mind in this
way it is eerie, and if the creeping woman is a ghost, it does seem to be evil like it is
taking possession of the protagonist’s soul. “Whether this breakdown was inherent in
her situation or whether the wallpaper possessed some latent power to influence the mind
of the living is left to the reader's interpretation” (D’Ammassa).
Other scholars like to interpret the psychology and the gothic in drawing meaning
from the end of the story. Showalter focuses on locked door: “Charlotte Gilman's
heroine, and for many of their sisters in literature, a room of one's own is a prison as well
as a sanctuary. Psychologically enfeebled by their conditioning, they dare not defy
society to do and say what they want; they struggle in a vague way to be let out of their
rooms, but never understand that by this time the doors are locked from the inside.”
Showalter thinks that the woman’s mind is forever shut down in its madness by her
husband and by society. Knight also sees the victory of the husband over his wife: “John
breaks into the room and, after witnessing the full measure of his wife's insanity, faints.
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Significantly, however, he is still blocking his wife, literally and symbolically obstructing
her path so that she has to "creep over him every time!" He further explains the defeat.
“While some critics have hailed the narrator as a feminist heroine, others have seen in her
a maternal failure coupled with a morbid fear of female sexuality. Some have viewed the
story, with its yellow paper, as an exemplar of the silencing of women writers in 19thcentury America…”
Golden also focuses on the closing words of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by
explaining an illustration (done by the artist Hatfield) that was included with early
publications of the story. Golden contrasts the appearance of the woman in the first two
illustrations to the third and final illustration of the “endpiece” that is captioned, "I had to
creep over him every time."
The dramatic shift in the portrayal of the narrator between the first two drawings
and the third suggests that the narrator succumbs to full-blown madness at an
alarming rate and passes through "the gradations from slight mental derangement
to raving lunacy,"… The illustration captures the narrator in an act very different
than covert writing: creeping on the floor in front of and over John. Conveying a
decrepit eeriness, her long and wild dark hair has been freed from the constraints
of its late Victorian-style coiffure to accentuate her madness…Although there are
no indications of a change in the narrator's appearance in the text…, Hatfield's
depiction responds to the traditional conception of the long- and wild-haired
madwoman in literature…(Golden)
Showalter: “"The woman, of course, is herself, trying to break out of her life; but
she can do so only by being mad. In the story's terrifying conclusion, she locks
herself in her room, systematically ripping the paper off the walls. In the role of
madness, she can express her aggressions against her husband; and when at
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last he breaks into the room, and faints in shock at the sight of her, there is a
triumph in her narrative. Yet she is truly mad; she has defeated him only by
destroying herself.”
Conclusion: Feminism achieved gothic and psychological realism=artistic
greatness
“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,
and it worked.” (Gilman “Why I Wrote…”)
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