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Chu Hwang
Professor Railton
ENAM 312
6 March 2002
Inescapable Childhood: Effects of Male Domination in The Yellow Wall-Paper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper has commonly been interpreted as a
woman’s attempt to break away from male-dominated nineteenth century American society.
Throughout the story, the Gilman portrays the narrator to be an infantile, childlike woman who is
nursed and petted by male authorities such as her husband John. The context in which the
narrator is placed, her actions and behaviors, and the writing style of the narrator in her journal
all highlight the childlike qualities she possesses because of male domination of her life. At the
end of the story, although the narrator makes an attempt to tear down male domination by
stripping the patterned yellow wallpaper off the wall, she remains a child as John finds her
“creeping” around the room. Despite the narrator’s attempt to escape the care and restraint she
receives from males, she does not grow up by the end of the story.
The narrator’s characteristics and the context in which Gilman places her reveal the fact
that the narrator is childlike under the rule of her husband. Gilman highlights the fact that the
narrator has become a child in the male-dominated society by placing her in the nursery of the
colonial mansion that her husband has rented for the summer; burdening her with mental
instability; and creating the character Jennie who acts as her nanny and nurse. For the summer,
the narrator lives in the nursery of the house, a room that had been previously used for the
children, a fact that she observes in her journal: “It was a nursery first and then playroom and
gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and
things on the wall” (668). Averse to the hideous yellow wallpaper in the nursery, she is forced to
sleep in the room by John the male authority and she submits to his reasoning the living in the
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room is fine without repapering: “‘You know the place is doing you good and really, dear, I
don’t care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental’” (669). The narrator’s placement
in a nursery forces a childlike appearance on her character, as does her mental instability. At the
beginning of the story, the narrator informs the reader of her sickness or mental illness that
makes her less than rational. Irrationality is often associated with young children; thus the
narrator’s mental state makes her seem like a child, who is not yet capable of rational thought.
The narrator sounds as irrational as a toddler in its terrible twos phase: “I’m getting dreadfully
fretful and querulous. I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (671). She even notices that
her illness seems to have made her inexplicably more irritable when she writes “I get
unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is
due to this nervous condition” (668). Because of her sickness, she must be taken care of. Jennie
functions as her nanny just as Mary functions as the nanny for the narrator’s baby. Jennie’s care
for the narrator, which is authorized by her husband, further emphasizes the childlike qualities
she has adopted in the male-dominated society. These qualities are also enhanced by the
narrator’s behavior.
The actions and behavior of the narrator portray her as a child in a woman’s body. Her
vivid imagination and her deference to John, who seems like a paternal figure, are instances of
her childlike actions. The narrator’s imagination is extremely vivid and irrational, similar to that
of a child. She imagines the colonial mansion to be a haunted house (667), that she can see
people strolling along the empty garden paths around the house (669), and that the pattern on the
yellow wall-paper traces out a woman struggling to break from behind the bars (674). In fact,
while imagining about the furniture, she is reminded of her fancies as a child: “I used to lie
awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture….
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I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one
chair that always seemed like a strong friend” (670). The narrator’s imagination is reflective of
her childlike behavior, as is her deference to John. Gilman distorts the narrator’s marriage to
John into a father-child relationship. She treats her husband as though he were a father figure—
she never disobeys him in his presence; instead, like a child, she seems to derive a sense of joy
from secretly disobeying him. When John observes that she seems to be getting better despite
the wallpaper, she writes, “I turned [the comment] off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling
him it was because of the wall-paper” (675). The narrator plays the role of the child as she tries
to obey or put on the appearance of obeying her father figure; the husband likewise actively
plays the role of the paternal figure when he treats her as a young child. John not only gives her
caring, fatherly advice on how to take care of herself, but also the language he uses for her is one
that a father would use towards his daughter. He calls her a “blessed little goose” (669) and
when he catches her out of bed in the middle of the night, he says “‘What is it, little girl? Don’t
go walking about like that—you’ll get cold’” (672-3). John’s use of language for a child to
address his wife and her deference to him as a father figure both reinforce her symbolic role as a
child in the story.
The narrator’s own style of writing in her journal, in which she constantly corrects herself
and repeats herself, also reflects the child’s role that she is forced to play in a male-dominated
society. The narrator’s habit of correcting herself is reminiscent of a young child who has
spoken falsely or done something wrong and must make amends. In accordance with John’s
wishes, she tries to control her imagination and thoughts. Instead of describing their summer
house as a “haunted house” directly, she writes that she “would say a haunted house” (667)
because she knows John would disapprove. When she starts to think about her mental state, she
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stops herself and her writing style portrays that she is actively trying to refrain herself from
contemplating restricted thoughts: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less
opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think
about my condition, and I confess it makes me feel bad” (667). By correcting herself and
stopping her thoughts in her journal writings, the writing style reveals a childlike deference and
attitude towards John, the male authority and paternal figure. The writing style of the narrator is
also repetitive, which creates the effect of a child stumbling over thoughts and words. In one
journal entry, the narrator sounds like a child trying to keep herself from writing by repeating her
reluctance to write: “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able”
(671-2). The repetition of her thoughts which she writes in her journal show how her mind
seems to function like a child who is unable to put aside unwanted, trivial thoughts. The narrator
obsessive thoughts about the yellow wallpaper seem to be a child’s play of counting the number
of tiles on the bathroom floor: “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper.
Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so! …I start, we’ll say, at the bottom,
down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth
time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” (671). The repetitive
nature of her thoughts and words and her habit of constantly correcting herself reveal that the
narrator’s childlike thoughts.
Even at the end of the story, the narrator is still repeating herself like a child. When John
is trying to open the nursery room door, the narrator tells him that “‘the key is down by the front
steps, under a plantain leaf.’” She “said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said
it so often that he had to go and see” (678); reiterating her statement to John makes the narrator
seem like a young girl trying to convince her disbelieving parents; furthermore, the concentrated
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repetition, slowly and gently, is a child’s attempt to sound rational and adult-like in order to
convince authority figures, as the narrator is trying to do. The story ends with the narrator still as
a child despite her effort to free the women behind the patterned bars in the yellow wallpaper.
Gilman also places her in the same context and with similar childlike characteristics and
behavior at the end as in the beginning. To show that she is still the child symbolically, the
narrator locks herself in the nursery, the children’s room. She remains mentally unstable and
very imaginative as she sees the women in the wallpaper creeping out the window (678). Even
though she has freed the women in the wallpaper, she is still deferential to her male authority
husband: after John repeatedly asks the narrator to open the door to the nursery, she obeys him
like a child and tells him where to find the key (678). Meanwhile, she is creeping around the
walls of the nursery like the women crawling off the yellow wallpaper that she tore off. Unlike
the freed women, the narrator is unable to creep out the window because she recognizes that no
one in nineteenth century American society would understand her actions: “To jump out of the
window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to even try. Besides I wouldn’t
do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be
misconstrued” (678). Once again, like a child, the narrator corrects her delinquent thoughts to
conform to the rationality that John, her parent figure, had taught her. The women creeping out
the window have been freed from the wallpaper; the narrator’s creeping only reinforces her
symbolic figure as a child. Unable to escape the male-dominated society and still a child, she
ends up crawling in the nursery.
Gilman uses the narrator as a child symbolically in The Yellow Wall-Paper. By placing
her in the nursery in the care of her “nanny” Jennie, questioning her mental stability, giving her a
vivid imagination, turning her marital relationship with John to a father-child relationship, and
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creating a childlike writing style for the narrator in her journal, Gilman portrays the narrator a
woman in a male-dominated society as a constrained and helpless child. In the story, as the
narrator comes to the realization of her constraint in this society, she does not grow up to be an
adult woman; instead, unable to escape from her prison, she only sinks further in her mental
instability until the end of the story in which she is crawling in the nursery and tearing down the
wallpaper like a toddler. Using the childlike narrator, Gilman’s story highlights the stifling
nature of a male-dominated society and she provides little hope in the end for what she sees as an
overwhelming and immovable barrier against women’s freedom.
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Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Anthology of American Literature.
7th ed. Comp. and ed. George McMichael, J.C. Levenson, Leo Marx, David E. Smith,
Mae Miller Claxton, and Susan Bunn. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
2000.