The Feminist’s lnner-Conflict Success in Personal Experiences:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Wanwadee Chaichankul

Abstract
This essay focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman‟s novel: The Yellow Wallpaper. The novel is a
story of a woman which presents a very interesting perspective of how a man can influence a
woman‟s life from a feminist‟s point of view, but with a present day interpretation can be given a
whole new depth because many conflicts flow from being woman against man to a struggle of
woman against herself so that she may successfully win the battle of person against society. By
feminizing the values, attitudes, and sensibilities of education, as well as the content, methodology,
and
philosophy, Gilman hoped to end gender discrepancies within society by creating a fundamentally
new woman. This story should hold a place in every woman‟s heart who is struggling to find her
stability in that time and this time, as well.
Keywords: feminist; inner-conflict success; personal experiences; stability
Introduction
The female perspective of today has changed quite substantially. The women of today compete
for the same jobs that men do and this causes them to take care of themselves and fight for
themselves. Since women today are a part of work community, men are forced to reckon with
the reality that women are as capable and stable as men. This idea has been fought for a long
time. The most reflection has taken place in various women‟s novels that convey to many
valuable pages of history in each era.
Chalotte Perkins Gilman (Ann, 1997) was a prominent social and feminist writer in the United
States from the 1890s through the 1930s. In The Yellow Wallpaper, originally published in 1899,
she presents the internal dialogue of a woman diagnosed with hysteria. Though The Yellow
Wallpaper is a work of fiction, it was based on Gilman‟s own experience after being diagnosed as
an hysteric and prescribed a “rest cure” which prohibited her writing and labeled her feminism and
social critique as symptoms of uterine illness. Gilman recovered from her illness and went on to
write influential social theses, including Woman and Economics (1898), and a feminist novel,
Herland (1915), which has become a classic of American women‟s literature.
Character List
The followings are the important characters appearing in The Yellow Wallpaper. (King, & Pam,
1999)

Associate Professor Dr., English Department, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University, Director, Research and Development Institute,
Bansomdejchoapraya Rajabhat University
Narrator
Modeled after Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a young
wife and mother who has recently began to suffer symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Although she does not believe that anything is wrong with her, John, her physicia n husband,
diagnoses her with neurasthenia and prescribes several months of S. Weir Mitchell‟s famed
“rest cure.”
In addition to being confined to the nursery in their rented summer home, the narrator is
expressly forbidden to write or engage in any creative activity. The narrator desperately wants
to please her husband and assumes her role as an ideal mother and wife, but she is unable to
balance her husband‟s needs with her desire to express her creativity. While attempting to
adhere to John‟s wishes for the most part, the narrator secretly writes in her journal, seeking
solace from her extreme loneliness and inactivity.
Over the course of the story, the narrator also begins to find comfort in the hideous yellow
wallpaper that covers the walls of the nursery. She gradually begins to see a female figure
trapped behind the bar-like pattern of the wallpaper and realizes that both she and the figure
are suffering from oppression and imprisonment. As the narrator becomes more and more
preoccupied with the pattern of the wallpaper, she forgets her desire to become the perfect
wife and mother and thinks only of a way to release the imprisoned woman from the
wallpaper. Gilman‟s increasingly choppy prose and disjointed stream-of-consciousness
express the narrator‟s growing insanity with each passing day. By the end of the story, the
narrator has lost all sense of reality, and John discovers her creeping around the perimeter of
the nursery, following the endless pattern of the wallpaper. While she discards her duty as a
wife and mother, as well as her sanity, the narrator ultimately triumphs in her personal quest
to release the woman in the wallpaper - and thus liberates herself.
Gilman suggests that the narrator's liberation from sanity and the bars of the wallpaper also
means an "escape" from her own sense of self.
John
The husband of the narrator, John is a practical physician who believes that his wife is
suffering from nothing more than a “slight hysterical tendency.” He prescribes the “rest cure,”
confining the narrator to the nursery and forbidding her to exercise her creative imagination in
any way. His antagonism toward her imagination stems from his own rationality and personal
anxiety about creativity; he scoffs openly at the narrator‟s fancies and is incapable of
understanding her true nature.
Throughout the story, he treats her in an infantile manner, referring to her as his “blessed little
goose” and “little girl.” Moreover, when the narrator attempts to discuss her unhappiness with
the situation in a mature manner, he refuses to accept her as an equal and simply carries her
back up to the nursery for more bed rest. He is fixed in his authoritative position as husband
and doctor and cannot adapt his strategy to account for her opinion on the matter. He believes
in a strict, paternalistic divide between men and women; men work outside of the home, as he
does, while women like Jennie, his sister, and Mary, the nanny, tend to the house.
Although John is set up as the villain of the story, he can also be seen as a more sympathetic
character. He clearly loves his wife and relies on her for his own happiness. Yet he is unable
to reconcile her creative desires with his own rationality or the chauvinistic expectations of the
time period. His wife is unable or unwilling to adhere to the ideal model of domesticity
expressed by the 19th-century society, and John is at a loss as to what to do. His solution is to
use Weir Mitchell‟s rest cure to “fix” his wife, and he does not realize that his own actions
push her over the edge of insanity.
Woman in the wallpaper
Although the narrator eventually believes that she sees many women in the yellow wallpaper,
she centers on one in particular. The woman appears to be trapped within the bar -like pattern
of the wallpaper, and she shakes the pattern as she tries to break out. The woman is most
active by moonlight, a symbol of femininity and a sign that John‟s strict daytime regimen is
no longer applicable to the narrator.
Over time, as the narrator‟s insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and
believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. As a ghostly counterpart of the narrator,
the woman in the wallpaper also symbolizes female imprisonment within the domestic sphere.
Unable to break free from the room, like the narrator, the woman in the wallpaper has only the
symbolic option of tending to the house as a wife and mother. The woman‟s habit of
“creeping” suggests that she must still be secretive after she has achieved her liberation. Social
norms will not accept her freedom from the domestic sphere, and so she must creep furtively
and lie in wait in the shadows of the wallpaper.
Jennie
Jennie is the narrator‟s sister-in-law who takes care of the house during the narrator‟s illness.
Although she does not play an active role in the narrative, she is a constant reminder of the
narrator's inability to assume her proper role as John's wife and housekeeper. Always maintaining
a passive position under John's supervision, Jennie symbolizes the happily domesticated woman
who does not find anything wrong with her domestic prison. However, Gilman also suggests that
there may be more to Jennie than meeting the eye: the narrator acknowledges that Jennie is aware
of the narrator's growing interest in the wallpaper and even discusses her future with John.
Mary
Mary takes care of the narrator and John's baby. With her name a possible allusion to the Virgin
Mary, Mary is the perfect mother-surrogate for the narrator, an idealized maternal figure whose
only concern is her child. Like Jennie, she also symbolizes the happily domesticated woman.
Although Mary is even less present in the text than Jennie, she still serves to remind the narrator of
her personal failings as a 19th century woman, particularly in terms of her own child.
Inside the Story
From the beginning of the story The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator speaks of how her husband
and other influential men in her life direct her so that she will recover quickly. The narrator shows
how she has a formed opinion (and probably successful idea for her treatment), she is still
swayed by her husband‟s direction with the following passage, “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 to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” Her
husband seems to be the one who can change her thoughts because of his „maleness‟ or the fact
that he is her husband. She is still being suppressed by a member of the opposing sex. (HaneyPeritz, 1986)
The narrator also speaks many times in a manner which suggests that because a man speaks she
has no mean by which to disagree with him because she is a woman. A perfect example of this is
presented in the beginning passages of the story, where the narrator states, “ Personally, I disagree
with their (her husband‟s and brother‟s) ideas. Personally, I believe that pleasant work, with
excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” This last sentence “But what
is one to do?” exemplifies wonderfully her oppressed female stature in the society of her life.
The preceeding passage is yet another display of the woman‟s ineptness with self-esteem. If
the woman would just take a moment to assess the fact that she is quite possibly right about her
own recovery even though she is a woman the conflict would immediately be taken from the sexist
realm to a realm of inner-conflict, which are in many of the topics in this story.
Throughout the story, the narrator believed that the wallpaper was trapping her inside. She has
been working meticulously at removing the wallpaper for several days. The last day, she removes
the rest of the wallpaper, and she believes she has escaped from behind the wallpaper and is free.
The final passages of the story successfully apparent a display of power and possible regain of
self-governance through the narrator‟s finally standing up to her husband by locking him out of
the room in which he has imprisoned her supposedly for benefit. This is the first time in the
story that he must listen to her entreaties to discover where the key is hidden. The assessment of
the final moments of the story could quite possibly be a successful way in which the author
intended to say much, after the fact, of how she understood the need for a woman to stand up for
her rights even in the face of a man‟s believed superiority.
Roles of Women in the 19th Century from the Story
According to the social norms of the time period, women in the 19th century were expected to
fulfill their duties as wives and mothers and be content in their existence as nothing more.
Men and women were divided between the public and private sphere, and women were
doomed to spend their lives solely in the domestic sphere. Not coincidentally, women who
dared to enter the masculine public realm were viewed as something akin to prostitutes, the
lowest level of society. (Susan, & Leslie, 2003).
With that in mind, although John could be seen as the domineering villain of the story, he is
simply a reflection of his society. The narrator‟s desire to have more in her life than John and
her child does not correspond to social expectations. Moreover, her love of writing and
creativity further distinguishes her from the idealized “angel of the house” that she is
supposed to emulate.
Gilman herself rebelled against these social expectations and, by leaving her first husband and
moving to California to write, was not deemed fit to belong in respectable society.
In the story, wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, is a
symbol of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere. Over the course of the story, the
wallpaper becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination
and identifies with a feminist double figure. (Susan, & Leslie, 2003).
When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some
sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and
starts actively studying and decoding its meaning. She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates
the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. Ove r time, as her
insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is
trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of
nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has
imprisoned her. The wallpaper's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced
sickness, with discriminated-against minorities of the time (especially the Chinese), and with
the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight. By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the
wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she
must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is
the first stage in a feminist uprising.
The Feminist’s lnner-Conflict Success in Personal Experiences
One of the greatest female authors of all time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, produced a body of
writing respected worldwide. Driven by uncontrollable circumstances and internal conflict,
her role in feminism, along with the personal relationships in her life, influenced her literary
works.
Insanity and Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”
reflects the intense struggle with of a woman during the late 1800‟s. However, as the story
unfolds, we realize the reasons for this insanity and the connections of this breakdown to the
main character‟s husband, John. What we discover is the way women were treated during the
late 1800‟s and the significance of this treatment on their lives. The story clearly expresses the
pain, opposition, and depression experienced by women at that time and provides a backdrop
for the initial stages of the feminist movement.
As the story begins, the author describes in detail her painful relationship with her husband.
She writes “John laughs at me of course, but one excepts that in marriage”. She also explains
“So I take phosphates or phosphites-whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and
exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to „work‟ until I am well again.” It is clear that the main
character is very unhappy in her marriage which causes her pain, and that she is unable to do
the things she would like to do. When she states “You see he does not believe I am sick!” it is
evident that she feels very repressed and that no matter what she says that she needs her
husband, he does not have the capacity to understand or to respond to those needs. He is
emotionally unavailable. Her frustration grows and contributes to her insanity and pain as the
story progresses.
The rest of the story conveys in great detail the symbolism of the yellow wallpaper, it‟s
contribution to her depression. The wallpaper seems to represent the main character‟s
husband. “The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it stuck closer than a
brother-they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.” She continues “This wallpaper
has a sub- pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in
certain lights, and not clearly then.” This mirrors the way she feels about her relationship with
her husband, how he controls her every move, and the way he smothers her. In direct contrast
is the pattern in the wallpaper which represents the main character and her marriage. “The
faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” The main
character continues “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around very fast, and her crawling shakes all over.” The description
of the patterns in the yellow wallpaper represent a constant struggle in an unhappy marriage
and the main character‟s desire to leave the relationship, but reflect her inability to do so.
Consequently, she becomes extremely depressed.
In conclusion, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a very symbolic story, representative of life in the
late 1800‟s, and the struggle for women to be heard. This story is written about the life and
experiences of one individual, her pain, opposition, and depression, but can be expanded to
represent the struggle for freedom for all women during that era.
Feminism in literature has expanded beyond women just voicing their own opinions. It now
includes several different ideas. Women are no longer looked at as shrew-like banshees
screaming for someone to listen to the injustices done to them.
Women are now regarded as literary equals; some women are literary giants. “Feminist
literary criticism moves with time from the criticism of writing by men and the exploration of
writing by women to a questioning of what it means at all to engage with or in language. I f all
language carries worlds within it, assumptions and values that lie embedded in the simplest of
utterances, then how can women take up such language, the language of patriarchy, and hope
to use it to forge a better world for women? (Pazhavila, 2010).” Based upon the number of
feminists and feminist writings in circulation today, it appears that women have already
answered that question themselves.
Impacts of the Story to Readers and the Real World
The Yellow Wallpaper, while dramatically enhanced with elements of horror, having been
confirmed by Gilman to be semi-autobiographical. This lends further gravity to the narrator's
intensely realistic and disturbing symptoms. According to Ann J. Lane, in the biography To
Herland and Beyond: The Life & Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as an author, Gilman felt
compelled “to express her private thoughts and feelings through public discourse, when it was
difficult to do so directly.” That this story is formatted as a series of journal entries, maintained in
secret by the narrator, speaks volumes about how women have commonly been forced to suppress
their complaints and desires.
Gilman, in her fight for equality, has proclaimed that “one sex has monopolized virtually all
human activities, and then called them male,” and further, that “what we think of as „masculine'
traits…are human traits that men have usurped as their own and to which women have been denied
access” . This message resonates throughout The Yellow Wallpaper, especially when the narrator
laments of her circumstances twice in the opening paragraphs, “What is one to do?”
That Gilman does not give her story a happy ending is far more effective, in terms of having a
strong impact on the reader. Though in her own life she gained back her autonomy by ceasing to
seek the counsel of her doctor and divorcing her husband, she strategically chose not to include
those actions in The Yellow Wallpaper. By having the protagonist lose her sanity profoundly
illustrates the peril of not fighting for one's rights as a human being, and effectively leaves it to the
reader to take from the story what he or she may. The Yellow Wallpaper poignantly teaches
women that though they may feel isolated and abnormal, their experience is not singular. This
realization alone can be liberating. (Pazhavila, 2010).
Gilman knew that her intent would speak loud and clear to the unsatisfied women in the world
who so desperately needed to receive a message of hope. However, as Gilman's views were ahead
of her time, the appreciation of her fans was not reflected in the literary criticism this story initially
received. It was not until “the first decades of this century, Gilman was recognized internationally
as a major theorist and social commentator”
Conclusion
In order to understand The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader must consider many things: first, the
time in which the story was written, and the society‟s attitude of the story content at that time.
Written in 1892, a woman suffering from depression was not clearly understood and was
treated with isolation, this would clearly drive any persons mad. Chalotte Gilman wrote this
story from her own personal experiences of the fact that this is a male dominated society, the
repression that women still face today. With her reason why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as
it appeared in the October issue of the Forerunner, 1913, make the story vivid and valuable even in
the present time, and she should be counted as the „First Wave Feminists‟.
“….The little book is valued by aliens and as a good specimen of literature. It has, to my
knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate-so terrifying her family that they let her out into
normal activity and she recovered.
But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist
had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading “The
Yellow Wallpaper.”
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,
and it worked.”
Moreover, the story has also been recognized as a feminist narrative worthy of historical and
literary scholarship until…in the 21st century.
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