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One of the prize reclamations of the feminist canon, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's impressionist short fiction "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a Gothic drama about gendered medical treatment. After confinement and silencing the hypersensitive protagonist goes insane. Composed as a secret journal and published in January 1892 in New England Magazine, the domestic horror tale depicts the hapless unnamed wife/patient victimized by John, an all-knowing husband/doctor who deliberately isolates her from her baby and friends. The subtext protests male-created rest cures that deprive women of autonomy and creative outlets. In opposition to John's dicta she exclaims, "I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!" (Gilman, 9). Gilman's accurate depiction of treatment in female asylums earned the respect of a Kansas physician, who validated the author's observations on claustrophobia and loss of self.
Submission spells the doom of Gilman's protagonist. To placate John, his "blessed little goose" tries to subdue the need for mental engagement and to quell a lively imagination (ibid., 5). The setting becomes villainous after she has nothing to occupy her senses but an expanse of arabesque paper and a permeating odor that the biographer Ann Lane identifies as the smell of coitus. Instead of confronting John for his inhumanity, the patient channels anger at the monstrous wallpaper, which is the color of wilting plants. The haunting stimuli cause her to consider arson, the recourse of the madwoman Bertha Mason Rochester, locked away at Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
Gilman's perspective on torture echoes prisoner-of-war memoirs. As relentless as patriarchal oppression, the four walls glare at her, offering no respite from shattered nerves. She anticipates no escape from the room's emotional violence. As does psychological noise enlarged to visual menace, the serpentine figures entrap and torment with two-dimensional elements that "suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions" (ibid., 4). Nightmarish to the point of battery, the images writhe and engage her whole being in a fight to preserve her sanity. The protagonist must decline to a bestial state before John realizes that he has stripped his wife of her humanity.
Unlike overt spousal abuse, John's mistreatment of his wife is insidious, but peculiarly praiseworthy for his intention to heal her skittishness. Like Offred, the human breeder immured in her keeper's bedroom in Margaret Atwood's dystopic best seller The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Gilman's protagonist faces a male diagnosis of too much imagination, too active a fancy. Rendered powerless, she battles psychic shock until it forces her into paranoia and hallucination. Delusion convinces her that the "awful paper began to laugh at me" (ibid., 17). A doppelgänger motif pairs the female patient with a submerged phantasm that appears to spring to life to crush an overly ambitious female. On her hands and knees the patient crawls about the room, stripping paper and muttering ominously at "all those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths" (ibid., 19). The result of weeks of captivity is psychic disintegration.
Gilman wrote from her personal experience with the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell's treatment for neurasthenia, a psychological decline often linked to postpartum depression that causes melancholia and nervous hysteria. After she "had been as far as one could go and get back," she contrived her own rescue by abandoning doctor-prescribed torpor and by returning to writing (Lane, 131). In October 1913 Gilman published "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper' " in The Forerunner, offering as a simple antidote to female depression "work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite" (ibid., xv). Her understanding of female malaise foretokens recognition of the "problem that has no name" in Betty Friedan's feminist treatise The Feminine Mystique (1963).
In addition to its contribution to feminist literature Gilman's feverish tale wrought an alteration in the way Mitchell treated depression in women. William Dean Howells labeled "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a horror story in his compendium Great Modern American Stories (Spacer1920), giving "recognition to the supreme awfulness of your thing" (ibid., 146). Ronald Perera's pseudobiographic two-act opera The Yellow Wallpaper, which premiered at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on May 17, 1989, featured a women's chorus and showcased Charlotte Gilman as the main character.
One of the prize reclamations of the feminist canon, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's impressionist short fiction "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a Gothic drama about gendered medical treatment. After confinement and silencing the hypersensitive protagonist goes insane. Composed as a secret journal and published in January 1892 in New England Magazine, the domestic horror tale depicts the hapless unnamed wife/patient victimized by John, an all-knowing husband/doctor who deliberately isolates her from her baby and friends. The subtext protests male-created rest cures that deprive women of autonomy and creative outlets. In opposition to John's dicta she exclaims, "I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!" (Gilman, 9). Gilman's accurate depiction of treatment in female asylums earned the respect of a Kansas physician, who validated the author's observations on claustrophobia and loss of self.
Submission spells the doom of Gilman's protagonist. To placate John, his "blessed little goose" tries to subdue the need for mental engagement and to quell a lively imagination (ibid., 5). The setting becomes villainous after she has nothing to occupy her senses but an expanse of arabesque paper and a permeating odor that the biographer Ann Lane identifies as the smell of coitus. Instead of confronting John for his inhumanity, the patient channels anger at the monstrous wallpaper, which is the color of wilting plants. The haunting stimuli cause her to consider arson, the recourse of the madwoman Bertha Mason Rochester, locked away at Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
Gilman's perspective on torture echoes prisoner-of-war memoirs. As relentless as patriarchal oppression, the four walls glare at her, offering no respite from shattered nerves. She anticipates no escape from the room's emotional violence. As does psychological noise enlarged to visual menace, the serpentine figures entrap and torment with two-dimensional elements that "suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions" (ibid., 4). Nightmarish to the point of battery, the images writhe and engage her whole being in a fight to preserve her sanity. The protagonist must decline to a bestial state before John realizes that he has stripped his wife of her humanity.
Unlike overt spousal abuse, John's mistreatment of his wife is insidious, but peculiarly praiseworthy for his intention to heal her skittishness. Like Offred, the human breeder immured in her keeper's bedroom in Margaret Atwood's dystopic best seller The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Gilman's protagonist faces a male diagnosis of too much imagination, too active a fancy. Rendered powerless, she battles psychic shock until it forces her into paranoia and hallucination. Delusion convinces her that the "awful paper began to laugh at me" (ibid., 17). A doppelgänger motif pairs the female patient with a submerged phantasm that appears to spring to life to crush an overly ambitious female. On her hands and knees the patient crawls about the room, stripping paper and muttering ominously at "all those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths" (ibid., 19). The result of weeks of captivity is psychic disintegration.
Gilman wrote from her personal experience with the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell's treatment for neurasthenia, a psychological decline often linked to postpartum depression that causes melancholia and nervous hysteria. After she "had been as far as one could go and get back," she contrived her own rescue by abandoning doctor-prescribed torpor and by returning to writing (Lane, 131). In October 1913 Gilman published "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper' " in The Forerunner, offering as a simple antidote to female depression "work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite" (ibid., xv). Her understanding of female malaise foretokens recognition of the "problem that has no name" in Betty Friedan's feminist treatise The Feminine Mystique (1963).
In addition to its contribution to feminist literature Gilman's feverish tale wrought an alteration in the way Mitchell treated depression in women. William Dean Howells labeled "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a horror story in his compendium Great Modern American Stories (Spacer1920), giving "recognition to the supreme awfulness of your thing" (ibid., 146). Ronald Perera's pseudobiographic two-act opera The Yellow Wallpaper, which premiered at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on May 17, 1989, featured a women's chorus and showcased Charlotte Gilman as the main character.