Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a leader of the late nineteenth-century feminist movement in America, and a key theorist. The ideas presented in her book Women and Economics invite comparison with contemporary insights into women’s social and economic positioning. See below for a list of background and critical reading about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which, together with her feminist utopia Herland, is Gilman’s best-known work.
“The Yellow Wallpaper”: Tools for Interpretation
A. Narrative Position and Irony
The narrator, the contents of her narrative (what she reveals and what she withholds, what she knows and what she doesn’t know), her attitudes and her narrative methods, are the basis of the powerful effects Gilman’s story achieves. The pervasive irony derives from the narrator, who fails to interpret her own condition, or to notice her gradual, horrifying decline into madness. She nevertheless unconsciously reveals her subjugation to the reader, with the result that the reader understands it much more clearly. For example, the reader has no trouble in seeing through John’s patronising affection as an instrument for controlling his wife, but the narrator accepts his cultivated love and concern at face value. Perhaps he is himself deluded by his show of feeling. When the narrator does manage to interpret some sign of her subjugation correctly, her anger is neutralised by the ideology of romance and marriage. Moreover, the narrator is not able to comprehend her growing physical confinement and powerlessness, as the reader is able to do. This contributes further to the horror. Irony, derived from the narrator’s limited knowledge and understanding, is therefore a fundamental technique of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
B. Narrative Style
The narrative methods are also striking. A conventional shape is imparted by the fact that the story line follows the period of the summer renting of a country house: the opening is when the rental is taken up; and some of the sections into which the story is divided refer to the length of the rental: “We have been here two weeks…”; “Well, the Fourth of July is over!” ; “Hurrah! This is the last day,….” (the climax of events). Five sections are present, each one introduced by a phrase such as these. Try to find them all!
Yet within this conventional outline the structure and narrative style are unusual. The text consists of an interweaving of descriptions of “elements”:
- first, material elements of confinement: the house, the room in which the narrator is largely confined, the wallpaper and its pattern, the garden and other surrounds of the house,
- secondly, other characters who have become elements of control: John; the narrator’s brother who is also a doctor; Dr Weir Mitchell; Mary, who has taken over the mothering of the narrator’s child; and Jennie, John’s sister, “a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper” (17). Those assumed to be loving family members and friends have in reality become jailers.
The narrator’s only companion is the paper to which she confides her thoughts and feelings. Writing allows her to “speak.” Sometimes she “speaks” in her own genuine “voice,” but more often she parrots the discourses of her male-dominated society. All the other characters–the people around her–are respected members of society; they mediate the power of society to confine and control.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” progresses by selecting one of these “elements” for description at random, and then dropping it in favour of another selection. Sometimes the description of an element will occupy several brief paragraphs, sometimes only a few lines. The disjointedness resulting from this narrative style is a leading and unique characteristic of the story. The shapelessness of her narration invites reading as an external copy, a paradigm or a making concrete, of the narrator’s disjointed mental condition. It is a material representation of her diminishing powers of concentration, her mental fragmentation. Alternatively, it can be seen to reflect the hostile conditions under which she writes.
The selection of the elements for discussion or description follows no set pattern. In its refusal of patterning–its maddening inconsistencies–the text resembles the pattern in the wallpaper. This is one level of a complex system of correspondences in Gilman’s story between the text itself and the fictional world that the text creates.
In addition, the movement of the story is governed by two contradictory impulses, so that pondering it can be an experience like vertigo. These contradictory impulses are:
- on the one hand, the conveying of more and more information, so that the narrator’s breakdown can be understood;
- on the other hand, quite simply, the limiting of information, the giving of contradictory facts, and information that cannot be interpreted with any certainty.
For example: (a) A typical riddle is posed by the story’s ending: if, as we have seen, the narrator has been reduced the condition of a grovelling beast, or of an infant tied by the umbilical cord, who is speaking to us now?
(b) A further example of the text’s contradictory impulse simultaneously to give and to withhold information is the refusal to define the upper room in which the narrator spends much of her time. Successive descriptions present this room as a nursery, a playroom, a gymnasium, and as the equivalent of a padded cell. Even the most careful and repeated readings do not resolve this issue. This ambiguity on a subject about which a reader might well expect clarity suggests that the room is a “metaphor,” or a suggestive feature, rather than a “symbol,” or an image that has a simple one-for-one correlation with its referent. The forward drive of the narration demonstrates at last that the room is indeed being used as a place of confinement for the insane; but this impulse is hindered and ultimately thwarted by the contrary “concealing” impulse that has put forward so many other interpretations. We never discover the precise purpose for which the upper room was designed and furnished.
C. Exposing Patriarchal Discourse
Janice Haney-Peritz outlines a fascinating, if not in every respect convincing, resolution of the pervasive disjointedness, ambiguity and contradictions of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She argues that the narrator is miming, or imitating the ubiquitous discourse of patriarchy. This is a version of the idea, common in recent literary theory, that language itself enshrines and reproduces the power structures of society. Much of the disjointedness and contradictions of the text, as outlined above, stems from the narrator’s oscillation between repeating attitudes which she has been taught, and which are constantly reinforced by those around her, and by expressing what she herself genuinely believes and thinks. To this extent at least the text supports Haney-Peritz’s argument.
To explain her case further: According to feminist adaptations of the ideas of the French psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan, all rational discourse belongs to the patriarchal Symbolic Order. This Order is initiated when the infant first learns language. Haney-Peritz goes on to suggest that through the miming or imitating embodied in the text in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the failures of patriarchal discourse, the gaps and contradictions in the inescapable Symbolic Order, are exposed. Under this interpretation, “The Yellow Wallpaper” reveals how women are unavoidably “spoken” by patriarchy, deprived of an authentic “voice” or “writing.” At the very least, the textual discontinuities suggest that women’s self-expression is fragmented, that it cannot be whole, flowing, or consistent. The fact that we are reading the narrator’s story thus becomes subversive at a deep ideological level, because this text exposes patriarchal power structures, as mediated by language.
D. Symbolism
Symbolism is a fourth interpretative tool applicable to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The representations just discussed, of the room as a nursery, a playroom, and a gymnasium, makes the point that the narrator’s situation is a profound denial of her adulthood–of the autonomy and self-confidence characteristic of maturity. She is reduced to the status of a child, an idea inherent in the refusal at the time “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written to grant women the vote or full control over their inheritances. The infantilising of the wife is also seen in the way John relates to her, which is fatherly, and subsumes her adulthood in terms such as “blessed little Goose,” and in speaking to her in the third person: “she shall be as sick as she pleases” (Diddums!).
Gilman’s story therefore incorporates a complex series of parallels and correspondences. We have seen that Haney-Peritz points to a key correspondence by showing that the unpredictability, disjointedness, ambiguity and contradictions of the text embody aspects of patriarchal discourse. The shapelessness of the text finds a further correspondence in the pattern of the wallpaper, which thus becomes a material representation in fiction – in other words, a symbol – for pervasive, complicated patriarchal linguistic and social structures, fissured as these nevertheless are by contradictions and gaps.
Other features of the wallpaper beyond the pattern expand this symbolic dimension. The paper is described as a fungus, interminably reproducing itself, as having a pervasive smell, and a colour which rubs off on everything. These features suggest the pervasiveness of patriarchy. The yellow colour also suggests antiquity, a feature of patriarchy suggested by other symbols in the story, such as the “ancestral house.” Symbolism was a dominant late-nineteenth century literary convention, and so the subtle and powerful use made of it in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not unexpected.
The symbolism of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is like the style of the story in being suggestive and ambiguous, not straightforward and simplistic. Resonances are called up, rather than correspondences stated. Therefore the pattern of the wallpaper is not a single-dimensional symbol of patriarchy. The woman and later women whom the narrator perceives in the wallpaper is both behind the pattern and incorporated within it; thus the pattern represents an aspect of the woman herself: she is confined and limited by patriarchal discourse, but also constructed by it. Her idea of herself and the language in which she forms this idea are phallocentric.
An example of a relatively simple use of symbolism is seen in the creeping posture adopted by the women of the narrator’s hallucinations. This is a powerful representation of women’s servitude.
E. Gothic Genre-the “Haunted” House
Genre, in this case Gothic, is a fifth interpretative pathway into “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Gothic is horror fiction focusing on a remote and threatening castle or mansion. (See the study of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Juliann Fleenor.) Gothic fiction has always had a powerful influence on women readers, seen in such works as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and in contemporary romantic fiction of the Mills and Boon (historical) kind. Various attempts have been made to explain this influence by symbolic interpretations of the Gothic castle.
Most obviously, the Gothic castle can be understood as a representation of the house, still central to most women’s lives. When “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written, the house (home) was middle-class women’s only approved sphere. The ambiguity of the castle in Gothic fiction reflects the complexity of a woman’s relationship to the house, as the place of her labour, the place where she is most empowered, the place where she enjoys the love and demands of husband and children, and as the place of her confinement, shutting her off from participating in the world of affairs, of wider human contact, of ideas, knowledge, and work. The house is essential to the archetypal social division which confines men to the public and women to the private spheres.
Far from unravelling the ambiguity of the house-symbol, “The Yellow Wallpaper” exacerbates it by its contradictory narrative style. An example is the sentence: “That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don’t care – there is something strange about the house – I can feel it.” At the beginning, the house is referred to as “ancestral halls”… “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate…a haunted house.” These terms embody women’s typically ambivalent attitude to the house. The house is the place of their colonisation, but also, in a patriarchal society, their traditional and approved inheritance. Like Gilman’s fictional house, many real houses are “haunted” by the ghost of the repressed female self.
The house as the place of closing off from the outside world of work and wider human interactions is embodied in the episodes in which the narrator looks out on the gardens and surrounds from her upstairs bedroom, which has windows on every side. Like the Lady of Shallot in Tennyson’s poem, whose only access to the world is a reflection in a mirror, she is cut off. Her only relationship with the outer world is through glass; she is the passive observer of a life from which she is excluded. She is, in addition, open to observation herself, like a prisoner.
Fleenor discusses further ambivalent symbolism associated with the Gothic mansion or castle. It can be understood as the maternal body, either the woman’s own body (and the reproductive powers of a woman’s body, her maternity, are most often the cause of her confinement to the house); or her mother’s body, symbolising women’s legacy of restriction, which many in turn unknowingly pass on to their daughters. The narrator’s position as a new mother is an important cause of her confinement. Yet she has been persuaded and forced to relinquish not only the adult responsibilities but also the immense emotional rewards of motherhood. Finally, in its restrictive and established or antique aspects, the house can be read as a symbol of patriarchy itself.
The closing scene demonstrates the layering of multiple resonances and ambiguities in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as listed and described above.
- The scene can be interpreted through its symbolism: the narrator crawls in triumph over her husband’s unconscious body, patriarchy prone at last, but she is crawling, she is tied by a rope, and she is mad. As in the lives of many women, definitions of freedom and confinement never cease to shift and change.
- The scene can also be interpreted on the level of reader-response: horror is dominant in the ending, but there is also an incongruous element of comedy, in John’s fainting, and in his undignified search for the key to the room. This combination of comedy and horror is typical of the genre of writing known as the grotesque.
- Finally, the scene can be interpreted in terms of character and the narrator’s condition: she has in a sense escaped from her oppressors, “the woman has got out” at last, the true self is liberated, but at the cost of sanity.
The profound and unsolvable ambiguity of the ending of “The Yellow Wallpaper” on all interpretative levels cements its resistance to incorporation within the literary stereotypes and structures approved by patriarchy. The text itself is a feminist rebellion.
READING SUGGESTIONS
For basic biographical information you should read Elaine R. Hedges’ Afterword to the Virago Modern Classics edition of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Gilman’s well-known feminist manifesto, Women and Economics, is a deeper introduction to her ideas. I also recommend Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); and Lane’s The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (Great Britain: The Women’s Press, 1981). A fascinating longer study, which places “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a broader context of feminist writing and ideas, is Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979). The edition of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Dale M. Bauer contains a further selection of critical essays.
Peter Conn. The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America 1898-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Ch.6, 156-68.
Juliann E. Fleenor. “The Gothic Prism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic Stories and her Autobiography,” in The Female Gothic. Ed., Julian E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983: 227-41.
Golden, Catherine. “‘Light of the Home, Light of the World’: The Presentation of Motherhood in Gilman’s Short Fiction.” Modern Language Studies 26.2-3(1996): 135-47.
Janice Haney-Peritz. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at The Yellow Wallpaper,” Women’s Studies 12/2 (1986):113-28.
Kasmer, Lisa. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: A Symptomatic Reading.” Literature and Psychology 36 (1990): 1-15.
Knight, Denise D. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Sara Mills, Lynne Pearce, Sue Spaull, Elaine Millard. Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Conrad Shumaker. ” ‘Too Terribly Good to be Printed’: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper,” American Literature 57/4 (December, 1985): 588-99.
Visit the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society Newsletter http://www.gilmansociety.org/newsletter
The Yellow Wallpaper: DISCUSSION TOPICS
1.Analyse the relations which the narrator has with other characters in the story.
2. Trace the development through the story of the following elements: the house, the garden, the room.
3. Offer an analysis of the narrator’s self-representation.
4. How does narrative perspective (point of view) contribute to the story’s effect?
5. State the effect of the story on you as reader.
6. Is there anything to be said in favour of John’s point of view? (See Shumaker’s article.)
7. The chief instrument of female oppression, according to Gilman [in Women and Economics], is motherhood: not the biological activity, but the idealised institution, what Gilman calls “matriology” (Conn, p. 159.) Does this idea surface anywhere in “The Yellow Wallpaper”?
8. What Gothic elements can you detect in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and how do you interpret them? (Cf. Fleenor’s interpretation of the Gothic, p. 230. as “a conflict with the mother, with motherhood and with creation.”)
9. Comment on Haney-Peritz’s interpretation of the wallpaper: “the oppressive structure at issue is a man’s prescriptive discourse about a woman” (p. 116).
10. Find some examples of contradictions and “gaps” in the discourse of the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” How does Haney-Peritz attempt to account for these contradictions and “gaps”?