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Daksha
Roll number 121
B.A(Hons) English 3rd year
Women’s Writing
Submitted to Dr. Santosh Bharti

Analysis of the Short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins

Gilman.

The man who does not know sick women does not know women.
-S. Weir Mitchell

I try to describe this long limitation, hoping that with such power
as is now mine, and such use of language as is within that power,
this will convince anyone who cares about it that this "living" of
mine had been done under a heavy handicap ....
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The story resembles an incident from its literary predecessor- Charlotte Bronte’s

Jane Eyre in which a woman named Bertha is confined being labelled “The

Madwoman in the Attic” which also happens to be the name of Sandra Gilbert

and Susan Gubar’s book examining nineteenth century texts with a feminist

literary perspective. It also becomes crucial to examine the story under the light

of Michel Foucault’s work Madness and Civilization, where he mentions how the

definition of what constitutes mental illness changes from society to society and

traces the history of this discourse, mentioning that nineteenth century was the
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time when the emphasis on treatment began. It can then be inferred that the

discourse in nineteenth century was such that slightest aberration from

‘normalcy’ in women (which could be anything threatening or questioning male

dominance) was seen as a disorder which was to be cured under/by the authority

of dominant patriarchal institutions in which women had no say.

The story progresses in the form of journal writing, where the narrator is directly

addressing the journal and/or the readers. The story is confessional on two levels-

One, for the narrator who has no one to tell how she feels so she uses writing in

her journal as a medium to communicate her feelings and thoughts and Two, for

Gilman herself who in her non-fictional piece “Why I wrote The Yellow

Wallpaper?” mentions that “For many years, I suffered from a severe and

continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” and how she was advised

by “a noted specialist in nervous diseases” to “live as domestic a life as far as

possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch

pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.” The story then is also

autobiographical in nature as it draws from incidents from life of Gilman herself.

The narrator also mentions about a friend of her who was under the care of a

known doctor who employed similar tactics. The fact that the cure prescribed to

Gilman, the narrator, narrator’s friend and to Virgina Woolf to cure her

neurasthenia says a lot about the plight of women.

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The yellow wallpaper in its materiality and description stands as a metaphor for

readers to interpret in various ways. It represents narrator’s own mind, the

“pattern” of social and economic dependence which reduces women to domestic

slavery. Similarly, the woman in the wallpaper can be interpreted as the narrator

herself, all the women who want to come out of the captivity of domestic slavery

which is clear in the lines when the narrator says “I wonder if they all come out

of that wallpaper as I did?”. An interesting interpretation is done by Paula A.

Treichler in the essay “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The

Yellow Wallpaper":

“I interpret the wallpaper to be women's writing or women's discourse, and

the woman in the wallpaper to be the representation of women that

becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak.”

Treichler further in the essay uses linguistics as a tool to argue that the language

of medical diagnosis is governed by linguistic signs that control and oppress

women, whereas the language of narration in the story serves as voice of a

woman, proceeding from being subdued to being defiant and hence labelled

“mad”.

The story can also be called a narration of horrors of patriarchy and it does invoke

tropes from Gothic genre at certain points. The narrator describes the colonial

mansion that they have rented as “a haunted house”. The detailed speculations by

regarding the house and the history of the room indicate towards conscious

working of Gilman to produce a Female Gothic Fiction. The eerie ending of the
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story with the line “I had to creep over him every time!” after John, the narrator’s

husband faints on seeing her “pulling the paper” also indicate a similar intention

on part of the author. Imprisonment is another trope used in the Female Gothic

Fiction and the story too carries these implications in the form of “paraphernalia

of confinement” (Gilbert, 90) used in the story like “rings and things”, gate at the

head of the stairs and constant “surveillance”.

Gilman through her story also comments upon the Gender roles and the Domestic

life of women. John, the husband stands for everything masculine- rationality,

practicality and authority whereas, the narrator is perceived to be fragile,

emotional and unfit to make decisions for herself. When the narrator casts her

suspicion about the house, John laughs it off and the narrator remarks “of course,

but one expects that in marriage” indicates the normalization of “casual sexism”

on part of the narrator. The repetition of the phrase “But what is one to do?” by

the narrator on more than one occasion also indicates how little agency she

possesses in the institution of marriage and her life. The narrator has internalized

the traditional role of a wife to such an extent that she remarks “I meant to be

such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative

burden already.”

It is rather ironic that there is a mention of American Independence Day in the

story when the female narrator herself does not have an independent existence. It

can be said that it is through the mask of madness, the defiance of authority by
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tearing the wallpaper apart and letting the imaginary woman in the wallpaper to

creep freely that the narrator reclaims her freedom.

Bibliography:

1. Davison, Margaret Carol. “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female

Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Women's Studies: An inter-

disciplinary journal. 33:1, 47-75.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497870490267197

2. Gilbert, Sandra M. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the

Anxiety of Authorship”. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1979.

3. Gilman, Perkins Charlotte. “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?”.

Advances in psychiatric treatment. vol. 17, pp 256–265. 2011.

4. ---. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The New England Magazine, 1892.

Women’s Writing. Edited by Saloni Sharma. Book Age Publications, 2017,

pp. 90–108.

5. Treichler, A Paula. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in

"The Yellow Wallpaper". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. Vol. 3, No.

1/2, pp 61-77. Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Spring - Autumn,

1984). http://www.jstor.org/stable/463825
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