The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper
"The Yellow Wallpaper"
Dover Publications cover
Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Country United States
Language English
Subject(s) Feminism, Women's health, Autobiography
Genre(s) Short story
Publisher New England Magazine
Publication date 1892
ISBN 0-486-29857-4

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was first published in 1891 in New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries. The narrator is a woman whose husband — a physician — has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal entries from him so that she can recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency;" a diagnosis common to women in that period.[1] The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

The story illustrates the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the room's wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper — the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."[2]

In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."[3]

Contents

[edit] Plot synopsis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Told in the first-person perspective, in the form of a series of journal entries, the story details the narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband believes it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure, since he only credits what is observable and scientific. He serves as his wife's physician, therefore treating her like a powerless patient. The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would, in modern times, be called postpartum psychosis. While on vacation for the summer at a colonial mansion, the narrator senses "something queer about it [the mansion]." The narrator is confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, but this treatment only exacerbates her depression.

She devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper — its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck," scrawling pattern; she also describes the various patches it is missing and the fact that it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. (Said yellow smears are found on her clothing, suggesting that all along it was she that was shredding the wallpaper). Obsessing over the hatred she believes radiates from the room, she supposes that it must have once been a nursery, and that the children who lived in it hated the wallpaper as much as she did. She notes a patch of wallpaper has been rubbed off at her shoulder height early in the book, and after lapsing into insanity confirms that she was the one who had done all the damage to the room, although she is oblivious to this fact herself. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight. With no other stimuli than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs on the wallpaper become increasingly intriguing, and a figure of a woman soon appears in the design. She eventually reaches the conclusion that the figure is trying to escape the bars from the shadows, and that there is a woman creeping on all fours behind them.

With the summer close to an end, the narrator finally asks for permission to leave the room. John does not agree to give her the freedom to walk outside, so the narrator voices that she may be losing her mind. Being urged to not speak another word of it, she eventually consumes her entire night with watching the wallpaper, while sleeping during the day. Eventually the woman descends into complete insanity, thinking she is a woman who has escaped from inside the wallpaper.

After realizing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, she begins to strip the remaining designs off the wall. While working on peeling away the wallpaper, she tries to hide her obsession with it due to her paranoia and fear that John may re-diagnose her, and his sister will remain with them. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, the woman refuses to unlock the door and tells him to go fetch the key from outside her window where she threw it earlier. Once he returns with the key and opens the door, however, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I’ve got out at last," her husband faints, as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each 'lap' around.


[edit] Media adaptations

  • In 2007, Chatterbox Audio Theater adapted the story for audio and made it available for free download and streaming from its website.
  • A version of it was performed twice on the radio program Suspense by Agnes Moorehead.
  • In 1977, a short film adaptation was produced by Marie Ashton through Women Make Movies.
  • Produced by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) for a series entitled "Masterpiece Theatre" a television film was adapted in 1989. It was adapted by Maggie Wadey and directed by John Clive.
  • An audio book of The Yellow Wallpaper additionally was produced by Durkin Hayes, and read by Win Phillips in 1997. This Radio Tales version can also be heard on Sonic Theater on XM Radio.
  • BBC Radio dramatized the story for the series Fear on Four.
  • A stage adaptation was performed at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper (film)
  • Song "Yellow Creep Around" on the Mary's Danish album Circa, published one century after the original.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Dover Publications, 1997, p. 1. See Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 3, No. 1/2, Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 61-77, doi:10.2307/463825 for how depression and "hysteria" were conventional "women's diseases" in the 19th century.
  2. ^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Dover Publications, 1997, p. 11.
  3. ^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Dover Publications, 1997, p. 15.

[edit] Further reading

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  • Chatterbox Audio Theater's adaptation of "The Yellow Wallpaper"
  • Text of The Yellow Wallpaper, City University of New York, retrieved January 22, 2008.
  • Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper", The Forerunner, October 1913; this webpage prepared by Catherine Lavender for the Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, last modified Tuesday June 8, 1999, retrieved January 22, 2008.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper, audio, CBS radio, 1948.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper at the Internet Movie Database
  • The Yellow Wallpaper A 2006 film inspired by the short story that relies on the gothic/horror interpretation.
  • Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper An article from the author published in 1913.
  • Bak, John S. “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (Winter 1994): 39-46.
  • Crewe, Jonathan. “Queering ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall 1995): 273-293.
  • Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-300-02596-3
  • Golden, Catherine. “The Writing of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ A Double Palimpsest.” Studies in American Fiction 17 (Autumn 1989): 193-201.
  • Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper," Women’s Studies 12 (1986): 113-128.
  • Hume, Beverly A. "Gilman’s ‘Interminable Grotesque’: The Narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper," Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Fall 1991): 477-484.
  • Johnson, Greg. “Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall 1989): 521-530.
  • King, Jeannette, and Pam Morris. “On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (Winter 1989): 23-32.
  • Klotz, Michael. "Two Dickens Rooms in 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'" Notes and Queries (December 2005): 490-1.
  • Knight, Denise D. “The Reincarnation of Jane: ‘Through This’ - Gilman’s Companion to ‘The Yellow Wall-paper.’” Women’s Studies 20 (1992): 287-302.
  • Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies 15 (Fall 1989): 415-437.
  • Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1984): 61-75.