Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—at once a timeless gothic tale in the mode of Hawthorne or Poe and an au courant critique of late-Victorian medical (mal)practice—first appeared in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. In this harrowing first-person narrative, an unnamed—and arguably unreliable—wife and new mother, who has been diagnosed by her physician-husband John as suffering from “neurasthenia” (i.e., nervous breakdown), describes her growing obsession with the yellow wallpaper of her cell-like bedroom—an obsession that, tragically, draws her into full-blown madness. I discovered the story nearly a century after its publication, as an
undergraduate student enrolled in an American literature course taught by Dorothy Berkson, an outspoken feminist whose opinions were still considered progressive (and even controversial) in the 1980s, when feminist literary criticism was gaining visibility and (would-be) Victorianists were reading books such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s now-classic The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and articles such as “Female Gothic,” by Ellen
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Dr. Berkson had us carefully study Gilbert and Gubar’s wide-reaching monograph, and the authors themselves once spoke on campus. In an elaborate demonstration of feminist cooperation (as opposed to patriarchal competition), Gilbert began a sentence and Gubar finished it. The pair’s performance—much like their playful (over)use of hyphens, dashes/slashes, and parentheses—at first startled their audience and later caused us a bit of fatigue and dis-ease—but it remained, somehow, (weirdly) irresistible. In keeping with their theoretical orientation, they argued for “The Yellow
Wallpaper” as an exploration of women writers’ “parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies,” and they interpreted the wallpaper—which features “outrageous angles,” “unheard of contradictions” and lethal, prison-like bars—as “a patriarchal text.”
Twenty years later, I decided to teach “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which has come to serve as the capstone text in my version of “Introduction to English Studies.” While I’ve often read, re-read, and discussed the story, I’ve never before written about it. In attempting to do so now, I’m reminded of the narrator’s reflections on her own writing: “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. […] But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.” I’m also tempted to indulge in Gilbert-and-Gubar-like stylistic excesses and parentheses that mimic not only the narrator’s own complex—and increasingly rambling and disjointed —prose, but also the “bloated curves and flourishes” of the yellow wallpaper itself. Finally, I find myself being drawn down a hermeneutic rabbit-hole; or, more accurately and ominously, becoming enmeshed in an interpretive spider-web.
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hapless doctor-husband, who has fainted at the dreadful spectacle of what his patient-wife has become. Like her, we readers may find ourselves first intrigued, then obsessed, and finally led in circles by “The Yellow Wallpaper”—both the story and the paper itself, which latter functions as an extraordinarily overdetermined metaphor for (1) patriarchy; (2) the narrator’s unconscious; (3) neurasthenia; (4) “feminine” discourse (as opposed to “masculine” diagnosis), and so on.
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like those favored by Emily Dickinson, at once bracket and emphasize ideas so as to “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—”; the term “dead paper,” which seems tautological until we recognize that some paper (the wallpaper) is crawlingly alive; and the tragic irony of the narrator’s being married to the very sort of man least likely to help her. And the story is just getting started.
As “The Yellow Wallpaper” develops, the narrator appears to (unconsciously? willfully?
desperately?) misread the room in which her husband imprisons her, taking it for a nursery rather than recognizing it as a madwoman’s cell. Meanwhile, she comes to see the wallpaper as both a screen and a mirror, projecting her fears and fantasies onto it while simultaneously recognizing (a version of) herself within it. In “Introduction to English Studies” we re-read the room and grapple with the wallpaper’s myriad meanings. We often look for assistance from Dickinson, who tells us that “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—,” and “Nature rarer uses Yellow / Than another Hue.” Drawing upon all we’ve learned throughout the semester, we apply the close-reading techniques of New Criticism, which enable the more-elaborate approaches of New Historicism,
