Madness and Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”:

A Decent into Madness or Feminist Liberation or Both?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles the so-called rest cure of a nameless woman who has just given birth. The woman’s physician-husband supervises the cure, during which the narrator is denied all mental stimulation. Rather than growing less anxious, the woman instead becomes more restive and miserable. Her mind, denied the mental outlet she craves, looks for other forms of intellectual engagement. She fixates upon the wallpaper of her bedroom, convinced that there is a woman behind it, demanding to get out. By the last lines of the story, the woman behind the paper and herself have merged in her consciousness, as she peels the paper to liberate the woman and herself: “’I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Gilman).

Even before the woman becomes mentally unbalanced, the woman calls the paper an artistic sin, something that is sulphureous as hellish death. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide” (Gilman). The paper is dull, much like the woman’s rest cure, and its suicidal tendencies mimic her own depression. It is yellow, the color of jaundice and illness.

There are indications that the depression arose around the time of the woman giving birth to her child, suggesting postpartum depression and her husband’s inability to understand his wife’s needs. Although it may also have a deeper cause, namely in the general refusal to allow women to write and express themselves fully. The specific prohibition against writing suggests as well that the man who both personifies male, patriarchal authority and physician’s authority is using her illness as a pretext to bend her to his will.

This use of medical authority to force women to conform to specific social norms did not end with the late 19th and early 20th century, around when the story takes place and Gilman wrote, however. In Women’s Encounter with Mental Health Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper, one woman describes being institutionalized after relatively minor teenage experimentation with sex and drugs in the late 1960s. She notes the irony of being forced to take psychotropic pills for schizophrenia, when her own, much milder use was the reason for her incarceration.

This is another theme of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” that the cure prescribed by male, establishment authority figures spark the disease it attempts to cure. At the beginning of the Gilman short story, she seems sane, if depressed. She claims to love her baby and husband, and expresses polite frustration with the fact that she is forced to rest, and her husband may be cross with her defiance of his advice, while writing. At the end of the story, she barely seems to recognize her husband, simply referring to him as the man she is crawling over to peel back the paper and liberate the woman behind the awful paper where she has been kept for so many months. The lack of stimulation has made her into the madwoman she was supposed to be at the very beginning of the tale.

Shawn St. Jean argues that, given the text has been printed and reprinted multiple times in various editions, that certain versions of the text more decisively indicate the woman’s madness than others: for example, in one printed version of the text, editing it to suggest that the woman must repeatedly climb over her husband as she encircles the room suggests a more complete descent into madness (St. Jean 402). It is equally possible to argue, however, that the real significance is the narrator referring to the man she once called John, her husband, and her physician simply as a man is a recognition that all are fused into one in his exemplification of male-dominated authority. There is no real romantic love in this story, or medical knowledge, only oppression that the woman must climb over. Madness is the narrator’s only vehicle of liberation.

Barbara Suess in her essay “The Writing’s on the Wall” similarly argues that the story highlights the limits of female expression, specifically the breakdown of writing and language. It is not simply that the woman is denied the ability to write and express herself (although she tries to do so in secret). She realizes that language itself is designed to shut women out of rational discourse. Suess uses Lacanian theory to explain how the division of sane and insane, male and female, essentially offers the woman no liberation, and the writing that the woman seeks to tear down on the wall is language itself. While the story can be read as “postpartum psychosis delirium,” this psychological diagnosis is not sufficient to fully understand why it is so difficult for the woman’s husband, as well as her sister-in-law (Suess 79).

The fact that the language used to describe the narrator’s true feelings and condition is inadequate is also highlighted by the fact that man of the illnesses women of this era were diagnosed with no longer even exist in modern diagnostic literature. For example, women were often said to be nervous or suffer from neurasthenia: “Because they were thought to have delicate bodies and sensitive minds, women were thought to be extremely susceptible to any disorder that could affect their emotional states” (“‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ the Nervous Diseases, and Hysteria”). Women were not simply believed to be physically weaker than men (although that was certainly a factor in the more frequent diagnosis of women as having nervous conditions). Women’s femaleness itself was seen as potentially diseased and pathological, the result of a so-called wandering womb (hysteria) that could unbalance the mind. The fact that the woman of the story had just given birth would have resulted in her more likely to have received such a diagnosis, regardless of her mental condition.

Although the rest cure is confining, on the other hand, the Gothic setting functions as a kind of liberation, fully unmasking the fact that the woman’s husband and society does not have her interests at heart. As noted by Carol Margaret Davison, when initially published, the short story was read more as a straightforward Gothic tale, more along the lines of Jane Eyre or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which a house takes on a kind of human quality, infecting the mind of an already physically and mentally vulnerable person. There was resistance to a feminist reading, because the idea of women being innately more susceptible to their environment and mental distress, particularly after giving birth, was acute.

Many of Gilman’s original readership may have agreed with John, the woman’s husband, that the female mind was innately unbalanced, especially after pregnancy, and the idea of the double behind the wallpaper is another familiar Gothic trope (Davison). It is only later that the short story has been reinterpreted in a feminist lens, and the women’s husband (and her sister-in-law Jennie) are viewed as her captors, effectively killing her with kindness.