Marriage Problems in The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper and the Problem of the Unhelpful Man

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 and descended from a proud line of rhetoricians (Silcox). Having a way with words was in her blood. Her parents separated when she was a child, and she became accustomed to a degree of independence—but when she was pressed into marriage, she found the arrangement to be oppressive and it contributed to her having a mental breakdown. The response of her husband was to give her the “rest cure” recommended by Freud and other high-profile physicians of the time (Silcox). Gilman did not want such a treatment, and her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a representation of her attitude about it: she believed that women in general suffered from a kind of neglect from men, who viewed them as inferior beings. If there was to be any cure for a woman’s mental breakdown it had to be traced back to how she was treated by the men in her life. Gilman had some difficulty getting her story published, as editors found it to be too disturbing—but with the help of a literary agent, it was eventually published in the New England Magazine. Gilman published several other stories over the course of her writing career, but “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story that has remained in the public view the most—thanks in particularly to its rediscovery in the 1970s during the second wave of feminism in America (Silcox). Her work was seen as important because it touched upon themes important to women—their needs, their views, their plight, and why men seemed to be so ignorant of their inner life.

In this paper, it will be shown that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an argument against unhelpful men attempting to direct and control women’s lives. It is a story told from the first person perspective of a narrator, who serves as a stand-in for Gilman herself. The narrator is confined to her room because of her nervousness. Her husband, a physician, insists that he knows best and will not listen to her side of things when it comes to what might help with her condition. Eventually, the narrator goes mad, leading to the collapse of her husband. The story may be read as an indictment of unhelpful men thinking they know better than their wives or even than women in general how a woman is best to be treated.

The inner life of the narrator in Gilman’s story is threatened by the no-nonsense attitude of her husband. He is oblivious to her creative and spiritual needs and dismisses them as problematic. The narrator states, “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not being felt and seen and put down in figures.” The narrator thus gives the impression that whatever her inner spiritual life may be, it is not permitted to come out or find expression in her daily life. It is something to be suppressed, according to her husband and according to the medical community. The fact that Gilman underwent the same treatment as the narrator in the story indicates that this story is Gilman’s own way of criticizing the treatment and society’s inexcusable attitude toward women in general. As Silcox points out, Gilman’s “rest cure” was championed by Freud and was popularly used as treatment among upper class women—yet in her experience it was nothing short of barbaric cruelty; a treatment in which she was confined like a prisoner in isolation. Indeed, Silcox notes that Gilman explained clearly why she wrote the story later one: it “was intended to convince Mitchell [her physician] to change his treatment of nervous disorders.” A better treatment might have been for the men in her life to pay more attention to her inner needs—rather than having “no patience with faith” or any other sort of elements of life that were not confirmed by way of empirical science.

The narrator knows what would help her: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (Gilman). The fact that she receives no support from her husband for this alternative treatment that she herself would like indicates that she is entirely marginalized. Moreover, she is made to feel guilty for her own feelings. Yet, the ludicrousness of what is being forced on her exposes the sham treatment for what it is: she is given nothing to do whatsoever—and therefore all she can do is think about her condition. But of course that is what her husband says she must not do. It is as though his conception of her were little more than that of a robot—a thing that can be turned on and off. He has no real understanding of her inner being or of herself as a woman.

However, there is also the problem of the narrator not understanding herself fully. She is what might be called an unreliable narrator, since she is having a nervous breakdown and the story is told from her perspective in a stream-of-consciousness style. The reader gets to see and experience her mental deterioration as it is happening in real time. Yet Gilman infuses the narration with irony. For example, the narrator states, “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” (Gilman). The irony is that if John truly loved her and were wise, he would listen more and she would not find it so difficult to talk to him about her condition. It is the fact that he is recalcitrant and unfeeling toward her that leads to her deterioration. He insists she see him as a physician. He does not understand what his most important role is: to be a husband, who loves and cherishes his wife. Part of the problem is that he does not know how to do this. He thinks in scientific terms, using the head, not the heart. What she needs is a heart to understand, to help her understand, to give her the kind of comfort, trust, warmth, encouragement, and support she needs to rise to the challenges of everyday life. She does not receive this kind of love from a man who insists on being a physician first, and a husband only second. As Esposito states, “In the world the narrator lives in, reason equals health and imagination equals illness” (“Illness in the Yellow Wallpaper”). She has an imagination, but it is not invited to live. Her husband wants her to be rational like he is—but he fails to be rational in the sense that he does not see her as something different from but equal to himself.

Esposito also states that one way to read the story is to view it as an examination of “the relationship between gender and power in the United States in the 19th century” (“Gender in The Yellow Wallpaper”). The relationship between John and the narrator may be taken as a typical one in 19th century America. The relationship is characterized by Esposito of being unequal: John treats her like she is his inferior—a child in his regard. She submits to everything he says. In 19th century America, women did have fewer rights than men; they could not vote; their roles were domestic; they had no position of power or authority in the wider world unlike today (Wayne). Naturally, this type of relationship led to conflict, as Rosenberg explains: the dynamic was such that it inverted values that should have been nourished rather than turned upside down.

Because of this unequal relationship, Gilman wrote the story to show how the “rest cure” was inhumane and unfair and what the likely outcome of such a cure would be for a woman: madness. Esposito argues that in the end of the story the narrator is able to invert the power dynamic: she calls her husband a “young man” whereas before he called her a “child”—and she is no longer submissive toward him but is rather acting out in order to free herself, by peeling the yellow wallpaper from the walls and taking back her own surroundings. The problem with this argument is that it does not consider the fact that she has actually gone mad. She repeats herself over and over again and does not seem to be in her right mind. John has fainted and is no longer in possession of himself, but neither is she really in possession of herself. The fact is that the treatment has not worked, and it was never going to work. What she needed was for her husband simply to appreciate her and love her unconditionally, to respect her needs and her desires, and to support them. Instead, he insisted that he knew best—and the end result was that he drove his wife to madness.

This same problem of an unhelpful man trying to control a woman appears consistently in American literature. From Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” to Glaspell’s “Trifles” to Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” it is always the same: a man wants a woman to act a certain way or be more to his liking, and the end result is always disastrous. In Hawthorne’s story, the husband ends up killing his wife in an effort to make her perfect. In Glaspell’s story, the wife ends up killing the husband after suffering years of torment and abuse. In Hemingway’s story, the man ends up pressuring the woman into getting an abortion in spite of her protestations. In Gilman’s story, the reader sees a husband reaping the just deserts of his actions: he loses his wife to madness by keeping her locked away and refusing to accept that she might know better than he what it is that her inner life needs.

Yet Esposito may be correct in his argument in the sense that the yellow wallpaper is itself a symbol of the oppressive nature of the narrator’s marriage. Since her husband insists he is more a physician than a husband, the marriage is a sham and has to be deconstructed. Her removal of the yellow wallpaper, as crazy and neurotic as it may seem, is her attempt to undo the marriage and free herself from the oppression. The wallpaper, over which she obsesses, becomes one object that she can control—since she has no control in her real marriage. By removing the wallpaper, she is acting in a manner that would enable her to validate her own inner life.

Still, the final situation at the end of the story is not a happy one. It is unlikely that when John does come to he will reconcile with his wife. The more likely scenario to follow is that she is committed to an insane asylum. She herself no longer thinks anything of her own actions, and views John more as an obstacle in her path to removing the wallpaper than as a husband. She states that she “had to creep over him every time” she went to remove another piece of the wallpaper so long as he lay there on the ground (Gilman). The story ends there, with no more journal submissions, which suggests that when John did awaken, he took drastic measures and probably had her confined in a ward somewhere. There is no evidence whatsoever that the narrator was able to free herself from the situation. The story, therefore, comes across as a warning and a cry for help on behalf of women everywhere in 19th century America. It is a warning in the sense that it shows what can happen to a woman when her husband refuses to acknowledge that she has a creative, independent, inner spirit that needs to have expression. It is a cry for help in the sense that it was written for the purpose of alerting a real doctor of how damaging the “rest cure” can actually be for a woman’s mental and emotional health.