The Yellow Wallpaper

¶ … Medicine in Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

At the beginning of the story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman (1899), the narrator has recently had a baby and suffered a nervous collapse. Today, we might call the narrator's difficulty post-partum depression. The narrator is having trouble coping with the emotional difficulties and physical and hormonal shifts that come after pregnancy. Also, she lives within a society that does not accommodate the intellectual and maternal needs of women simultaneously. In other words, a woman must choose motherhood or personhood; a woman cannot be both a body and a mind. This means that the cure the narrator is prescribed, to forego all mental exertion, only makes her symptoms and inner conflicts worse, rather than better.

The narrator begins the story already distraught and unbalanced. She surrounded by people who do not understand her needs. She is trapped in the home where she is supposed to be resting. Her room becomes her prison. She describes herself "unreasonably angry" with her husband, a physician who prescribes "tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise" and insists there is nothing really wrong with his wife, as he dismisses her imaginative fantasies as silly romance. At one point in the story, he calls his wife "little girl," affectionately. The woman hates the peeling wallpaper of her airy room, calling its "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" with "lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide." This description indicates she is already projecting her unhappiness into the wallpaper's design.

Two weeks later, the narrator is frustrated that her husband will not repaper the room, but she cannot let herself reproach him, and instead reproaches herself for not being like John's sister Jennie who is a "perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession." The narrator projects all of her anger onto the wallpaper, calling it viscous and impertinent. By the 4th of July, the narrator is so distraught she sees a woman behind the paper. The paper gives the impression that there is "a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern." She fancies that the paper is moving. The pattern moves, the wallpaper's influence creeps into the house, and she projects her obsession onto John and Jennie, who seem to stare at the paper like she does when they have an unguarded moment.

The once-acknowledged imaginary woman becomes 'real' by the end of the story, shaking the paper and creeping about by day -- finally, at the story's end, the narrator has become the trapped, wallpaper-encased woman in her mind, and completely mentally unraveled as a result of her rest cure. This shows how the wallpaper of the former nursery room of the home symbolizes that woman is trapped by her rest cure, and by maternity. The narrator, unable to express her anger and sadness, instead expresses these feelings by developing a fixation on an imaginary woman, the projection of all of her unexpressed needs. Even as she becomes delusional, the narrator seems less obtuse than her uncaring physician of a husband, who cannot acknowledge that the mind can influence someone's state of physical health, or see that his wife has needs beyond that of maternity and domesticity.