Unraveling: The Heroine of Charlotte

Unraveling: The heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

The heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" seems like a normal, articulate, married woman at the beginning of the story, and ends the tale talking like a madwoman. However, Gilman makes it clear early on that the nameless narrator feels a sense of discomfiture, even torment, due to her circumstances. The 'rest cure' she has embarked upon to regain her physical strength after having a child eventually destroys her fragile mental health. At first the narrator is able to speak in coherent sentences and seems sane in the eyes of her uncomprehending doctor husband. At the end of the story she is crawling through the halls, peeling away the yellow wallpaper in a dissociated state. Yet this does not mean that she goes from a totally sane to an insane woman. Gilman's intention is to unmask the insanity of the infantilizing of women, and she shows this by depicting how the main character gradually unravels, leaving clues early on about the character's mental instability.

At the beginning of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the main character is suffering a 'rest cure' that seems to be postpartum depression. Numerous references are made to the woman's baby, but the narrator does not seem to feel much of a connection to the child. This could partially be a function of being a middle class woman, who was expected to rely upon a nanny or it could also be the result of her depression and her dislike of her social role as a woman. The narrator is not uncaring. She becomes filled with compassion for the 'woman' she is certain lies behind the peeling yellow wallpaper of the country home her husband rents for her to recover her strength and her health. She is not permitted to read or to engage in any stimulating activities, a kind of extreme version of the daily life of most women of the Victorian age. But the intelligent, sensitive narrator cannot help herself from thinking about her plight.

The narrator tries to convince herself that she is grateful for her husband's solicitude, as she says over and over how nice and airy the house seems, and how grand it is. Yet her real feelings come seeping through, particularly in regards to the wallpaper: "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 -- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." Repulsion, even suicide haunts the narrator's language early on in the tale.

The woman's insanity is a coming to fruition of her original sense of unhappiness; her apparent break with reality is not a sudden unhinging of her mind. Gilman is also careful to show the woman's madness is a socially-produced artifact, not biology. In fact, doctors seem to have little understanding of what really troubles the woman, including the woman's own husband who is a medical doctor. The narrator's mind wants to study, and when she is not allowed to read, she studies the wallpaper. "I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time… I lie here on this great immovable bed -- it is nailed down, I believe -- and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion." She does not think of her child, and only occasionally of her husband. The wallpaper and the imaginary woman command her focus. Forced into a pointless existence, and denied the mobility and the intellectual excitement that make life meaningful, the woman's mind turns to other intellectual and imaginary pursuits, Gilman suggests.

Eventually, rather than describing herself as looking at the pattern of the wallpaper, Gilman's heroine disassociates and projects herself as a trapped individual on the other side of the wallpaper. She refers to the other woman as 'she.' "I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but l now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour." Although this is an indication that the narrator is far less mentally stable than when she began her 'rest cure' the fixation upon the wallpaper has remained constant throughout the story, as well as the language of entrapment and the woman's reflection on the 'puzzle' of the wallpaper's pattern.