The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Background
• – Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper after she had a severe
case of postpartum depression
• – essentially a response to her doctor, who tried to cure
through a “rest cure”
• – “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own
husband assures friends and relative that there is really
nothing the matter with one but temporary nervousness
depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one
to do?... So I take phosphoates or phosphites –
whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and
exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I
am well again. Personally I disagree with their ideas”
• After Gilman had written “The Yellow
Wallpaper” she decided to write an
explanation of her purpose or so-what
behind the story.
• She says that she based it on her own
personal experiences through this disease
and “it was not intended to drive people
crazy, but to save people from being
driven crazy, and it worked.” (Gilman,
“Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)
• Here is a quote from that passage that helps
explains why Gilman had to publish another
article in order to explain why she wrote “The
Yellow Wallpaper”.
• “[A] Boston physician made protest in The
Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written,
he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to
read it.
• Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to
say that it was the best description of incipient
insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my
pardon--had I been there?” (Gilman, “Why I
wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)
Feminism
• In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author uses

a number of literary devices to express the
political theme of feminism and the
oppression of women.
• To achieve her goal of expressing feminist
sentiment in The Yellow Wallpaper,
Gilman creates a narrator who is at once
expressive about her feelings but is also
prone to devaluing her own assessments.
• Gilman was a women’s rights activist in
the late 1800’s and she used her fiction to
raise feminist issues and to bring about a
change in their circumstances.
• In The Yellow Wallpaper she tells a story
of a woman entrapped within the confines
of her marriage and her expected roles as
a woman and it is this perhaps that causes
the woman’s madness.
Liberation Through Language
• Gilman saw language as a powerful political tool; she

wanted to use it to emancipate the Victorian women:
• I wrote to preach…
• One girl reads this, and takes fire! Her life is changed.
She becomes a power -
• a mover of others - I write for her. [1]
• Gilman desired to build a world unknown to her
contemporaries; one where women were not imprisoned
within the domestic domain. For her, language was an
instrument to incite revolution among women.
• The woman in the story is incarcerated by her
female body. She is trapped, having to act out
the role expected of her by society.
• She does not feel equipped for a life of being a
perpetual wife and mother. Her womanly body
is not suited to the impassioned and creative
mind that she has.
• Her stillness and stagnation cause her mind to
weaken and lose the insight it once had. The
tight corset of a Victorian dress tightens and
constricts her just as her life style does.
• The narrator’s entrapment within her
feminine role is represented by the jail like
qualities of the room in which she stays.
These are described by the narrator after
she asks her husband to remove the
offending wallpaper:
• He said that after the wallpaper was
changed it would be the heavy bedstead,
and then the barred windows, and then
that gate at the head of the stairs, and so
on.
• John, the narrator’s husband, treats her
like a child. The narrator is subject to her
subjugation as wife to her husband
constantly throughout the story. The bars
on the windows and the gate on the stairs
represent the lack of freedom she has
within her life and marriage.
• The marital bed is nailed down to the floor;

this implies that she has no choice but to
perform conjugal rites with her husband.
She is to remain passive while she is
dominated by the male.
The Woman in the Wallpaper
As the narrator deteriorates she begins to see a woman
within the wallpaper. At night the woman is seen shaking
the bars within the pattern, fighting to break free. These
are the barriers that need to be broken down in order to
reach a state of female emancipation.
• For the narrator liberation lies within the power of

language; language is a symbol of freedom, the freedom
to express oneself, and so then, to realize oneself. The
narrator uses writing to purge herself of her pent up
anxieties:
I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I

don’t feel able
And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say

what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief. [4]
• The wallpaper and its dizzy pattern
represent language. Many feminists critics
have said that language is phallocentric
(male dominated) and that women have to
find a new way of appropriating it in order
to express the true sense of their thoughts
and emotions.
• The woman trapped within the wallpaper
represents the Victorian women trapped
within their feminine roles unable to break
down the barriers of language to be able
to freely express themselves.
• However at the end of the story the
woman is liberated so there is hope that
through the use of language women could
one day be free of their constraints.
• Gilman was able to alter medical practices with
The Yellow Wallpaper and says that she has
“saved one woman from a similar fate--so
terrifying her family that they let her out into
normal activity and she recovered.” (Gilman,
“Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”) She was also
using it to represent the oppression of women in
a masculine society.
• Also the doctor that had applying the “rest cure”

to her altered his treatment for neurasthenia or
postpartum depression.
• Gilman was later diagnosed with incurable
breast cancer and she killed herself with
an overdose of chloroform rather then
letting others be in charge of her life.

The Yellow Wallpaper

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Yellow Wallpaper

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Yellow Wallpaper

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author uses

• Gilman saw language as a powerful political tool; she

• The marital bed is nailed down to the floor;

• For the narrator liberation lies within the power of

I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I

And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say

• Also the doctor that had applying the “rest cure”

You might also like