In comparing Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper we find that these two works have a great deal in common. Beyond the use of a virtual world as a plot device, the two works use a similar setup for characterization, set a similar mood and use lot of the same kind of imagery in similar settings to make it all seem real to the reader. While Bradbury’s work is rather macabre and Gilman’s is more of a psychological thriller, both works are built around the authors’ special way with suspense and their skill with characterization and imagery.
In Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt a young couple living above their social origins are seeking to give their children every advantage they, presumably, did not have. To this end they purchased a marvelous house with a “living nursery”. The couple is struggling with society and social expectations and a world in which technology has gone wild. Instead of a dream home they are beginning to find that they have purchased a crippling crutch which slowly takes over every active part of being human, turning them into passive receivers and viewers of life. The house does everything for them. They do not even brush their own teeth.
They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.
The house is almost another character and the nursery, in particular, is a marvelous escape from reality, or so they think. They see it as educational, and it actually becomes a surrogate parent fulfilling every whim of the children. By the time the story begins, the parents have become secondary to the nursery and been found unsatisfactory by the children, because they sometimes say “no”.
You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours – the tantrum he threw! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery.
At the beginning of the story we immediately know that something is wrong with the nursery, and we find out about the African Veldt and how it seems to be stuck in a rather wild African scene of a pride of lions. We find out a great deal about George and Lydia in the first paragraphs. They have spent an enormous amount of money on a house which does everything. This was, apparently a dream for which they worked. The house was supposed to be the perfect haven, and was supposed to make them happy, hence the name, HappyLife Home. However, the changes it has made in their lives and, particularly in them and their children, are not so good. They are struggling to break away from this affluent prison that society seems to have almost imposed upon them by pressure to succeed and to visibly demonstrate that success. “But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?”
The use of psychology as they consult a psychologist for help, allows us to understand these characters in a very short time. This is backed up in the dialogue. Lydia is afraid and suggests that they have a psychologist look at the nursery, because their spoiled children have suddenly become obsessed with an African Veldt. “Bradbury’s tale is set in a future where the walls of rooms take on a virtual reality that is constructed out of the “telepathic emanations” of their inhabitants,” (Roth, 2001). The telepathic element shows us that the children are creating these scenes. We then see the different reactions of the two parents after paying a visit to the nursery and being charged by lions. Lydia is genuinely terrified, while George is amused, but he comforts her and agrees to shut off the room.
When the children return from their outing they discuss the nursery and the African Veldt, which the children deny is there at all. George looks and finds it changed, and they claim it was not Africa at all. He sends the children to bed and locks the nursery. He and Lydia discuss the possibilities of the room increasing any inborn neurosis in children. He thought earlier of how bloodthirsty young children were, before they knew of the realities of death. Reid (2000) suggests that the psychological aspects of this tale have not materialized in the current digital virtual worlds, like Second Life, “To be sure, it is an old division; and the trepidation experienced by the worried parents watching their children frolic in the digital world conjured in their playroom in Bradbury’s “The Veldt” is a common reality now.” However, the story remains quite chilling and these characters are remembered for the grisly ending in this tale. “The Veldt” describes how the misuse of technology turns two children into killers.” (Reid, 2000, p. 46)
In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it is not technology per se, but yet, it is, which drives the narrator into insanity. Roth mentions some controversy of the time of its publishing concerning the effects of certain kinds of wallpaper upon people, especially physically inducing seizures in epileptics or creating more psychological problems for patients (Roth, 2001).The wallpaper is not a digital wonder, but it becomes one in the mind of the narrator.
At first she simply does not like it and feels that something is wrong with the house. The reader makes the connection. Then each time she mentions the wallpaper the words get more serious. She describes the patterns as arabesques and mushrooms. Then she describes watching the wallpaper, which is when the reader begins to fear for her. “…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.” Each description becomes less rational and more serious, until she finally sees a woman trapped in the wallpaper. “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—” The woman is possibly suffering from postpartum depression and struggling to regain her equilibrium as a mother. Herndl ( 1993, 72,75,103,234) names several instances of the invalidation of women in literature by virtue of their weak constitutions and propensity for developing “melancholy”. One instance he sites is in Bullard’s novel Christine: A Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856) “But after almost a year of solitary confinement, Christine begins to doubt herself, fearing that she is sinking into ‘the most hopeless of any kind of insanity, that of a gentle, but settled melancholy.’” (Herndl, 1993, p. 72 )
At the time when this was written her depression was called melancholy, and the prescription was rest, quiet and solitude. It was mostly accorded to women and the popular (male) opinion was that it was the weakness of the female constitution and psyche which caused it. The narrator makes several attempts to escape her eventual fate, to no avail. She suggests that there must be something wrong with the mansion if it is so cheap. She had tried to escape by writing, but her physician husband and brother both concur that writing is unhealthy for a woman and they forbid it. She asks to be moved to another room and is told that the room she wants is unsuitable. When she complains about the wallpaper her husband decides not to repaper as he had planned, so that she will overcome her aversion and will not become obsessed with all the problems of the room. In many ways it is the patriarchal environment which controls her completely that she is trying to escape. There is a parallel between the two stories here in the enforced passivity of the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper, “I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more,” and the care of the house for the people in The Veldt.
As the story progresses and the narrator is bored by the enforced inaction, so she becomes more fixated upon the curious faded yellow wallpaper. We experience her journey into madness first hand as we listen to her thoughts. “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself and that is that it changes as the light changes.” We listen as she discovers eyes in the wallpaper, fungi and then a creeping woman trying to get into the house from the wallpaper. At the end she has escaped her domestic socially imposed imprisonment in marriage into insanity, though she thinks she has escaped the wallpaper. The characterization of the narrator is made intimate by the first person and even though we consider her an unreliable narrator, the eventual descent into insanity actually validates her fears.
The characterization of John, her husband, as another factor which we, and the narrator, feel is contributing to her illness by his medical treatment of rest and isolation. The inactivity seems to be encouraging her to examine the wallpaper. She has been forbidden to write or even do simple household chores. This was the treatment of the time by concerned physicians, but her husband seems to delight in her incapacity. Perhaps it makes him feel strong and protective. He certainly takes a paternal role with her, so that could be another complication. He may be promoting her illness by his attitude and treatment, because he subconsciously wants someone to take care of (Counseling and psychotheraqpy theories. 2006). The narrator hints at this several times.
The narrator is struggling against a social mores of subservience and weakness in females, the social bounds of marriage in the nineteenth century and the dominant paternal society. She is also fighting some kind of depression or psychosis termed “melancholy” without modern medicine and therapy, and while being immobilized and forced to do nothing. The husband would rule even if he was not a doctor. Being a doctor gives him total control and nobody but his wife will question this. As time passes we hear her imaginings about the wallpaper, how it comes to life, how it has bars in it and how there is a woman behind the bars trying to get out. She see the windows in the daytime creeping outside every window. As soon as she turns the woman is there. Then it becomes many women. She wonders if the women all came out of the wallpaper like her as she rips off the last of the wallpaper. Her husband comes home to find her creeping around the room. She tells John that she has ripped off most of the wallpaper, so he and Jane cannot stuff her back in. She has carried us along down into her very own mental prison. While it is not as powerful an ending as in The Veldt, where the parents vanish and their bloody clothing is seen on the hillside with the lions, it leaves readers to shake their heads to throw off the images painted in the Yellow Wallpaper.
The characterization in The Veldt is accomplished by third person narrative and dialogue. In The Yellow Wallpaper we have a more intimate first person narrative in the form of a diary which the narrator is not supposed to be writing, since writing is forbidden. Bradbury was right to use third person, since the ending would be impossible if it were first person. “And suddenly they realized why those other screams bad sounded familiar.” We have to have some distance and a limited viewpoint for it to succeed. By the same token, we need first person narrative in The Yellow Wallpaper in order to understand the character. We know what is true and how she struggles and we share her fears until she finally makes statements which are obviously untrue, showing us that she is no longer sane. “‘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!”’
The mood of The Veldt is ominous and suspenseful. We know from the beginning that something will or has happened. Bradbury describes the sounds and smells and creates the images of wildness for the reader. He foreshadows the ending several times with the first visit together to the nursery, when they are charged by the lions and the dash out to the hall and with mentions of the savagery of youth. “They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.” By the time the children get the parents to agree to turn the nursery on again for a minute the reader is fairly screaming, “No!” We instinctively know that something dreadful will happen, since we have heard screams and seen bloody items.
The mood is built as the couple discuss the problems with the children, discipline and tantrums and as they consult the psychologist. We realize that this house literally wipes their noses, or anything else that needs wiping, and we wonder about the cheap price of the nursery. Like the cheap lease price of the mansion with the yellow wallpaper, something seems very wrong, rather like the dope pusher offering free samples. Bradbury builds the mood throughout by interspersing worried conversations about how the house does everything and they don’t belong, “That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid….” He uses descriptions of the veldt and discussions of how spoiled the children have become. They talk about becoming superfluous. Then they worry about from where in the children’s minds comes this veldt with its smells and heat and the growing sense of danger. They hear screams from the nursery and find their own personal items there, chewed and bloodied.
The worry of the psychologist heightens the suspenseful mood as we begin to realize that he considers it urgent to get them out of the house. He expects it to take year of therapy to straighten out the kids, and he suggests that they turn everything off and that the nursery should be destroyed. “This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here.” Bradbury keeps us on edge as the children wheedle for a few more minutes in the nursery, and George and Lydia keep saying no.
In The Yellow Wallpaper the mood is more curious at first and we are drawn along by sharing the narrator’s thoughts through her secret diary. The reader suspects that she may be an unreliable narrator and that is intriguing. The ending is both a total surprise and yet, somehow, very logical. All through the story we keep hoping she will somehow break free of the cocooned existence within which she has been slowly fading away, but we never expect her to escape in the manner which she does. The vivid descriptions she gives of the wallpaper and its changes keep us reading to see what happens to the wallpaper, especially as the time draws near for them to leave. She never actually describes the other woman which becomes the women, though she gives vivid descriptions her movements and of the arabesques, the fungi, the bulging eyes and the bars. The author even describes the smell of the wallpaper and calls it yellow smell. One very unexpected twist was the husband fainting at the end. It appears he actually had no clue as to what was going on inside her head.
The words used in various descriptions are both poetic and patterns of sound indicating her feelings to set the mood which begins as curious and gradually becomes quite desperate. For example: “The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions — why, that is something like it.” Then further on she describes the smell: “It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.” As her paranoia deepens the narrator uses stronger words and relays ever darker thoughts.
Bradbury uses a combination of dialogue and vivid description to create the mood. He describes all the sights and smells of the nursery, the sounds and even the heaviness of mood it creates. Finally Bradbury shows us veiled threats which foreshadow the ending.
“Will you shut off the house sometime soon?
“We’re considering it.”
“I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.”
“I won’t have any threats from my son!”
“Very well.” And Peter strolled off to the nursery.
Gilman combines interior monologue with description to accomplish the same task. They work equally well, but our own distance is very different with the two stories. While we identify with the couple in the Veldt, we feel more surprise and horror at their deaths. In The Yellow Wallpaper we identify with the narrator, whose name we never learn, as a female imprisoned in the role of her time, helpless and invisible.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.
We feel a sense of loss as we realize that she has finally descended into madness. Yet, there is also relief, since she actually has escaped what is, to her, an intolerable existence of constant oppression.
I don’t like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
The settings for these stories is very different, but the same: a house in different eras. Bradbury’s tale is told in an affluent future when technology can literally do everything for people except be born and die. It can take care of their personal hygiene, cook their meals, clean the clothing and the house, provide a huge variety of entertainment and even create artwork and crafts. It is an interesting, and somewhat amusing, thing that darning socks is mentioned. That is really the only thing I noticed which dates this story, since people in developed nations simply no longer darn socks.
The setting of the house is also a character in some ways, since it interacts with the occupants on a telepathic level. Of course, this is what makes this story so scary. It reminds us that young children should not be given too much power. Children need to mature before they gain that kind of power. We don’t really see anything else outside the house, though we are told that they are still in the US.
The house in The Yellow Wallpaper is a mansion fallen into some disuse. The time period is current for the author, but that was in the 1890s. It was Hedges who brought this story to the attention of readers in the 1970s (Golden & Zangrando, 2000, p. 10) and she says in her lengthy afterward of Gilman’s revised text,
The wallpaper consists of “lame uncertain curves” that suddenly “commit suicide — destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.” There are pointless patterns in the paper, which the narrator nevertheless determines to pursue to some conclusion. Fighting for her identity, for some sense of independent self, she observes the wallpaper and notes that just as she is about to find some pattern and meaning in it, it “slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.” (Gilman, 1996, p. 51)
The old house is rented while their own is being renovated. The room where the narrator “rests” was a former nursery, which makes us wonder if Bradbury read this story as his dangerous room is a nursery. However, the larger part of the setting for both is the time period. Bradbury’s is in the affluent future when people seem to have become quite materialistic and everything is automated. Gilman’s is set in the nineteenth century and the repressive society of that era. Women were most certainly controlled. They were considered property under the law of most states, having no rights to handle financial transactions, to buy property or even own much of anything. All property was the husband’s. Gilman wrote from first hand experience, having suffered a month in a sanatorium herself for melancholy, and nearly gone mad there, and then having been told by the doctor there to “never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” (Gillman, 1996, p. 46)
What is a most interesting “coincidence?” is that both stories use the walls of a nursery for the element of danger. The nursery is supposed to symbolize innocence, and in these two works it is closer to horror. In Bradbury’s story the walls really do come to life, so to speak, though they are not supposed to actually do that. In Gilman’s story the walls come to life in the mind of the narrator, symbolizing her imprisonment in her time as wife and mother. Near the end, this is extended to all women as she imagines she sees many women, all whom have escaped from the wallpaper. In both stories the main characters are destroyed by the wall, which is why the setting is very important. Without these two settings neither story is possible.
There is also the comparison of haunted houses, as Willis suggests (2007):
A twentieth-century haunted house story, “The Veldt,” by Ray Bradbury, expresses this paradigm in a particularly vivid way, and, since it also takes place in a nursery or children’s room, it speaks more directly to “The Yellow Wallpaper” than many other examples of the form. (Willis, 2007)
Bak describes the setting of The Yellow Wallpaper perfectly in his article:
Gilman’s narrator is isolated “three miles from the village” (11) in an upstairs nursery of a “colonial mansion” (9), its windows barred and its walls covered in a faded yellow wallpaper whose “sprawling flamboyant patterns” commit “every artistic sin” (13) imaginable. It is a room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about the room. (Bak)
I cannot improve upon his description.
Once having read these two works it is virtually impossible not to notice the similarities, though there are also many differences. Both authors have masterfully created a heavy mood, Bradbury’s macabre and horrific and Gilman’s tense and amusingly weird in places. We feel the tension as the authors describe the very disturbing images on the wall. Neither images are supposed to be real, but both of them become a certain horrible reality for the characters.
Each set of characters struggle against certain characteristics of their society.
The society in Bradbury’s tale is represented mostly by the house and its many conveniences. The psychologist gives us information about many other people having spoiled children, so we get a hint that the affluence and technological advancement of this society is having the effect upon the people in that they are becoming dependent, ineffectual and spoiled. We do know from the text that there are still some Luddites resisting the technology, since ordinary homes are still available. The parents in the story want to give their children every advantage, but have misplaced their trust in technology. The society, as a whole, seems to have forgotten that personal parenting is more important in raising children than any kind of technology. We guess from the psychologist’s statements that Lydia and George are one couple of many who have fallen into this trap. It is an ironic twist that Bradbury gives the children the names of the lead characters in Peter Pan, Wendy and Peter, who want also to escape reality into Never-Never Land (Smith, 2002, p. 44).
In Gilman’s work, the narrator is struggling against a totally repressive society which relegated women to bedroom and the kitchen. It is interesting that the narrator is never even given a name. She is invisible, powerless and ineffectual (Smith, 2002, p. 110). There was no reliable birth control, so in their roles as sole caregivers, women became overwhelmed by the workload and lack of privacy or freedom which comes with children. Many such women suffered nervous trauma, stress or melancholy when faced with returning to an active sexual life with their husbands after childbirth, especially if they already had two or three children. (Roth, 2001) It was the established paternalistic society which kept women virtual prisoners in their homes. Before the age of majority and marriage, the father controlled the daughters, as he did their mothers, and then the husband took over. Legally a woman did not even have any recourse to a certain amount of beatings, as long as there was no permanent injury, and marital rape was not a crime. In fact, a husband could actually divorce a woman for neglecting her marital duties, while women could seldom get a divorce without the agreement of the husband. Women achieved the vote in 1935, but they still had a long ways to go. In some states, women were still not empowered through the 1970s. Nevada and Idaho are examples of this where any major purchase made had to be signed by the husband. In the society of Gilman’s narrator, women were slaves.
References
Bak, J. S. (1994). Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”. Studies in Short Fiction, 31(1), 39+. Web.
Bullard, Laura Curtis. Christine: A Woman’s Trials and Triumphs. New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1856.
Gilman, C. P. (1996). The Yellow Wall-Paper (Revised ed.). New York: Feminist Press. Web.
Golden, C. J. & Zangrando, J. S. (Eds.). (2000). The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Web.
Herndl, D. P. (1993). Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Laureate Education Inc. (Producer), &. (2006). Counseling and psychotheraqpy theories. [Video/DVD] Baltimore.
Reid, R. A. (2000). Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Web.
Roth, M. (2001). Gilman’s arabesque wallpaper.(charlotte perkins gilman’s short story the yellow wallpaper considered for its themes and influences).
Smith, P. A. (2002). Thematic Guide to Popular Short Stories. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Web.
Willis, H. (2007). The unexamined second life isn’t worth living: Virtual worlds and interactive art.