This paper is in regard to two narratives which are different from each other yet strangely similar and which feature some aspect of equal rights for men and women. The stories are “The Revolt of Mother” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Freeman’s “The Revolt of Mother” is a short story now receiving a lot of attention due to its relevance to the history of American feminism. The mother who rebels is one of those determined women – self-aware and tough-minded that started to appear near the end of the 19th century when the so-called “New Woman” began to assume clear definition. Freeman has opened the eyes of American women to the idea that in a world where men have the upperhand, women must fight for their rights and their privileges (thesis statement).
“Sarah Penn is a female who successfully revolts against and liberates herself form a familial situation of pernicious male dominance. There is, however, a more important reason for modern readers to focus upon this particular Freeman tale. It is one of her best” (Elrath, 1980: 255)
The revolt begins with Sarah and her husband: “Father!”
“What is it?”
“What are them men diggin’ over there for?”
There was a sudden dropping and enlarging of the lower part of the old man’s face…; he shut his mouth tight, and went on harnessing the great bay mare. He hustled the collar on to her neck with a jerk.
“Father!”
The old man strapped the saddle upon the mare’s back” (Freeman:180-181)
Father- Adorinam Penn – is thus introduced as the villain of the piece, a defiant man who will have his way and will not allow any opposition. He growls and tlls Mother to go back into the house and mind her own business. Mother does not immediately go and Freeman gives us the first sign of this fiercely self-reliant person Adorinam has to contend with. Mother appears as the “meek” housewife” but actually is as immovable as a rock.
Daughter Nanny complains that Adorinam’s decision to build another barn disregards their need for a better dwelling place. Mother trusts in her husband’s judgment and reminds Nanny that he has always been a good provider for the family. Sarah continues to nag him but her pleas fell on deaf ears.
As the completion of the new barn draws near and Adorinam prepares to move in his stock, a letter from Sarah’s brother in Vermont arrives inviting Adorinam to go and see the horse he has been wanting to buy. He accepts the invitation, thereby giving her the opportunity to take advantage of his providential absence. She packs the family’s worldly belongings and within hours has moved everything into the new barn. When the new cows arrive, she placed one in the old horse so that when her husband arrived, he would realize how serious she was when she accused him of housing their cattle in better accommodations that those in which he raised his family.
Adorinam undergoes an initial shock. At this point we may predict that despite his surly, taciturn ways, he will eventually capitulate to Sarah’s mandate that he complete her dream by adding such finishing touches as doors, windows and partitions. As Sarah as known all along, he has a fundamental respect for her and will do right by her (Munro, 2004).
Ms. Freeman is both sympathetic and opposed to the norms that strictly define spheres of action. She casts as a wife who indulges in her husband’s every whim while painting Adorinam as a man who is simply incapable of understanding Sarah’s reactions as comprehending how important a new house is for her. His bewildered final comment: “I hadn’t no idea you was so set on’t as all this comes to.”
The next short story to analyze is “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “Greg Johnson provides a fairly satisfactory general overview of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a Gothic production. Despite the disputable claim that Gilman’s story functions in part or a Gothic parody, he correctly identifies and aptly elucidates several of the most familiar Gothic themes at work in this study specifically “confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and irrational “fear” alongside such traditional Gothic elements as the distraught heroine, the forbidding mansion and the powerfully repressive male antagonist” (Davison, 2004: 47).
The main protagonist is a wife who regards herself and her husband John as “ordinary people who seldom secure ancestral halls for the summer” (Gilman, 1899). In the above description, she reveals a highly suspicious nature – a symptom of an aberration of the nervous system. Something is odd, she claims, that this colonial mansion is rented so cheaply and why has it remained untenanted for so long?
Her brother and her husband, John are physicians of high repute in the community. Both scoff at superstition and assure friends and relatives that there is nothing serious about the patient’s condition but a “temporary depression” which manifests itself as a slightly hysterical tendency. She is meek and follows all their instructions but disagrees with them inwardly. Personally she believes that congenial work with excitement would be good for her, but she was powerless against them. Apparently, they rule her life. She is a writer and pursued this activity but she quit since she was convinced that it tired her a lot. Unlike Sarah in “The Revolt of Mother” who worked hard all her life.
Confiding in John that she felt something strange about the house, he responded by closing the window, considering that it was caused by a draft of air. Here the reader notices that John was deliberately ignoring her comments. She responded by getting angry with him and realized that her condition was worsening. Noticing the change, John became even more protective of her. They decided to transfer to the nursery at the top of the house – a room allowing lots of fresh air and sunshine. But the walls are stripped of paper in patches around the head of the bed and she adjudged it to be the ugliest wallpaper she had ever seen.
Another deterrent to the patient’s recovery is her husband’s habitual absence. She is thankful that her ailment is not serious but “dreadfully depressing”. Perhaps it would have been beneficial had she been surrounded with people instead of being isolated. But it was not her choice; although even her baby was unwelcome in the sickroom fir it only made her nervous. Her situation contrasted with that of Sarah in “The Revolt of Mother” who had many people around her. Attention would be diverted. Sarah had to serve a family, especially her husband, not to mention the hired help. The patient in “The Yellow Wallpaper” could at least have been hired to take care and provide conversation for her.
From then on deterioration of the senses took place from imagining people walking in the garden to large bulbous eyes crawling in the wallpaper, crying fits, a bear appearing with a woman behind. Then when the paper developed a fungus with a stench accompanying, women started appearing in the wallpaper. She decided to catch one of them to show to her husband and proposed to do it by creeping into the wallpaper. Just then he arrives and is even more shocked than Adorinam in the first story that he faints. Although John is shocked to see her on all fours, she wonders why he has fainted.
Readers who have followed her deterioration believe she is not beyond salvation as Ms. Freeman’s autobiographical explanation shows: “Many and many a reader has asked me. When the story first came out in The New England Magazine about 1891, 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” (Gilman, 1913,:n.p.). Another physician in Kansas wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen (Gilman, 1913: n.p.)
For many years, Ms. Gilman suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown, tending to Melancholia and beyond. She went to a noted specialist who put her to bed and applied the rest cure and sent her home with solemn advise to live as domestic a life as possible. She obeyed the doctor’s instructions and came so near to the borderline of utter mental ruin. This was the life the patient led in The Yellow Wallpaper to which her husband and brother forced her.
Ms. Gilman cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went back to work – the normal life of every human being, in which is joy and growth and service without which one is a pauper and a parasite ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Had this protagonist rebelled early on against the orders of her two physicians and gone back to writing, she would have been spared that much suffering. Had she enough will power to hold her husband on to his promise of changing the wallpaper, there would not be anymore wallpaper to speak of and to become obsessed about. There would not be anymore ugliness to hallucinate about or stench to endure – only the beauty in the garden and her baby’s presence and the fragrance of its breath. But she feared repercussions resulting from going against her husband and her brother. Fear is sometimes a deterrent to action – even action for a cause (Davison, 2004).
Unlike Sarah in the “Revolt of Mother” who works herself to the bone, the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper’ takes the path of least resistance. Convinced that she is ill, though not seriously, she plays the role of an invalid while her mind does all the work, obsessing on the yellow wallpaper in the sickroom. She has no plans for the future unlike Sarah who nurtures a fierce love for her brood and who will never give up. She is concerned about her daughter and feels that a new house is a prerequisite for Nanny’s future well-being. Unlike John’s wife who will go just as far as bewailing her inability to fend for her baby and be grateful that he has a capable nurse to take care of him.
We must not underestimate the power of love. If the Adorinam painted at the start as pigheaded, domineering and a bully, capitulates under Sarah’s persistence and determination because he loved and respected her after all, there is a great possibility that the men in the life of John’s wife could give in to what she thinks is best for herself because it is evident from the beginning that they care for her and want her to get well.
My unsolicited advice to the womenfolk is to stand firm by your rights and fight for them if need be (like Sarah). You might not realize it at first, but you will all be respected for this.
The outcome of both stories are satisfactory. If Ms. Gilman says that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is autobiographical and that she recovered, then it follows that John’s wife did recover too. We are sure Sarah was content with how the state of affairs turned out. As adult readers, we have the child’s wish that “they live happily ever after”. So all’s well that ends well.
References
Davison, C.M. (2004) “Haunted House/ Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “the Yellow Wallpaper”, Women’s Studies, Vol 33 Issue I, p. 47-75.
Elrath, J. R. (1980) “The Artistry of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Revolt””, Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 80, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p. 225.
Freeman, M. E. W. (1891) “The Revolt of the Mother.” A New England Nun and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Brothers, p. 448-68.
Gilman, C.P. (1899) “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Small & Maynard, Boston, MA.
Gilman, C.P. (1913) “Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Forerunner, issue.
Munro, C.L. (2004) “The Revolt of “Mother”. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition.