“Yellow Wallpaper” is a series of diary notes written by a young woman during her three months in a secluded mansion in the countryside. Her husband, a successful doctor with a high position in society, brings her here for the summer to improve her health. In doing so, he is guided by the principles of the so-called “relaxation treatment” developed by Dr. S. Mitchell2, and deprives his wife of society, books, and entertainment, leaving her alone for a long time. The narrator, whose name Gilman does not name in the story, secretly disagrees with her husband, and therefore keeps a diary, unable to trust the “living soul.” The image of the doctor’s husband, who has authority, correlates with the traditional patriarchal social order, within which traditions and prescriptions limit the behavior of women. Placed in a yellow wallpaper room, the storyteller immediately recognizes it as disgusting, and the color and pattern of the wallpaper repulsive. Remarkable is the fact that the space chosen by the husband was a former nursery, and his condescending attitude towards his wife infantilizes her. Thus, in an environment devoid of any intellectual and emotional stimulus, the narrator is carried away by the wallpaper pattern. After some time, she begins to distinguish a particular background: a woman behind bars. The story’s ambiguous ending is marked by an act of disobedience and aggression (the narrator locks herself in the room, tears the wallpaper off the walls, crawls in a circle). Feminist readings interpret the heroine’s madness as rejecting the patriarchal system and escaping from it, and the process of becoming insane as a search and finding of her female identity.
Since its re-publication in 1973, critics have appreciated and read Gilman’s text from a feminist, psychoanalytic, historical, and cultural perspective. The magic of the story arises from the innovative transfer of the experience of insanity in the first-person storytelling, showing the evolution of the image of the wallpaper and indicating their symbolic significance and ending, provoking further interpretation of the text. In this regard, it is curious that the “cult of the house” and the “female sphere” are represented in Gilman’s story as the room’s physical space in which the heroine of the story is forcibly placed. Simultaneously, the room and the experience of being in it turn out to be a kind of laboratory of the female imagination, female self-knowledge, and self-expression. In this paper, attention is focused on the forms of artistic representation of the mobile female experience and the phenomenology of the heroine’s consciousness in their correlation with the room’s space poetics.
The two main contrasting structures of the story are the husband’s daytime world, the rational world, and the irrational nocturnal fantasy world of his wife. The author contrasts the image of John, “practical to the extreme”, ignoring all things or events that “cannot be felt or seen” and his sister Jenny, to the image of an impressionable and nervous wife, who appears in the house as “inhabited by spirits… strange” and intimidating. John, who believed that the reason for his wife’s nervous breakdown was her “violent imagination and penchant for writing,” forces her to the daily solitary residence in the space of four walls, which almost destroys the heroine, actualizing her fears. However, the essential semantic oppositions of the story are control (or discipline) and imagination.
It is the refusal to control from the outside and the vivid imagination of the heroine that determine the dynamics of the story’s internal plot. Let’s trace its implementation, paying attention to individual elements of artistic depiction. The room’s main symbol as an instrument of control (discipline) is the marital bed, which is bolted to the floor and looks like “it has seen many battles.” The author describes her as “huge and heavy… immovable.” And the bars on the windows – as evoking associations with a prison cell. The room’s previous use as a gym is evidenced by “rings and various things embedded in the walls.” According to various researchers, these items are of high importance and mark the prisoner status of the room’s former inhabitants. Introducing into the objective world of the work multiple attributes symbolizing the disciplinary practices of suppression (bars, rings, a bolted bed), Gilman unequivocally points out that in marriage, a woman is deprived of her freedom and becomes a prisoner, even if she does not realize it.
The critical point for understanding the writer’s purpose is the room wallpaper, which gives the most detailed picture of the storyteller’s fears. They become a phantasmagoric screen onto which she projects her vision of the situation. Moreover, their intricate psychedelic ornament in the form of “waves of optical horror” maintains a sense of isolation and isolation from the outside world. The heroine’s fears are inscribed in a strange wallpaper pattern, which is both “meaningless” and “painful” for her. The narrator’s hypotheses about the purpose of the room evoke images, implicit the meaning of worrying about invisible supervision and control. The wallpaper’s unusual and incomprehensible external pattern is represented by a repeating fragment in which “the pattern begins to resemble a curled neck with two bulging eyes staring up at you” so that these “absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.” Under the close and unrelenting surveillance of “bulging eyes”, the narrator’s state changes from obsessive anxiety, to madness (Thrailkill, 560). Wallpapers cause irreversible consequences for the psyche and consciousness of the heroine. The heroine herself says that “I have never met such expressiveness in an inanimate object before”, it seems to her that the wallpaper is looking at her as if they know “what a harmful influence they have on her”. Feeling hatred for wallpaper, the heroine notes their disgusting yellow color as “smoldering, dirty” and disturbing her “yellow smell” of wallpaper. In the end, the heroine of the story rips the wallpaper off the walls, proclaiming the deliverance from supervision and the liberation of consciousness. The wallpaper image occupies a fundamental place in the artistic world of work, being a manifestation of specific modeling categories. The text not only thematically shows the release of a woman from the shackles of the patriarchal regime, but the poetics of space directly reproduces the sequence of the heroine’s actions, transforming her consciousness and ridding her of her former suppressed “I”. It is no coincidence that the wallpaper image’s reception undergoes significant metamorphoses in the heroine’s imagination: from violent rejection and rejection to curiosity, the desire to explore mysterious pictures, to active actions to tear wallpaper from the walls of the room.
The image of women crawling on all fours suggests a return to their natural, free state of growth and development. It was the free development of a woman that was violated by gender prejudices built not only into the treatment schemes for “female diseases” created by male institutions but also by the entire Victorian patriarchal culture, which imposes disciplinary norms that bind a woman in a rigid framework of various rules and regulations, thereby depriving her creativity and freedom to express yourself.
In addition to the opposition we have identified, control (discipline) – imagination, which allows the heroine to break the gratings and restrictions imposed on a woman, the most crucial feature of the poetics of the story in its direct relation to the space of the room is the hidden signs of the heroine’s “I” projection outside, the point of her emotional state (Gilman 260). The story is told in the first person, and, perhaps, precisely because the heroine throughout the information remains anonymous and nameless for us, unable to express her thoughts, feelings, and fantasies to others, she trusts their diary, which she calls “soulless paper” (dead paper) 4. The story consists of 12 diary entries in which the narrator describes her physical condition – “illness” and the emotions she experiences. The first diary entry is the most voluminous of all. It is replete with descriptions of a country mansion and the surrounding nature. In it, for the first time, yellow wallpapers are mentioned, their strange annoying pattern “in which all kinds of artistic errors are concentrated”, their repulsive dirty yellow color. From the moment she recognizes another woman in her inner drawing, the heroine begins to acquire her “I”, her identity. It is no coincidence that this happens at night, at a time when the subconscious mind is free from the work of suppressive disciplinary mechanisms. The narrator begins to associate herself with the woman behind bars, who at first saw her as relatively passive, “bent and hunched over” (Stetson 19). Still, then, just like the narrator, the strength for rebellion and struggle awakens. She begins to “shake the pattern (the grating) as if he wants to free himself. “As you move towards the end of the story, the volume of diary entries decreases: the heroine no longer shows any interest in her husband’s opinion or fear of him.
In this way, the solution of the poetics of space in the story is directly related to the problem of the “female” question, presented through the opposition of control vs. imagination, where power is depicted in specific units (tracking eyes, lattices). The heroine’s imagination, consistently interpreting these images, projects her internal state onto them (passive, depressive, and further interested, active). The artistic concept of the story “Yellow Wallpaper” is also revealed with such categories of the cultural world of the work as color, smell, and form. The ubiquitous smell of wallpaper and their disgusting sickly yellow color, hallucinatory images produced by the heroine’s imagination create an “overwhelming” atmosphere and determine the heroine’s behavior, striving for protest freedom from restrictions. “Yellow Wallpaper” is an allegory of the unequal social order of the late 19th century, in which women were only meant to play a secondary role. The way the heroine’s husband treats his wife causes her a complex of profound emotional experiences, through which she realizes her insignificance in life. A literary work is not so much fiction as a reflection of the real state of affairs in families of that time. According to the drama plot, it is only through depression and anger that the narrator gains self-confidence.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte P. “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?” Advances in psychiatric treatment, vol. 17, 2011, pp. 256–265.
Stetson, Charlotte P. The Yellow Wallpaper. Hansebooks, 2019.
Thrailkill, Jane F. “Doctoring “The Yellow Wallpaper” ELH, vol. 69, no. 2, 2002, pp. 525-566.