Introduction
The short 6,000-word story by Charlotte Perkins Stetson (published under the name of her husband) captures the readers’ attention from the very first pages. The story is written in the first person, like a diary or a journal, which makes readers live through every page and line, every narrator’s thought and word. Since the woman who narrates is alienated from the community and not allowed to work or be engaged in any other activity, she describes her inner thoughts and feelings, and that makes the whole story even more vivid.
The Background: How Alienation Works
In the late 1880s, a decade before The Yellow Wallpaper was published, Silas Weir Mitchel, a reputable American neurologist, invented his theory of the rest cure (“Rest Cure” par. 1). It was prescribed to individuals diagnosed with various nervous conditions, such as hysteria or neurasthenia. Since those health conditions were much more common among women, the regime and kind of treatment did not surprise anyone.
Mitchel claimed that the best way to cure nervous illnesses was the isolation from family, friends, and society per se (“Rest Cure” par. 2). The bed rest, an abundance of fresh air, an absence of any work or activity, and regular feeding (forced feeding, if needed) were prescribed. All of this reached the point that “nurses cleaned and fed” those isolated women and even “turned them over in bed” (“Rest Cure” par. 2).
Nevertheless, many patients (and some of the physicians as well) were convinced that such kind of treatment was “worse than the disease” (“Rest Cure” par. 2). And the story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a prime example of that. Being prescribed with the rest cure and after three months of following the physician’s instructions, Charlotte “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (Gilman par. 4). Then she decided to return to a normal life, began working again, and came up with the idea to write a fictional story, which was not so fictional at all. The author wanted to show how the rest cure, in fact, worked and what consequences it caused. One of the physicians even described her work as “the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen” (Gilman par. 2). Indeed, it is.
The Criticism of the Story
The story is written in the first person, and it is the best decision, which its author could have possibly made. Charlotte wanted to convey the feeling of the narrator, and nothing could have done it better than the story in the first person and a format of a diary.
From the very beginning, readers see the following situation. Jane (the narrator) is sick (has a “hysterical tendency”) and is surrounded by physicians (her husband and brother), who do not believe that her health condition should be somehow addressed, apart from isolation, of course (Stetson 647). Since the woman is forbidden from working, as well as from any other activity and communication, she is almost unable to write about anything except her own thoughts and inner feelings.
She describes her surroundings (“There is a delicious garden”), her fears (“there is something strange about the house”), her emotions (“I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes”), and so forth (Stetson 648). However, the most important descriptions, through which readers can make the conclusions about Jane’s state, are those about her room, particularly about the yellow wallpaper.
Firstly, readers see that the woman simply does not like the wallpaper. For instance, she writes, “I never saw a worse paper in my life” (Stetson 648). She also says that the patterns commit “every artistic sin”, and the color is “repellent, almost revolting” (Stetson 648). Hence, for that moment, readers can barely notice anything strange about the paper – it is quite ordinary. However, the words, which the woman chooses to describe the color, have hidden and alarming undertones. Jane says, “It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulfur tint in others” (Stetson 649). The words “lurid” and “sickly” imply that the wallpaper makes Jane feel bad, at least ill at ease (Stetson 649). The next time she returns to the wallpaper, she chooses the word “horrid”, and so on (Stetson 649).
When Jane firstly mentions the subpattern she sees in the wallpaper, she says that it is “particularly irritating” (Stetson 649). Then she gives the descriptions that leave no doubt about the woman’s state. For example, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (Stetson 649). Later she says, “The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Stetson 654). And this list can be greatly expanded.
Little by little, we conclude that Jane is going crazy, and it is her vision of the wallpaper, which tells us about it. Therefore, readers understand the narrator’s state mainly due to the paper’s descriptions, and those become more and more often as the story goes.
It seems to me that the author has chosen the wallpaper as an object of Jane’s hallucinations on purpose. Its pattern represents something like a cage and the woman inside it can be associated with every female who has ever experienced the best care. Those women did not like such kind of treatment but were unable to contest the physician’s decision. As Jane says, “I disagree with their ideas … but what is one to do?” (Stetson 648). So, the ending, in which Jane identifies herself as a woman on the other side of the cage and believes that she has managed to escape (even though madness), is quite predictable.
If the narrator were someone else (John, for instance), we would probably get to know about Jane’s madness only at that moment when she began creeping around, and her madness became evident. Besides, if John were a narrator, the whole idea of the story would have been ruined since many critics and probably the author herself considered The Yellow Wallpaper as a part of feminist literature (“Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper” par. 1).
I realize that Charlotte Perkins Gilman conceived to make readers like the main character or at least sympathize with this woman. Frankly speaking, it is hard to determine whether I like her or not, but I am definitely sorry for her. While Charlotte found the courage to disobey a physician and do what seemed right to her, her character turned out to be unable to do this. Still, the author chose such an outcome on purpose since she wanted to show the world how the rest cure really worked.
To conclude, the story is incredibly well written, and it is almost impossible to stop reading before you find out how it ends. I believe that such kind of effect is achieved due to the story in the first person, and because every description used by the author perfectly conveys Jane’s state and keeps readers involved.
Works Cited
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper – Writing Women: Introduction n.d. Web.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins n.d., Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?. Web.
Rest Cure n.d. Web.
Stetson, Charlotte Perkins n.d., The Yellow Wall-Paper. Web.