Analysis
When Charlotte Perkins Gliman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” came out in the New England Magazine about 1891, it evoked comments from a number of physicians. One said, “Such a story ought not to be written. It is enough to drive one crazy.” Another opined that “It was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen,”
Ms. Gilman confesses to have undergone the same experience as the woman in the story, but that she was saved form a similar fate by her family who let her out into normal activity and she recovered. Years later a great specialist admitted having altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading the story which was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” starts out with a wife whose name and physical condition are not mentioned. She speaks of herself and her husband John as “ordinary people who seldom secure ancestral halls for the summer.” In describing this hereditary estate, she reveals a highly suspicious nature – a symptom of an aberration of the nervous system. She insists that there is something queer about the colonial mansion, else why should it be let so cheaply and stand so long untenanted?
John is the practical sort. “He has no patience with faith , an intense horror of superstition, and scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt ands seen and put down in figures. “Both the patient’s husband and brother are physicians of high standing. They assume friends and relatives that there is nothing the matter with her but a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency. So at first she is docile and follows all their orders but disagrees with them inwardly. Personally, she believed that congenial work with excitement and change would do her good, but she was powerless. She was a writer and did write for a while, but gave it up since it tired her a good deal.
When she revealed to John that she felt something strange about the house, he responded by saying that what she felt was a drought and promptly shut the window. She got unreasonably angry with him and realized she had never been so sensitive before. We as readers deduce that instead of getting better, she is getting worse.
John notices this change and becomes protective of her. The couple decides to move to the nursery at the top of the house which is a big airy room with windows that look all ways and having air and sunshine galore. A nursery at first, then playroom and gym later. The paint and paper suggest a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped of wallpaper in great patches all around the head of her bed. She never saw a worse paper in all her life and adjudged it to be brave “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
Another deterrent to the patient’s recovery is her husband’s habitual absence. She reveals, “I am glad my case is not serious. But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.’ At this point the reader is prone to believe that her condition is definitely, worsening, especially when she confesses that she is glad “Mary (the baby’s nurse) is so good with the baby and yet its mother cannot be with him for it makes her nervous.”
John laughed at her about the wallpaper and initially meant to repaper the room but later changed his mind, believing that she was letting it get the better of heer. Nothing was worse than to give way to such fancies.
She later began to fancy people walking in her garden. John warned her that with her imaginative power and habit of story making, her nervous weakness would be sure to lead to something worse and to be sure to check this tendency. True enough, analyzing the wallpaper, she observed “a recurrent spot where the pattern rolled like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stared at you upside down. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before.”
It is strange that our patient is still able to view and appreciate the beauty of the countryside and yet perceive the wallpaper’s ugliness – “a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one for you can see it in certain lights and not clearly then.”
A strong proof that her condition is alarming is that she has begun crying at nothing and crying most of the time. Also, she started to follow the pattern of the wallpaper by the hour –its design and arrangement, its bloated curves and flourishes, with “delirium tremens” go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But they also connect diagonally and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror.
It would not need a specialist to diagnose the seriousness of our patient’s condition. For her, the pattern on the wallpaper could now move, change as the light changes as the light changes and resembles a fungus. In any kind of light, the paper becomes bears and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. Even the wallpaper always has new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow over it. “It is the strangest yellow… it makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful things like buttercups, but old, foul, bad yellow things.’
Still another development is the stench and the woman (or women) that appear. The day comes for the couple to leave. The room is now bare, but our patient wants to catch one of the women coming out of the wallpaper to show to her husband and proposes to do it by getting into the wallpaper by creeping. Just then he arrives and is shocked to see her on all fours. Her announcement is even more scary when she says that she has gotten out of the wallpaper and that no one can put her back. She then wonders why John has fainted. We who have followed her deterioration know and believe she is not beyond salvation. And if you detect an autobiographical connection here, you are right!