I.
The American author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is perhaps best remembered today for a (semi-autobiographical) short story written after she suffered a severe bout of postpartum psychosis and first published in 1892: The Yellow Wallpaper ... [1]
II.
The (possibly unhinged and certainly unreliable) narrator is a married woman who keeps a journal. Her husband, John, is a doctor and "practical in the extreme".
By this she means:
"He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he
scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put
down in figures."
Rightly or wrongly, she resents the fact that he will not believe she's physically unwell and blames him for thereby retarding her recovery. And, to be fair, I can see how this might be troubling.
For it's bad enough when one's useless GP insists there's really nothing wrong. But when one's own spouse - who just happens to also be a physician of high standing - "assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression", that must be really maddening.
And when one's own brother - also a highly respected doctor - concurs that one is simply exhibiting signs of a slight hysterical tendency ... Well, it would be enough to make anyone want to scream and tear at the wallpaper (whatever the colour or pattern).
It's an unfortunate fact that doctors and others working in the healthcare professions, are often not what one might expect or hope for. And experience over recent years has taught me to be wary of accepting their diagnoses and prescribed treatments.
And so I'm sympathetic to the narrator of Gilman's story; even if, as I say, she may be unreliable on occasion and a little too romantic and overly sensitive to queer vibrations for my tastes (sometimes, a draught is just a draught and you really do just need to close the window).
And I do see that John is a patronising and paternalistic prick; I wouldn't want to be married to him, that's for sure.
As for the wallpaper:
"I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
[...] The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."
I know a lot of people dislike wallpaper: and I know a lot of people hate the colour yellow - although I'm not among their number and have, in fact, just painted my kitchen in a lemon zesty colour full of enough sunshine to make Van Gogh proud [2].
Still, she has a point: one should be happy - or, at the very least, not unhappy - in one's domestic surroundings.
And it's wrong of her husband to laugh at her about the wallpaper. Just as it's wrong not to appreciate that Wilde was perfectly serious when, lying in his wretchedly furnished Paris hotel room, he declared that he and his wallpaper were fighting a duel to the death: One or the other of us has to go.
The fact that Wilde died shortly afterwards proves that home furnishings can have a malevolent - even fatal - influence on our lives and that aesthetics deserves to be taken very seriously as a branch of philosophy.
III.
Like the narrator, I also used to lie awake as a child and extract a mixture of terror and entertainment out of the objects of my little bedroom. She remembers how kindly the knobs of a big old bureau were, whilst I remember the scary faces and figures made of leaves that appeared in the curtains - and that returns us to the yellow wallpaper:
"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."
Despite this, the woman grows very fond of her room; in spite of the wallpaper, or perhaps - somewhat perversely - because of the wallpaper: "It dwells in my mind so!" She spends many hours trying to follow the pointless pattern:
"There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit."
She particularly dislikes it at night, when the moonlight shines on the undulating wallpaper and gives her the creeps:
"The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move [...]"
Her husband tells her to go back to sleep and not be silly. But she doesn't. Instead, she lies there in the darkness "trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately".
If the colour of the paper is bad enough, it's the pattern - with its purely random design that seems to change depending on the light and time of day - that really tortures her mind:
"You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."
In the end, she decides the female figure she sees behind the pattern is a prisoner; trapped and desperate to escape. And she determines to learn her secret, even if she still can't stomach the yellowness of the wallpaper which makes her think "of all the yellow things I ever saw; not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things".
Oh, and did I mention the paper's unique smell:
"I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.
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.
It gets into my hair."
"Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.
It is not bad - at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."
IV.
And so, we approach the end of Gilman's remarkable tale ... and the narrator's further descent into madness.
She decides, for example, that the pattern of the wallpaper really is moving; that the trapped woman is making it move as she crawls around and shakes the bars of her prison, desperate to break out. Unfortunately, "nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so".
But, having said that:
"I think that woman gets out in the daytime! [...] I’ve seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
[...] I see her [...] creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.
I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!"
Finally, there's only one thing for it - she has to strip the paper off the walls:
"As soon as it was moonlight, and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper."
The next day, when alone in the house, she attempts to finish the job, keeping a rope close by just in case the woman gets out and requires restraining. But peeling off the paper isn't easy and she grows increasingly angry and frustrated. She also now totally identifies with the woman and believes that she too has emerged out of the wallpaper:
"I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. [...]
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."
At this point, her husband John comes home and discovers her creeping around the room:
"'What is the matter?' he cried. 'For God's sake, what are you doing!'
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. 'I’ve got out at last,' said I [...] And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!'"
In horror and despair, her husband collapses:
"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!"
Is that final line a triumphant assertion of female agency and independence - or the confession of a lunatic?
Maybe both: I don't know.
But I do know Gilman's work fully deserves the multiple readings from many different perspectives that it has had over the last 130 years. H. P. Lovecraft was not wrong to recognise it as a classic tale which powerfully (and cleverly) delineates the madness which can overtake any one of us (whatever the colour of our wallpaper) [3].
Notes
[1] I am reading (and quoting) from Gilman's tale as published in eBook form by Project Gutenberg in 1999. Click here to read free online.
[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here.
[3] See H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', a 28,000 word essay published in The Recluse (1927): click here to read on the H. P. Lovecraft Archive.
Thanks to Síomón Solomon for suggesting this post.
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