The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper
Dover Publications cover
Author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Country
United States
Language
English
Subject(s)
Feminism, Women's health, Autobiography
Genre(s)
Short story
Publisher
New England Magazine
Publication date
1892
ISBN
0-486-29857-4
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was first published in 1891 in New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.
The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries. The narrator is a woman whose husband — a physician — has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal entries from him so that she can recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency;" a diagnosis common to women in that period.[1] The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.
The story illustrates the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the room's wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper — the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."[2]
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "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."[3]
Plot synopsis
Told in the first-person perspective, in the form of a series of journal entries, the story details the narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband believes it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure, since he only credits what is observable and scientific. He serves as his wife's physician, therefore treating her like a powerless patient. The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would, in modern times, be called postpartum psychosis. While on vacation for the summer at a colonial mansion, the narrator senses "something queer about it [the mansion]." The narrator is confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, but this treatment only exacerbates her depression.
She devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper — its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck," scrawling pattern; she also describes the various patches it is missing and the fact that it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. (Said yellow smears are found on her clothing, suggesting that all along it was she that was shredding the wallpaper). Obsessing over the hatred she believes radiates from the room, she supposes that it must have once been a nursery, and that the children who lived in it hated the wallpaper as much as she did. She notes a patch of wallpaper has been rubbed off at her shoulder height early in the book, and after lapsing into insanity confirms that she was the one who had done all the damage to the room, although she is oblivious to this fact herself. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight. With no other stimuli than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs on the wallpaper become increasingly intriguing, and a figure of a woman soon appears in the design. She eventually reaches the conclusion that the figure is trying to escape the bars from the shadows, and that there is a woman creeping on all fours behind them.
With the summer close to an end, the narrator finally asks for permission to leave the room. John does not agree to give her the freedom to walk outside, so the narrator voices that she may be losing her mind. Being urged to not speak another word of it, she eventually consumes her entire night with watching the wallpaper, while sleeping during the day. Eventually the woman descends into complete insanity, thinking she is a woman who has escaped from inside the wallpaper.
After realizing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, she begins to strip the remaining designs off the wall. While working on peeling away the wallpaper, she tries to hide her obsession with it due to her paranoia and fear that John may re-diagnose her, and his sister will remain with them. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, the woman refuses to unlock the door and tells him to go fetch the key from outside her window where she threw it earlier. Once he returns with the key and opens the door, however, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I’ve got out at last," her husband faints, as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each 'lap' around.