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On Feminism and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Gilman

Feminism is based on the assumption that women have the same human, political and social rights as men, furthermore, that women should have the same opportunities as men in their personal choices regarding careers, politics and expression. A feminist text states the author’s agenda for women in society as they relate to oppression by a patriarchal power structure and the subsequent formation of social ‘standards’ and ‘protocols’. A feminist text will be written by a woman, and it will point out deficiencies in society regarding equal opportunity, and the reader will typically be aware of this motive. In a work of fiction, the main character, or heroine, personifies the social struggle against male domination.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, telling a story about a woman’s struggles against male-centric thinking and societal ‘norms’. The text may be ambiguous to the reader who is unfamiliar with Gilman’s politics and personal biography, yet, it impresses any reader with the puerile treatment of the main character, who remains nameless in the text. To the casual reader, the story is one of a good-meaning, but oppressive husband who drives his wife mad in an attempt to help her, but it story illustrates how established protocols of behavior could have devastating effects on the women of Gilman’s time, regardless of the intentions of the purveyor. By late 20th century standards, the behavior of John, the husband, seems eerily inappropriate and restrictive, but was considered quite normal in the 19th century.

After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in its quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce. (Lauter, 799) Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.

Charlotte and her brother grew up in an unhappy, cheerless home. Mother and children lived on the edge of poverty, moving nineteen times in eighteen years to fourteen different cities.

Soon after her marriage to Charles Stetson and the birth of her daughter, she fell into a deeply depressed condition and consulted Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who prescribed his famous rest cure. It is her experience with Mitchell’s treatment that inspired her to write The Yellow Wallpaper.

During most of her adult life, Gilman was heavily involved in politics and continued publishing her ideas through critical essays, novels and The Forerunner, a journal that she had written and published almost entirely by herself. Her views of a woman’s societal place were made clear, not only in her novels and essays, but by her most famous work, Women and Economics, published in 1898. (Lauter, 800)

Gilman was an early feminist, and her writings share a common theme that women do not have an equal human status in our society. She advocated a new economic and socialist order brought about by a collective women’s movement as the solution to their frustrations. (Gilman, Foreward) (Gilman, Foreward) She wrote the novel Herland to describe a unique society without the problems generated by male ‘deflections’. Herland sets a feminine Utopia where the entire society, lost by freak cataclysm, has no men—and none of their problems or rules. She wrote the novel Herland to describe a unique society without the problems generated by male ‘deflections’. Herland sets a feminine Utopia where the entire society, lost by freak cataclysm, has no men—and none of their problems or rules. She wrote the novel Herland to describe a unique society without the problems generated by male ‘deflections’. Herland sets a feminine Utopia where the entire society, lost by freak cataclysm, has no men—and none of their problems or rules. She wrote the novel Herland to describe a unique society without the problems generated by male ‘deflections’. Herland sets a feminine Utopia where the entire society, lost by freak cataclysm, has no men—and none of their problems or rules.

Knowing that Gilman was a controversial figure for her day, and after reading her other works, it is easy to see more of her feminist allusions in The Yellow Wallpaper. It seems that she has carefully crafted her sentences and metaphors to instill a picture of lurid and creepy male oppression. Her descriptions of the house recall a bygone era; she refers to it as an ‘ancestral hall’ and goes on to give a gothic description of the estate. She falls just short of setting the scene for a ghost story. The reference to old things and the past is a reference to out-dated practices and treatment of women, as she considers the future to hold more equality. By setting the story in this tone, Gilman alludes to practices of oppression that, in her mind, should be relegated to the past.

The surface of the text contains clues about Gilman’s perceptions of the treatment and roles of women. Her main character stumbles over technical words like ‘phosphates’, showing that women were overlooked in education. Moreover, she demonstrates a normalcy of women that are non-technical—they should not have to worry about phosphates, which are in the scientific realm assigned to men. The character Gilman sets up in her first few pages is of the proper Victorian woman—dutiful to her husband, simple and non-technical. Gilman goes out of her way to describe the garden of the house as ‘delicious’, this, perhaps, an allusion to a woman’s place in the kitchen. In the world of yellow wallpaper, a woman would naturally be fascinated by a garden. Gilman’s character is a naíve, faithful wife who does as her husband instructs her to. She blames herself for being ‘unreasonably angry’ and is critical of her nervous disorder, as she is pressured to think so by her husband and doctors. Despite her intuitive objections, she agrees to treatment for her depression because her husband wishes her to.

It is the wallpaper, though, that is the focal-point of the story, and it holds within it many descriptive and fruitful metaphors for the insidious discrimination and oppression of women. With steady patience and a methodical rhythm, Gilman exposes more and more insight into the meaning of the wallpaper throughout the story. She uses a slow and steady pace to release tidbits of metaphor that clue the reader to see the wallpaper as a symbol of male authority. The main character’s fascination with the ugly paper begins as an innocent annoyance, builds to a pastime, and crescendos to an obsession. The beauty of the story, however, is that this build-up is very subtle, and only after reflection and contemplation can the symbols of the wallpaper be seen. Indeed, the character in the story cannot recognize them herself, and it is the struggle to see what is in the wallpaper that moves the reader along.

The text is sprinkled with metaphors and allegories concerning the paper; the references are complex and numerous. There is the paper’s stench, which subtly pervades the whole house. This perhaps to give a sense of pervasive and inescapable injustice, much like the unspoken social rules which governed Gilman’s world. The paper’s pattern, which slowly develops from bulbous eyes to a woman shaking bars. It contains many vague images, but acts as a paranoid menagerie of domination. Gilman gives a sense that the wallpaper is ever-present and lurking, like the subtle rejections she faced as a female writer. The paper stains people and things, much like society passing its sense of protocol from person to person, father to son. A constantly changing light which shows new and mutating forms in the paper—symbols of the many ways chauvinism has perpetrated itself. Each one can be read as a different facet of a male-centric society and its effect on women. The images are so numerous that it is not possible to know precisely what Gilman meant for each one—perhaps she was unsure herself—but a reader can personalize them all and gain a sense of them from the context Gilman places around the text.

One of the text’s strongest images is the paper’s pattern, which seems to change with different lighting. Particular traits can only be seen under certain conditions, and they change over time. This could be a symbol of the subtle methods of discrimination that women face, for they can only be seen at certain times and under certain conditions. A promotion may be passed or a novel rejected, but these actions of discrimination can be so subtly framed that they go largely unnoticed by the masses. To the trained eye, like Gilman’s main character, they becomes obvious. Another symbol is the paper’s odor. It is described as pervasive yet familiar, and makes an excellent metaphor for the pervasive and foul effects of male domination. Gilman describes the odor magnificently, and one becomes repulsed by it. Another tell-tale descriptor is the skulking woman, figuratively hiding and lurking, perhaps Gilman’s feelings about her own writing, lurking among men and not being openly individualistic. Strangled heads in the paper may symbolize women whose careers and goals have been choked, and the main character’s tearing down of the paper and creeping over her husband is clearly a symbol of triumph. Gilman herself broke through the glass ceiling to be widely published, and this may have been the kind of victory she was extolling—tearing down the glass ceiling. Perhaps, even, her victory over her experience with Dr. Mitchell’s rest cure gave inspiration. In the end, the main character must creep over her husband even after tearing down the paper, indeed, bits of the paper remain on the wall. This reads strongly that there are still advances to be made in terms of true social and economic equality, and ‘husbands’ lie down as obstacles to be dealt with.

Gilman wrote about her purpose for writing The Yellow Wallpaper some years after it was first published, and describes her motivations in doing so. She tells of at least one person who was liberated from Mitchell’s ‘rest cure’, and she very clearly states her elation at ‘having escaped’(Gilman, Oct. 1913)

The metaphors, images and the basic plot of the story leave a reader with a female character that has broken out in triumph over an oppressive set of male characters. She makes her own way through a hobby of writing, and finds individuality against the norms of her society. The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, because it promotes new ideas from Gilman and challenges old ideas about women’s position in society. Gilman shows a female heroine that overcomes oppression in many forms to find her own opportunities for personal choice. The text inspires its reader at many levels, but most importantly, it exposes ugly and unnoticed social conventions that are second-nature to its male characters. The story promotes Gilman’s agenda for change, and it illustrates a woman’s struggle to find equal opportunity in society.


Works Cited

Lauter, Paul, General Editor. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. II, 2nd edition New York: Heath, 1994

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Herland, New York: Pantheon Books 1979

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins The Forerunner, October 1913, University of Texas via internet

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