Throughout short fiction, Charlotte Gilman is most famously noted for her ability to create strong gothic themes in her writing. This is especially true in her 1890s story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Overall, an important theme in Charlotte Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that when combined, isolation and oppression often lead to negative consequences such as insanity and mental instability. Gilman achieves this through her thorough use of symbolism and settings that helps to highlight and establish the overall theme. As often seen in the 1800s, the role in which women played amongst society was often minuscule, and unheard of compared to their male counterparts. This is exactly the case in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In a time…show more content… Show
The plot and structure of the story, which pits the narrator's interior disintegration against the other characters' expectations of normalcy, helps build the themes in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Conformity versus ExpressionAs the wife of a respected physician, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" must conform to society's norms as well as her husband's wishes. The narrator accepts her role with very little outward dissent, although her need for freedom of expression reveals itself privately. She rebelliously and secretly writes in her journal. She stays awake at night to have time to herself. However, her need for healthy self-expression mostly goes unmet, and so she begins to project her inward self onto her surroundings through hallucination. She sees a confined woman behind the "bars" of the wallpaper's pattern, and she sees creeping women outside her windows. Ultimately, this unhealthy tension between conformity and expression breaks her down, and the narrator is left without the ability to do either. ConfinementThe narrator is confined physically by her surroundings and her husband's directives. The edges of the property, the edges of her vision, the walls of the room, and the bars on the windows all provide borders and walls behind which she must stay. Beyond these physical barriers are those set up by society for women. In this era, a woman must conform to the wishes of her husband and the culture in which she is living. Her husband has decided that she should remain inactive and in her room most of the time, and, as a doctor and her husband, she has little choice but to obey. These restrictions are reflected in the way her thoughts are confined by the wallpaper's pattern. She finds that she can trace its patterns for hours at a time while lying completely inactive in her bed: "I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion." In this way, the pattern traps her mind even as her physical self is trapped. Women's RolesAt the time "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written, women of the narrator's class were expected to stay in the home, perform the function of gracious hostess when entertaining guests, and submit to their husbands' authority. As a woman, the narrator lacks liberty, agency in her own life, and meaningful work. She must stay in the home, and most decisions are made for her, not by her. John decides to rent the house. He decides that she should rest. When she wants to leave, he rejects that option. Even the roles of homemaker and mother are taken on by other women. Mary takes on the role of mother, taking care of the baby. Jennie does the other domestic tasks in the house, including taking care of the narrator. Treated like a child who must be cared for, the narrator has nothing but idleness in her life. The writer, Charlotte Gilman, was of the strong opinion that women need meaningful work suited to their natural abilities and inclinations, which might not be maternal or domestic. The narrator's mental decline demonstrates what can happen when women lack suitable work. Mental IllnessThe narrator's declining mental condition has both internal and external origins. She is clearly suffering from depression, likely related to the birth of the baby mentioned in the story. Yet the idleness and isolation that is supposed to cure her of this condition only worsens it. Her madness also has internal and external effects. Her mind, revealed in the words of her journal, becomes more and more caught up in thoughts of the wallpaper's pattern, in hallucinations, and in her increasing paranoia about the other people in the house. Physically, she is increasingly tired and emotionally unstable, sleeping most of the days away and crying when she tries to discuss her situation with her husband, John. In the end, she succumbs in both body and mind to the madness, creeping along the wall in her room without taking notice of her surroundings.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman uses the conventions of the psychological horror tale to critique the position of women within the institution of marriage, especially as practiced by the “respectable” classes of her time. When the story was first published, most readers took it as a scary tale about a woman in an extreme state of consciousness—a gripping, disturbing entertainment, but little more. After its rediscovery in the twentieth century, however, readings of the story have become more complex. For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their full development. John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her. The narrator is reduced to acting like a cross, petulant child, unable to stand up for herself without seeming unreasonable or disloyal. The narrator has no say in even the smallest details of her life, and she retreats into her obsessive fantasy, the only place she can retain some control and exercise the power of her mind. The Importance of Self-ExpressionThe mental constraints placed upon the narrator, even more so than the physical ones, are what ultimately drive her insane. She is forced to hide her anxieties and fears in order to preserve the façade of a happy marriage and to make it seem as though she is winning the fight against her depression. From the beginning, the most intolerable aspect of her treatment is the compulsory silence and idleness of the “resting cure.” She is forced to become completely passive, forbidden from exercising her mind in any way. Writing is especially off limits, and John warns her several times that she must use her self-control to rein in her imagination, which he fears will run away with her. Of course, the narrator’s eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not the expression of it. She is constantly longing for an emotional and intellectual outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal, which she describes more than once as a “relief” to her mind. For Gilman, a mind that is kept in a state of forced inactivity is doomed to self-destruction. The Evils of the “Resting Cure”As someone who almost was destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s “resting cure” for depression, it is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this ineffective and cruel course of treatment. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a mind that is already plagued with anxiety can deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in the story, took Gilman’s criticism to heart and abandoned the “resting cure.” Beyond the specific technique described in the story, Gilman means to criticize any form of medical care that ignores the concerns of the patient, considering her only as a passive object of treatment. The connection between a woman’s subordination in the home and her subordination in a doctor/patient relationship is clear—John is, after all, the narrator’s husband and doctor. Gilman implies that both forms of authority can be easily abused, even when the husband or doctor means to help. All too often, the women who are the silent subjects of this authority are infantilized, or worse.
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