The oppression of women in the patriarchal society of the late nineteenth century is well established in the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The uncoincidentally unnamed protagonist, a wife of a physician, suffers presumably from postpartum depression. Women’s mental health was not given much, if any, study or consideration, and treatments were often unsatisfactory and nearly absurd. Her sanity slowly dissolves in an obsession with torn wallpaper in their bedroom and the figure of what she is sure to be a woman.
As she occupies more and more of her time in the room, her only stimuli become the wallpaper; a fixed, enclosed flat space. Her autonomy as a woman and a wife are nonexistent, which correlates to her immediate surroundings as they are the opposite of freedom and leisure: the windows are barred, the heavy bed nailed down, the floor gouged, the wallpaper deteriorating, and a locked gate. The narrative consists only of two contrasting visual frames: the window, where she longingly gazes out at the lovely views of a “delicious” (581) green garden and a neighboring bay, which epitomizes life and openness, and the “atrocious” (582) solitary room that she is seemingly trapped in. The nursery-turned bedroom symbolizes the entrapment of domesticity and mental health that many women often experienced in this time period.
The rising action of the plot mimics the increasing loss of the narrator’s sanity in her attempts to find meaning and reason within the wallpaper. Gilman uses visual references to embellish the climax and expose the underlinings of the main character. The descriptions of the wallpaper give a peculiar and growing density to the narrator; she describes the wallpaper as an “optic horror” (585) that has a pattern that looks “like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (582), curves that “suddenly commit suicide” (583), while also comparing it to sprouting fungus and seaweed. She was determined to “follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion,” (584) which was later revealed to be “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (586).
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Gilman created a verbal expression that employed techniques originating from abstraction and cubist art, which practice the limited use of color as well as featuring other visual elements. The color yellow, often times associated with happiness, ironically, forces the narrator to study the confusing contours of the peeling paper. The wife begins a fascination after her initial disgust with the broken patterns and as she finds herself growing attached to them, it pushes her deeper into her anxieties by overwhelming her visually. She becomes “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper” (584).
As she mentally and physically inclines closer to the wallpaper, even circling the room so much as to cause stains on her clothing, the reader senses a growing paranoia in her narration; it becomes a “great effort for [her] to think straight” (585). The narrator is forced to search for forms of design and see in two dimensions, submitting to the invasive paper and hallucinating a creeping, skulking figure that is quietly subdued in the daytime; eerily much as the narrator is. The figure of a woman inside the paper is quite literally a shadow of the wife; a hidden personification of the imprisonment and confinement of women.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a narrative-based examination of the progression of a physically and mentally repressed subject whose mind becomes increasingly less dependent on external stimuli. Gilman combines both text and image to depict emotional disturbance. Her projection of emotions onto the wallpaper allows the reader to experience an erratic, and eventually frenzy, transition from sane to insane.
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