Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper:

A Decent into Madness or Feminist Liberation or Both?

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper chronicles the so-called rest cure of a nameless woman who has just given birth. The womans physician-husband supervises the cure, during which the narrator is denied all mental stimulation. Rather than growing less anxious, the woman instead becomes more restive and miserable. Her mind, denied the mental outlet she craves, looks for other forms of intellectual engagement. She fixates upon the wallpaper of her bedroom, convinced that there is a woman behind it, demanding to get out. By the last lines of the story, the woman behind the paper and herself have merged in her consciousness, as she peels the paper to liberate the woman and herself: Ive got out at last, said I, in spite of you and Jane! And Ive pulled off most of the paper, so you cant put me back! (Gilman).

Even before the woman becomes mentally unbalanced, the woman calls the paper an artistic sin, something that is sulphureous as hellish death. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide (Gilman). The paper is dull, much like the womans rest cure, and its suicidal tendencies mimic her own depression. It is yellow, the color of jaundice and illness.

There are indications that the depression arose around the time of the woman giving birth to her child, suggesting postpartum depression and her husbands inability to understand his wifes needs. Although it may also have a deeper cause, namely in the general refusal to allow women to write and express themselves fully. The specific prohibition against writing suggests as well that the man who both personifies male, patriarchal authority and physicians authority is using her illness as a pretext to bend her to his will.

This use of medical authority to force women to conform to specific social norms did not end with the late 19th and early 20th century, around when the story takes place and Gilman wrote, however. In Womens Encounter with Mental Health Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper, one woman describes being institutionalized after relatively minor teenage experimentation with sex and drugs in the late 1960s. She notes the irony of being forced to take psychotropic pills for schizophrenia,...

At the beginning of the Gilman short story, she seems sane, if depressed. She claims to love her baby and husband, and expresses polite frustration with the fact that she is forced to rest, and her husband may be cross with her defiance of his advice, while writing. At the end of the story, she barely seems to recognize her husband, simply referring to him as the man she is crawling over to peel back the paper and liberate the woman behind the awful paper where she has been kept for so many months. The lack of stimulation has made her into the madwoman she was supposed to be at the very beginning of the tale.

Shawn St. Jean argues that, given the text has been printed and reprinted multiple times in various editions, that certain versions of the text more decisively indicate the womans madness than others: for example, in one printed version of the text, editing it to suggest that the woman must repeatedly climb over her husband as she encircles the room suggests a more complete descent into madness (St. Jean 402). It is equally possible to argue, however, that the real significance is the narrator referring to the man she once called John, her husband, and her physician simply as a man is a recognition that all are fused into one in his exemplification of male-dominated authority. There is no real romantic love in this story, or medical knowledge, only oppression that the woman must climb over. Madness is the narrators only vehicle of liberation.

Barbara Suess in her essay The Writings on the Wall similarly argues that the story highlights the limits of female expression, specifically the breakdown of writing and language. It is not simply…