The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Last month, my thematic book club did something a little
different — we all read a short story together for discussion.
I had always thought of The Yellow Wallpaper as a story
where the main character is suffering from post-partum depression. Her
husband locks her in an attic room to “rest” and she slowly goes insane,
fixating on the yellow wallpaper. After reading it again, I have a very
different perspective. This time I looked at it as a potential crime, and maybe
even a ghost story.
One of the funny things that came out of the discussion was
that two of us, who had read it before, had the same mistaken memory —that the
main character had been locked in an attic room by her husband. Now, he does
choose the upper-level room for them as a bedroom, but she is not locked
in until she does that herself toward the very end.
The narrator and her husband have secured “ancestral halls for
the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate.” She says it might be
haunted but laughs it off.
There’s a beautiful garden and nice rooms that open on it, but
her husband insists they take the upstairs nursery because it is airy and big. The
narrator thinks it was “a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I
should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are
rings and things in the walls.”
In the article “House of Horror” (linked at the end) there is
even the suggestion that enslaved people may have been kept restrained in this
room and “By the end of the story the narrator has spotted ‘so many’ women who
she believes have scrabbled free from the garish yellow prison.”
About her husband, she says, “He is very careful and loving,
and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” Which can be seen as being
kind or nit-picking, depending on your perspective.
“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband,
assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one
but temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency — what is one
to do?”
She is able to go out and walk in the garden or down the lane
a little, but as the story progresses, she spends more and more time resting in
the bedroom. “It is getting to be a great effort to me to think straight.”
She says her husband loves her so much “But he said I wasn’t
able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there,” when she suggests a visit
to her cousin. It sounded very much like house arrest.
She tries to convince her husband that she is not getting
better and they should leave, but he insists on staying because they have three
weeks left.
Of the wallpaper, she says, “It is a dull yet lurid orange in
some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” This was a light bulb moment for me. Green? Could arsenic be at
hand?
The wallpaper is torn off in spots, the floor is scratched and
gouged and splintered, and there’s a heavy bed bolted down. Very strange for a
nursery.
“But there is something else about that paper — the smell!”
The rain makes it worse and it gets in her hair. She even notices it when she’s outside if she turns her head
quickly.
A little searching around told me that it was widely known at
that point in time that wallpaper with arsenic often had a “mouse-like” odor in damp
rooms or smelled like garlic, especially in damp conditions.
I couldn’t help thinking that if he is such a learned
physician, was he suffering from a God complex, or just stupid? I mean, did he
really not even consider the fact that arsenic might be in the wallpaper, since
it was widely known by the 1890s, or was he trying to drive her insane? Only
his behavior at the very end seems to absolve him.
And she is stuck there, getting weaker, while he is out of the
house working.
She mentions her husband threatening to send her to Weir
Mitchell in the fall if she doesn’t get better. “But I don’t want to go there
at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like
John and my brother, but only more so!” So, she does realize how domineering
and condescending they are, I think. Gilman contended that her own experience
with Weir Mitchell nearly drove her insane and this story resulted.
There are very distinct aspects of the story that merit a
great deal of praise. The details are developed in beautiful fashion. It’s
perfectly creepy and even quite horrific when you consider how much her
situation is out of her control.
Here is a young woman suffering from post-partum depression,
made to endure a rest cure in a house that may well be haunted by at least the collective trauma of enslaved
people, and set up to spend most of her time in a room that has arsenic
wallpaper, which can flake off and even become gaseous under damp conditions.
It's a master class of a story, from my perspective.
You can read the full short story yourself at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf
I also read
The Feminist Gothic in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
https://www.lonestar.edu/yellow-wallpaper.htm
House of horror: the poisonous power of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Death on the doorstep: Arsenic in Victorian
wallpaper
https://www.slam.org/blog/arsenic-in-victorian-wallpaper/
