an early feminist sociologist

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was the leading intellectual of the women’s movement from 1890-1920. She was known for her incisive studies of woman’s role and and status in society, from a sociological perspective. In fact, it was her sociological works that made her famous in her day, but by the end of her life (1935), her ideas had been eclipsed by newer feminist philosophies and she was largely forgotten. Her writing remained so until the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to unearth her writings. This resurgence also brought Gilman’s fiction to the fore for the first time, because she was not especially known as a fiction writer in her own time — amazing, since we now consider “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to be a classic of the 19th-Century.

Gilman was born into a good family as a distant relation to Harriet Beecher Stowe, but her father deserted the family shortly after her birth. Gilman and her mother and brother were left transient and nearly destitute, and this experience led to Gilman’s life-long pursuit of self-sufficiency and non-dependence. She studied art, and to earn her own living in adulthood she taught and designed greeting cards. She eventually married and had a child, after the birth of whom she was struck by post-partum depression; she was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who treated her with bed rest and by banning her from any intellectual pursuits. His guidance was to force his patients to throw themselves into domestic work and the care of the child and essentially deny any other outside interests or ideas. This, Gilman has explained, let to feelings of “utter mental ruin,” which she cured by eventually eschewing Mitchell’s theories and going through a trial separation from her husband and taking a vacation to California. She and her husband eventually divorced amicably, and she had a happy second marriage to her first cousin. This experience dealing with post-partum and the horrors of mental health treatment in her time were the direct inspiration for “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The story itself is a commentary on the medical attitudes to women and the power politics of marriage. The story was rejected by Atlantic Monthly because the editor found it too personally distressing, but it was published in 1898 in the less prestigious New England Magazine.

But in her own time, Gilman was best known for her sociological studies, most notably Women and Economics. Her thesis was that women’s economic dependence (and the devaluation of their work) determines their subordinate social status. She felt women’s work should be professionalized and socialized with all gender distinctions removed, with the exclusion of child-rearing which she felt should be the domain of women. I find this really troubling because I don’t think you come to a point of equality with these kinds of distinction; her dream for equality is heavily problematized by this choice. This work, though, brought her immense fame, and she published extensively on these ideas. She even produced a magazine from 1910-1916, for which she wrote all the copy (including serialized novels!) and experienced a great deal of creative energy around it. One of these serialized novels was Herland, a feminist utopian fiction about a world without men.

In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the narrator is frustrated because her husband/doctor (ALARM BELLS) doesn’t believe she is ill, and is telling people she is merely suffering from hysteria. She is forbidden to work by the well-meaning control of her husband. His response to her illness is, to my mind, a manifestation of the social infantilization of women. It shouldn’t be surprising that he treats her as a child — in 1898, she is a child in the eyes of the law, with no rights and no ability to vote. In the story, the narrator is lying in a bed in a wallpapered room, prevented by her husband’s will from reading or writing. Imagine existing in a prone position, staring at a wall, for hours on end. Her room has barred windows because it used to be a nursery, and it’s interesting because the bars on the window have gone from being an issue of safety for children to a prison for a grown woman (though she is told she is being protected from herself.

The fundamental issue for the narrator is that John, her husband, does not believe in her suffering. This is a post-partum depression (though no mention of the child occurs until 3-4 pages into the story), but it is so poorly understood by the times and by the male-dominated medical system. When she asks to be made more comfortable by having the hideous wallpaper replaced, she is told by John that he won’t “give in” to her “fancies.” She is also denied the stimulated company she desires to have, and is exposed only to very dull people. Intellectually starved, her brain begins to play tricks on her. She starts to see the wallpaper as made up of “unblinking eyes” that are everywhere; this is clearly a response to her feelings of being under surveillance by John.

Because her family and friends don’t believe her illness is “real,” she has no outlet for her emotions. She steals moments to write (the product being this story) when she can, but as everyone believes her writing is causing her nervous disorder she is forced to be deceitful — and she finds the hiding exhausting. She cries only when she’s alone for fear of worrying her family, and this constant solitude and lack of validation leads her to seek meaning in the paper. She spends excessive amounts of time trying to decipher a message in the wall.

John dictates to the narrator how she feels and doesn’t listen when she tries to explain it to him. Again, he treats her like a child with regard to her own medical care. This leads to her feelings of frustration and impotence being amplified, and she begins to perceive a woman living inside the wallpaper. This is a double for herself, and it emerges as she is becoming increasingly frightened of her husband — the doppelganger offers her a psychological escape. Indeed, the narrator becomes possessive about the woman in the wallpaper and fears that she will be discovered by her husband and her housekeeper. This is interesting because it echoes the possessive tendency John shows to the narrator; she seems to be taking the same role over the woman in the paper in a bid to have some element of control over her life. Eventually, the woman inside the wallpaper learns to shake the pattern in a bid for freedom — exactly what the narrator wishes she could do — and the narrator gets excited by the possibility of freedom for her friend. The narrator begins to dismantle the wallpaper, but as she does it she becomes one with the woman and takes on the woman’s creeping ways. She fears being returned to the paper.

The story ends with John entering the room, seeing the destruction, and fainting. That the reaction seems so extreme is interesting, but I think he passes out not from the physical act that has occurred, but because it symbolizes her quest for freedom and her final psychological break from the (unintentional) mental abuse she has received. It’s a fascinating look at a really upsetting issue, but I also think “The Yellow Wall-Paper” shows how far we have come on the road to gender equality, and how the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and other early feminists paved that road.