This week we read The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We read it so that we could compare it with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for our coursework. Man is that story creepy! It’s highlighting the mistreatment of those with mental illness before we really had an understanding.
Gilman herself did have depression for a time and was actually told that the best thing to do was have no mental stimulation, no writing, ultimately do nothing. What really annoys me is that if you have a creative mind then you’ll need an outlet for all the knowledge swirling around your head; it can’t just be repressed. I loved the story but it did weird me out!
The story is about a woman (whose name we don’t really find out) who’s suffering from what her husband has told her is a nervous depression. It’s also hinted that it could be postnatal. John is her as a physician, and according to her John doesn’t believe her- now we can’t hate on John because at this point in time (I want to say 19th century) mental illness was not understood at all even lesser so than in The Bell Jar.
So, John’s solution is to rent a house for 3 months, take his wife away and keep her in a room with what she describes as a “sprawling flamboyant pattern committing every artistic sin”. Now if you were trapped in this room with nothing to do you’d have to occupy youself, therefore this woman obsesses with the room’s yellow wallpaper.
At points it gets a bit icky when John’s all ‘my little goose’ and why at one points he refers to her as a little girl ( *face turns a bit green*) No, John, just no! It’s cute, you care we get it!
Moving on, the increasing madness of this story continues as her mental deterioration increases. She goes from hating the ugly, dirty yellow paper to wanting to help the woman inside of it shift free. Now we all see things, elephants on clouds to (yes) even shaoes in wallpaper. But actually trying to free the woman in the wall show that she is suffering from mental health problems. As a reader you know her illness is consuming her as the sentences shift from longer and more eloquent to shorter, fragmented phrases, representing the breakdown of her mind.
If you know your colours then you’ll know the colour yellow conotes happiness and positivity clearly the opposite of how she feels. I think for me and my A2 class, the part that are out of the ordinary are:
- the fact she actually chew this big wooden bed
- she creeps around the wall thinking she fits into a gap of the woman in the walls.
Leading on to the reader realising the rather disturbing conclusion that the poor woman has effectively become the woman in the wall. Imagine walking in on her with no doubt a bloody mouth (from chewing the bed!) and creeping round the walls of a room. Carnage.
Slightly terrifying it may be but I believe it’s rather sad. I mean, just think: this woman was a creative, intelligent, new mother who had a very loving physician for a husband. Now, due to the lack of understanding for mental illness, she has ended up being controlled and consumed by it. Embodying the role of the woman in the wall paper, this makes me assume that her mistreatment has led to her nervous depression becoming a kind of personality disorder, in which she thinks she is the woman. Enforced by the ending, a new character Jane is introduced whom I think is the woman herself.
I love the narrative technique of using the journal monolouge of the woman, like a secret diary -providing us with an insight but could also be bias and unreliable as we get no one else’s opinion.
Looking for a minor Halloween style short story to read? Pick this one! So good. I loved it!
- Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
