On the Yellow Wallpaper
Hiewon Ahn
“It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”
So begins the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which follows the story of a woman diagnosed with “nervous depression”- what we would now view today as postpartum psychosis- and is put under three months of “rest therapy” by her doctor husband; a cure of forbidding her from any work nor social interaction, isolated in an old house out in the country. Without much else to do, this unnamed woman soon becomes fixated by the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom, which she both is disgusted and fascinated by.
In fact, this yellow wallpaper becomes a mirror that reflects some of the protagonists’ most fundamental inner conflicts; a failing, unequal marriage, descending mental health and the restricting boundaries of 19th century society. While there is not one outright mention of any of the woman’s conflicts, the wallpaper becomes to represent all that is left unsaid and her gradual descent into mental ruin.
While fairly known all over the world, The Yellow Wallpaper is often mistaken for simply being a story about a lady who goes crazy- in the words of John Green: “Plot Summary — Woman Stares at Wall”. However, not only is Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper a powerful critique of the practice of “rest therapy”, which was a real and widespread practice back in Gilman’s day, it is also a sharp observation of the institutionalized sexism and class-based discrimination women were subject to in the 19th century.
“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.”
As the protagonist’s rest therapy progresses, she begins to convince herself that there is a woman caught behind the garish pattern of the wallpaper- a woman who is “stooping down and creeping about”, trying to escape. “ I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.”
During the final day of her stay, the protagonist decides to set the woman behind the pattern free, and rips off all the wallpaper in the room from the walls. When her husband- the one who sentenced her to her so-called treatment, despite her protests- finally enters the room, he finds his wife hunched, crawling around the room like the woman behind the pattern she had seen for so long and set free. He faints. So says the protagonist- “ “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “ in spite of you and Jane? And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” “.
Perhaps Gilman dreamed that one day, all the women behind the wallpaper could break free and escape this way. Perhaps she believed that centuries later, when people would read her story, the yellow wallpaper would be no more, all of it ripped and done away with.
But reading this in 2021, I could feel as if only one thing was clear; the legacy of the yellow wallpaper still thrives. We are still constricted by its patterns, and we still haven’t broken free.
