Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Literary Critique - The Yellow Wallpaper
March/30/2016 01:28 PM Filed: Literary Critiques
Photo Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston
(Wikimedia Commons)
Nineteenth-Century Feminism and Suppression
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a woman suffering a nervous breakdown. At least that’s the impression given by the character’s physician husband, who chooses to keep her in drugged confinement at a rented vacation retreat, prohibiting contact with her baby.
Based on a real incident in Gilman’s life, the story details the misery of a nineteenth-century feminist forced into a role in which she doesn’t belong. Gilman’s marriage ended, and she moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California. She pursued a career as a socialist lecturer. Although it’s unclear whether Gilman’s ex-husband kept her medicated and locked in a room, the description of the ordeal is vivid and frightening.
The protagonist appears to be hallucinating or experiencing the side effects of a powerful drug. She sees something, or someone, behind the tattered wallpaper in her bedroom, and eventually, sees her true self emerge at the end of the story. The ugly, old wallcovering alludes to the outdated, restricted life she is leaving. She announces her “arrival” to her husband because it is him she blames for being trapped.
At the end of the story she has barred herself in the bedroom and crawls on the floor removing strips of the paper. Her behavior is a symbolical metamorphosis.
Published in 1892, this strange account of domestic hell speaks of the dangers of prescribed drug abuse and unwarranted use of mind-altering medication by the medical community, as much as it shines a spotlight on a woman’s identity crisis.