Reading The Yellow Wallpaper docx
Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—at once a timeless gothic tale in the mode
of Hawthorne or Poe and an au courant critique of late-Victorian medical (mal)practice—first appeared
in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. In this harrowing first-person narrative, an
unnamed—and arguably unreliable—wife and new mother, who has been diagnosed by her physicianhusband John as suffering from “neurasthenia” (i.e., nervous breakdown), describes her growing
obsession with the yellow wallpaper of her cell-like bedroom—an obsession that, tragically, draws her
into full-blown madness. I discovered the story nearly a century after its publication, as an
undergraduate student enrolled in an American literature course taught by Dorothy Berkson, an
outspoken feminist whose opinions were still considered progressive (and even controversial) in the
1980s, when feminist literary criticism was gaining visibility and (would-be) Victorianists were reading
books such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s now-classic The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and articles such as “Female Gothic,” by Ellen
Moers.
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Dr. Berkson had us carefully study Gilbert and Gubar’s wide-reaching monograph, and the
authors themselves once spoke on campus. In an elaborate demonstration of feminist cooperation (as
opposed to patriarchal competition), Gilbert began a sentence and Gubar finished it. The pair’s
performance—much like their playful (over)use of hyphens, dashes/slashes, and parentheses—at first
startled their audience and later caused us a bit of fatigue and dis-ease—but it remained, somehow,
(weirdly) irresistible. In keeping with their theoretical orientation, they argued for “The Yellow
Wallpaper” as an exploration of women writers’ “parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal
female bodies,” and they interpreted the wallpaper—which features “outrageous angles,” “unheard of
contradictions” and lethal, prison-like bars—as “a patriarchal text.”
Twenty years later, I decided to teach “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which has come to serve as the
capstone text in my version of “Introduction to English Studies.” While I’ve often read, re-read, and
discussed the story, I’ve never before written about it. In attempting to do so now, I’m reminded of the
narrator’s reflections on her own writing: “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t
feel able. […] But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting
to be greater than the relief.” I’m also tempted to indulge in Gilbert-and-Gubar-like stylistic excesses and
parentheses that mimic not only the narrator’s own complex—and increasingly rambling and disjointed
—prose, but also the “bloated curves and flourishes” of the yellow wallpaper itself. Finally, I find myself
being drawn down a hermeneutic rabbit-hole; or, more accurately and ominously, becoming enmeshed
in an interpretive spider-web.
One of the tale’s most gothic features is the way in which it entraps readers, who become as
unwilling and unable to escape from it as the narrator is unwilling and unable to escape from the room
into which she has locked herself. Driven mad by trying to decipher a wallpaper pattern that is “not
arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry” but is nevertheless
meaningful, she ends up tearing down the paper and crawling, in circles, through it—and over her
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hapless doctor-husband, who has fainted at the dreadful spectacle of what his patient-wife has become.
Like her, we readers may find ourselves first intrigued, then obsessed, and finally led in circles by “The
Yellow Wallpaper”—both the story and the paper itself, which latter functions as an extraordinarily
overdetermined metaphor for (1) patriarchy; (2) the narrator’s unconscious; (3) neurasthenia; (4)
“feminine” discourse (as opposed to “masculine” diagnosis), and so on.
What makes “The Yellow Wallpaper” baroque and potentially overwhelming, however, likewise
makes it ideally suited for classroom discussions of the relationships among reading, writing, theory, and
criticism. This is, after all, a story of multiple (mis)readings and (re)writings. John misdiagnoses his wife’s
illness and prescribes the “rest cure” developed by the renowned hysteria and neurasthenia “expert”
Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), forbidding her to write. She rejects his quackery (in effect, re-writing or
over-writing his diagnosis) and writes in secret, not only to herself but also to us—and to Weir Mitchell
himself, to whom Perkins Gilman sent the story in the hope that he would abandon his “cure.” “John is a
physician,” the narrator confides at the outset of her story, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living
soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do
not get well faster.” Here, in a single sentence, we encounter the dashes, italics, and parentheses, which,
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like those favored by Emily Dickinson, at once bracket and emphasize ideas so as to “Tell all the truth,
but tell it slant—”; the term “dead paper,” which seems tautological until we recognize that some paper
(the wallpaper) is crawlingly alive; and the tragic irony of the narrator’s being married to the very sort of
man least likely to help her. And the story is just getting started.
As “The Yellow Wallpaper” develops, the narrator appears to (unconsciously? willfully?
desperately?) misread the room in which her husband imprisons her, taking it for a nursery rather than
recognizing it as a madwoman’s cell. Meanwhile, she comes to see the wallpaper as both a screen and a
mirror, projecting her fears and fantasies onto it while simultaneously recognizing (a version of) herself
within it. In “Introduction to English Studies” we re-read the room and grapple with the wallpaper’s
myriad meanings. We often look for assistance from Dickinson, who tells us that “Much Madness is
divinest Sense,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—,” and “Nature rarer uses Yellow / Than
another Hue.” Drawing upon all we’ve learned throughout the semester, we apply the close-reading
techniques of New Criticism, which enable the more-elaborate approaches of New Historicism,
feminism, reader-oriented criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and cultural
studies, as each and all illuminate, enrich, and are in turn enriched by this dizzyingly complex text. The
experience is headache-inducing, exhilarating, and more than a little exhausting—but it’s also quite
rewarding.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—at once a timeless gothic tale in the mode
of Hawthorne or Poe and an au courant critique of late-Victorian medical (mal)practice—first appeared
in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. In this harrowing first-person narrative, an
unnamed—and arguably unreliable—wife and new mother, who has been diagnosed by her physicianhusband John as suffering from “neurasthenia” (i.e., nervous breakdown), describes her growing
obsession with the yellow wallpaper of her cell-like bedroom—an obsession that, tragically, draws her
into full-blown madness. I discovered the story nearly a century after its publication, as an
undergraduate student enrolled in an American literature course taught by Dorothy Berkson, an
outspoken feminist whose opinions were still considered progressive (and even controversial) in the
1980s, when feminist literary criticism was gaining visibility and (would-be) Victorianists were reading
books such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s now-classic The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and articles such as “Female Gothic,” by Ellen
Moers.
Mustafa 2
Dr. Berkson had us carefully study Gilbert and Gubar’s wide-reaching monograph, and the
authors themselves once spoke on campus. In an elaborate demonstration of feminist cooperation (as
opposed to patriarchal competition), Gilbert began a sentence and Gubar finished it. The pair’s
performance—much like their playful (over)use of hyphens, dashes/slashes, and parentheses—at first
startled their audience and later caused us a bit of fatigue and dis-ease—but it remained, somehow,
(weirdly) irresistible. In keeping with their theoretical orientation, they argued for “The Yellow
Wallpaper” as an exploration of women writers’ “parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal
female bodies,” and they interpreted the wallpaper—which features “outrageous angles,” “unheard of
contradictions” and lethal, prison-like bars—as “a patriarchal text.”
Twenty years later, I decided to teach “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which has come to serve as the
capstone text in my version of “Introduction to English Studies.” While I’ve often read, re-read, and
discussed the story, I’ve never before written about it. In attempting to do so now, I’m reminded of the
narrator’s reflections on her own writing: “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t
feel able. […] But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting
to be greater than the relief.” I’m also tempted to indulge in Gilbert-and-Gubar-like stylistic excesses and
parentheses that mimic not only the narrator’s own complex—and increasingly rambling and disjointed
—prose, but also the “bloated curves and flourishes” of the yellow wallpaper itself. Finally, I find myself
being drawn down a hermeneutic rabbit-hole; or, more accurately and ominously, becoming enmeshed
in an interpretive spider-web.
One of the tale’s most gothic features is the way in which it entraps readers, who become as
unwilling and unable to escape from it as the narrator is unwilling and unable to escape from the room
into which she has locked herself. Driven mad by trying to decipher a wallpaper pattern that is “not
arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry” but is nevertheless
meaningful, she ends up tearing down the paper and crawling, in circles, through it—and over her
Mustafa 3
hapless doctor-husband, who has fainted at the dreadful spectacle of what his patient-wife has become.
Like her, we readers may find ourselves first intrigued, then obsessed, and finally led in circles by “The
Yellow Wallpaper”—both the story and the paper itself, which latter functions as an extraordinarily
overdetermined metaphor for (1) patriarchy; (2) the narrator’s unconscious; (3) neurasthenia; (4)
“feminine” discourse (as opposed to “masculine” diagnosis), and so on.
What makes “The Yellow Wallpaper” baroque and potentially overwhelming, however, likewise
makes it ideally suited for classroom discussions of the relationships among reading, writing, theory, and
criticism. This is, after all, a story of multiple (mis)readings and (re)writings. John misdiagnoses his wife’s
illness and prescribes the “rest cure” developed by the renowned hysteria and neurasthenia “expert”
Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), forbidding her to write. She rejects his quackery (in effect, re-writing or
over-writing his diagnosis) and writes in secret, not only to herself but also to us—and to Weir Mitchell
himself, to whom Perkins Gilman sent the story in the hope that he would abandon his “cure.” “John is a
physician,” the narrator confides at the outset of her story, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living
soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do
not get well faster.” Here, in a single sentence, we encounter the dashes, italics, and parentheses, which,
Mustafa 4
like those favored by Emily Dickinson, at once bracket and emphasize ideas so as to “Tell all the truth,
but tell it slant—”; the term “dead paper,” which seems tautological until we recognize that some paper
(the wallpaper) is crawlingly alive; and the tragic irony of the narrator’s being married to the very sort of
man least likely to help her. And the story is just getting started.
As “The Yellow Wallpaper” develops, the narrator appears to (unconsciously? willfully?
desperately?) misread the room in which her husband imprisons her, taking it for a nursery rather than
recognizing it as a madwoman’s cell. Meanwhile, she comes to see the wallpaper as both a screen and a
mirror, projecting her fears and fantasies onto it while simultaneously recognizing (a version of) herself
within it. In “Introduction to English Studies” we re-read the room and grapple with the wallpaper’s
myriad meanings. We often look for assistance from Dickinson, who tells us that “Much Madness is
divinest Sense,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—,” and “Nature rarer uses Yellow / Than
another Hue.” Drawing upon all we’ve learned throughout the semester, we apply the close-reading
techniques of New Criticism, which enable the more-elaborate approaches of New Historicism,
feminism, reader-oriented criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and cultural
studies, as each and all illuminate, enrich, and are in turn enriched by this dizzyingly complex text. The
experience is headache-inducing, exhilarating, and more than a little exhausting—but it’s also quite
rewarding.