The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The story describes a young woman and her husband. He imposes a rest cure on her when she suffers “temporary nervous depression” after the birth of their baby. They spend the summer at a colonial mansion, where the narrator is confined to an upstairs nursery. The story makes striking use of an unreliable narrator to gradually reveal the degree to which her husband has “imprisoned” her due to her physical and mental condition: she describes torn wallpaper, barred windows, metal rings in the walls, a floor “scratched and gouged and splintered,” a bed bolted to the floor, and a gate at the top of the stairs, but blames all these on children who must have resided there.
The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room – its “sickly” colour, its “yellow” smell, its bizarre and disturbing pattern like “an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions,” its missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper mutates, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design.
Eventually, she believes a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. She thinks she must free the woman in the wallpaper and strips the remaining paper off the wall. When her husband arrives home, the narrator refuses to unlock her door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, rubbing against the wallpaper, and exclaiming, “I’ve got out at last… despite you.” He faints, but she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935), also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist.
Biography.
She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her best-remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Mary Perkins (formerly Mary Fitch Westcott) and Frederic Beecher Perkins. She had only one brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older because a physician advised Mary Perkins that she might die if she bore other children.
During Charlotte’s infancy, her father moved out and abandoned his wife and children, and the remainder of her childhood was spent in poverty. Since their mother was unable to support the family on her own, the Perkinses were often in the presence of her father’s aunts, namely Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and Catharine Beecher, educationalist.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
