Position Paper:

Feminist reading of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper is a haunting short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that
describes the oppression of women in Victorian society. The story is eerily similar to what
Gilman experienced herself, including images of postpartum depression from which she
suffered from. The story is written in first-person point of view and we don’t even know the
name of the narrator, which further prompts us to imagine Gilman molding the narrator after
herself.

Gilman considered herself a humanist and rejected the idea that women should be
confined to domestic environments. From personal experience she knew that separation from
that kind of oppressive environment could do much more good than harm. She created many
of her stories from a feminist point of view.

The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is a woman in postpartum depression, and has
been ‘diagnosed’ with ‘hysteria’, a ‘disease’ used to oppress the mental issues of women at
the time. So, as an obedient wife, she follows her husband, John, to an isolated mansion in
which she later gets confined to the attic until she loses her mind. She keeps trying to respect
her husband’s wishes for her to rest and not think about anything, lest she gets criticized for
speaking up.

At the beginning of the story we see her resisting the oppression by complaining and
trying to convince John to change his mind. That plan is quickly abandoned due to how
condescendingly he replies to her pleas and she quickly realizes that they’re falling on deaf
ears. While we do not see the narrator actively trying to resist anymore, she does keep
passively resisting her husband’s command until the very end. Since her husband forbade her
any mental activity she was also forbidden from writing. The narrator defies her husband,
although secretly, by continuing to write her thoughts and feelings when no one’s looking.

John is a typical Victorian man. He is made of misogyny and therefore treats the
narrator like a child, incapable of making her own decisions. He is almost patronizing in the
way he treats her, calling her his “little goose”.
 Another character that is mentioned is John’s sister, Jennie. Jennie has a significant
role in the story, no matter how minor. She represents the internalized misogyny everpresent
in society. Jennie, despite being a woman herself, tries as hard as her brother to keep the
narrator contained in the mansion. She conforms to the rules society has set for her and
expects other women to follow the same path she took.

The only thing the narrator wanted throughout the entirety of the story was freedom.
Freedom which she was never granted. Alienation from her friends and from nature, slowly
but surely, pushed her closer and closer to the edge of insanity. In the end, in some dark and
twisted way, she does manage to regain her freedom. Through her insanity her mind was
finally free from torment. The message that this gives us is that the only way a woman can
truly be free is either if she’s dead or if she’s insane.

In some way the gender roles are flipped on their head at the end of the story. John
adapts a traditionally feminine role at the end. Usually it is a female that faints from shock
after seeing something frightening. In this case, after witnessing his mentally ill wife, it is
John who faints while she laughs at him.

Gilman did explicitly say that she wanted to shine a light on issues women had during
that time period because of androcentric culture. Through this story she showed us how much
misogyny was ingrained into society that neither Jennie nor the narrator were able to stand up
for themselves as women. They were always silenced. She showed how destructive such a
view is and how detrimental it is to a woman and everyone around her. The ‘rest cure’ was
not a proper medication to treat mental illness. Gilman did not sugarcoat things and told the
public exactly how she felt, despite there being some backlash to her work being published.
By sending a copy of her story to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the man who diagnosed her with
“some brain disease”, she set an example for all oppressed women who wanted to speak out
against their oppressor.

Nejra Galijašević