The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860. Her father, Frederick

Beecher Perkins, a librarian, belonged to the famous Beecher family; he was the nephew of the

well known novelist and abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). Soon after the birth of

Charlotte Perkins, her father abandoned the family and her mother, Mary A. Fitch, had to raise

the children single handedly. Receiving little financial support from her husband, Mary Fitch

relied on the help offered by relatives and also took up the job of a school teacher for some time.

Since the family was constantly on the move (as Charlotte Perkins mentions in her

autobiography, they had to shift nineteen times in eighteen years), the Perkins children received

limited formal schooling and were taught by their mother. The childhood of Charlotte Perkins

was also one of emotional deprivation as the father was absent and the mother, stung by her

husband’s desertion, withheld open display of affection and grew to be a disciplinarian. In 1873

Frederick Beecher Perkins and Mary A. Fitch were officially divorced. Charlotte Perkins went

on to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design and later worked as an art teacher. In 1882

she met Charles Walter Stetson, a local artist whose marriage proposal she rejected. However, in

1883 she agreed to marry him. It did not turn out to be a wise decision as Stetson’s expectations

from the relationship were at variance with those of Charlotte Perkins. He expected her to

conform to the conventional role of a wife and mother and did not appreciate her professional

ambitions. It pushed Charlotte Perkins towards depression, a condition which worsened after the

birth of their daughter, Katharine in 1885, forcing her to seek medical assistance from a leading

physician of the time, Weir Mitchell. He suggested rest cure with only “two hours intellectual

life a day” and strict instructions to stay away from “pen, brush or pencil … as long as I lived”

(Gilman). The treatment did nothing to help Charlotte Perkins and almost reduced her to the state
of the protagonist of her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper”, a story which draws upon

Perkins’ own experience. In 1888 she left her husband and went to California. To support herself

and her daughter, Perkins ran a boarding house and also started writing and giving lectures to

women’s organizations, suffrage groups etc . Since her work required her to be away f rom home

often, in 1894 Charlotte Perkins left her daughter with Stetson and his second wife for some

time, a decision which resulted in her being condemned for being an unnatural mother.

The decision to leave her husband was one which allowed Charlotte Perkins to rediscover herself

and build her career as an important writer and reformer of late nineteenth and early twentieth

century America. One of the key issues which figures in her fictional as well as non-fictional

work is that of women’s economic dependence. As a child she had witnessed her mother’s

struggle to cope with the precarious financial position of the family in the face of the father’s

desertion and realized the need for women to work, to be self-reliant. In works, such as Women

and Economics (1898), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Charlotte Perkins argued that

women should be paid for domestic labor, that the idea of ‘home’ should be reinterpreted so that

“ we may all have homes to love and grow in without the requirement that half of us shall never

have anything else” (Gilman 12). However, despite fighting for women’s issues throughout her

life, she was not comfortable with being labeled a ‘feminist’ and insisted that her struggle was

aimed at the betterment of the entire human race.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is autobiographical in nature, and this is something which Charlotte

Perkins herself confirmed in a short piece called “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”,

written in 1923. This short story was first published in 1892 in New England Magazine. Initially

read as a supernatural or horror story, it was subsequently ignored like other works of Perkins till

the Feminist Press “rediscovered” it in 1973. Since then it has been variously reinterpreted, for
example, as a metaphor for the condition of women at the end of the nineteenth century,

particularly women who were torn between their desire to write and the dictate of their society to

curb that ‘unnatural desire’, a concern which continued to be voiced by later generations of

women writers, in works of fiction as well as non-fiction.

The protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, like that of “Bliss”, is an upper middle class woman

who, like Bertha, the protagonist of Katherine Mansfield’s short story, seems to have accepted

conventional ideas about women, about marriage as an institution and women’s position in it.

This is reflected in her matter of fact statement at the beginning of the story: “John laughs at me,

of course, but one expects that in marriage”.

The world she inhabits is a world of binaries, of rational men and ‘fanciful’ women. Through

the figure of the husband, John, who is a physician and therefore in ‘control’ of his wife’s

treatment, the story draws attention to the way in which contemporary medical discourses sought

to define women. The authority of science was used to stall growing demands for greater rights

for women. The biological difference between the two sexes became a means to justify women’s

exclusion from spheres of higher education and work. As Grace Farrell points out, in the

nineteenth century “all female ailments…were connected to the female reproductive organs” and

it was suggested that women’s greater participation in intellectual/ mental work would interfere

with the proper growth of their reproductive system and thus, affect their ‘primary’ role as

procreators. It is such a reasoning that is used by the protagonist’s husband. “He combines the

diagnostic language of the physician …with the paternalistic language of the husband to create a

formidable array of controls over her behavior”. Thus, she is confined to the “nursery” at the top

of the house, with a rigid schedule to follow and any kind of intellectual stimulation absolutely

forbidden. The husband’s diagnosis and suggested cure are seconded by the brother, also a
physician, thereby effectively sealing the fate of the protagonist. In this male dominated

discourse her opinion of what ails her or her doubts about the suggested cure do not matter. That

there is more to it than meets the eye is hinted at by the details of the nursery given by the

protagonist, which are quite unsettling: “…the windows are barred for little children, and there

are rings and things in the walls. “

This suggests the existence of a sinister past, of the possible other, less than benign uses to which

the room was perhaps put, thereby reinforcing its impression as a “prison” in the present, rather

than a place of recuperation for the protagonist. John’s ideas about her illness and its cure do not

convince the protagonist and she strongly feels that “congenial work” would aid her recovery

rather than obstruct it. But this dissenting voice is suppressed by the conditioned self of the

protagonist, whose tenacious hold is reflected in the frequent references to what “John says.” The

denial of pen and paper by the physician-husband is clearly a denial of the protagonist’s right to

represent herself and thereby challenge his misrepresentation of her as either childlike, hence in

need of male guidance, or hysterical and neurotic , and so again in need of supervision. The

protagonist’s desire to write and its demonization by John (and, by extension, her society) forces

her to lead a double life. Thus, she takes to writing in the absence of her husband and his sister.

This act of putting pen to paper, of recording her thoughts and feelings, unburdens her because it

provides her with an outlet for saying what is unsayable – her fancies and fears, the so-called

irrational ideas which are dismissed by her husband who “is practical in the extreme”. But

writing also drains her because it involves subterfuge. Thus, the sudden breaks in the narrative

reflect the forced breaks in her private journal, necessitated by the arrival of John or his sister-

the form her story takes reflects the conditions under which she writes as well as her increasingly

disoriented mental state. The situation of the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be read as a
metaphor for the constraints under which women writers before and after Charlotte Perkins have

worked. The protagonist also bemoans the lack of “any advice or companionship about…work”,

thereby raising the question of the effect of “the lack of tradition upon the mind of a (woman)

writer” which Virginia Woolf talks about in A Room of One’s Own.

The Wallpaper as a Metaphor

The protagonist’s loneliness, forced inactivity and lack of normal relations with her husband

(the seemingly innocuous references to two beds, John spending nights away from home suggest

as much) begin to unhinge her. Her request to have the wallpaper changed is turned down by her

husband because he wants her to control her ‘fancies’ and irrational ideas. Confined to the

nursery with little to occupy her mind, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, which begins

to acquire a life of its own. The protagonist’s changing reactions to the wallpaper are a measure

of her state of mind. Initially, she objects to it on aesthetic grounds but the language and the

images used are too strong and disturbing to describe a mere “artistic sin”: “There is a recurrent

spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”

The latent violence in these lines clearly indicates the presence of a subtext. Unable to confront

and challenge her husband, and the larger social system that he symbolizes, the protagonist

seems to displace or redirect her feeling of resentment towards other objects, in this case the

wallpaper. At first, she sees it as an instrument of surveillance, with its “absurd, unblinking

eyes…everywhere,” reflecting her sense of being kept under watch all the time . Gradually, this

feeling of animosity is replaced by something more complex as the protagonist’s increasingly

unstable mind begins to ‘see’ a figure behind the pattern, the figure of a woman, who becomes
an embodiment of the protagonist’s literal and metaphorical imprisonment in a patriarchal set up.

Identifying herself with this ‘woman’ the protagonist decides to set her free by ripping the

wallpaper apart: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled and before morning we had

pulled yards of that paper.”

This moment has been read as an enabling one: the recognition of and identification with ‘the

woman’ behind the bars is a crucial first step towards freedom, freedom from her own

conditioned self and from the law of the husband and the patriarchal order (though this freedom

is not free f rom ambiguity). As J. Wolter points out, the protagonist “begins to decode the

pattern (of her husband and his world), destroys it, and constructs a reading and a world of her

own” (Wolter 199). This change is also reflected in the protagonist’s attitude to her husband.

While initially she is tormented by a feeling of guilt and reproaches herself for failing in her

duties as a wife, she goes on to shed that meekness, finally addressing him at the end of the story

as an equal. Horrified by the change in his wife, John faints at the end of the story. But his

collapse does not necessarily signify release for the protagonist. After all, the final image that the

story leaves us with is hardly one that generates hope- a woman, creeping round and round,

“securely fastened by a rope”.

Race and C lass Politics in “The Ye llow Wallpaper” Though rightly celebrated as a key feminist

text of its time, which continues to resonate with meaning, “The Yellow Wallpaper” reflects the

race and class bias of its writer. Susan Lanser points out that the story is embedded in the race

politics of America at the end of the 19th century, which saw a huge influx of immigrants from

China, Southern and Eastern Europe etc . It gave rise to “a mass anxiety about the Yellow Peril”
and calls for immigration control, which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 . This feeling

of intolerance extended to the African- Americans as well. When read in this context, the story

and “its tropes take on an obvious political charge”. What lends credence to such a reading is the

anti- immigrant and, at times, racist rhetoric found elsewhere in the writing of Perkins. For

instance, she opposed immigration from certain parts of the world on the grounds that the

migrants would ‘contaminate’ the ‘American’ population with their conservative notions about

gender relations etc . and thus, undo the good work done in this sphere. Thus, on the one hand,

“The Yellow Wallpaper” challenges systemic oppression of women, on the other, it participates

in oppression of another kind, based on race and ethnic difference. The protagonist’s comments

about the color of the wallpaper would have evoked an immediate response from the first readers

of the short story: “The color is repellent…a smouldering unclean yellow…”

The connotations of the “unclean yellow”, its link with the supposedly unclean habits of the non-

white migrants, would have been ‘obvious’ to the contemporaries of Perkins. Later, the

protagonist deploys scatological imagery to give vent to her sense of disgust with the ‘yellow’

wallpaper: “If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding

and sprouting in endless convolutions- why that is something like it.”

This can be read as a reference to growing immigrant population which might soon outnumber

the white Americans. Other than the race politics, there is also a class angle to the struggle

depicted in “The Yellow Wallpaper” which is very much the struggle of an upper/middle class

woman, undergoing a rest cure- a treatment which would surely not have been prescribed to or

afforded by women of a lower class. What the protagonist has to say about her daily routine

would have sounded ironical to women from a less economically privileged section: “Nobody
would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, to dress and entertain, and order

things”.

To say this is not to belittle the agony of a woman who is forced to live in a state of passive

dependence and whose creativity is stifled, it is to say that the turmoil she experiences is

representative of a certain class of women only and is based on a certain set of class related

assumptions.