Sometimes, even experts in certain professions go wrong. Many of them always believe too much in their knowledge such that it never occurs to them that they can go wrong. It is a good thing for professionals to have self-belief for the sake of efficiency in what they do. However, it is equally proper to observe some restraint in the practice of their professions, especially for professionals who directly deal with human life. Having excessive belief in oneself often makes them neglect other people’s advice and opinion.
In the long-run, the results of the decisions that such people make may be devastating. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator suffers from PPD after delivering a child. Her husband takes her to an old mansion in summer, where she is supposed to recover from the depression (Gilman 1). The mansion used to be a nursery before it became a playroom, and later a gymnasium. Her husband, who is a physician, does not listen to her side of the story. He does not care about her feelings (Forward and Heilmann 166).
Her brother, also a physician, supports her husband in insisting that inactivity and taking enough rest will help her recover. On the contrary, she believes that engaging in writing, congenial work and excitement will work better. She says, “Personally, I believe that congenial work with excitement and change would do me good” (Gilman 1). The story is a symbol of the harsh experiences women go through in marriage because of husbands who dominate them in everything.
John’s therapy on the narrator achieves negative results: her situation deteriorates instead of improving as he had expected. The therapy would have worked better if he had listened and considered her feelings about the situation. The narrator believes that writing, excitement and a change of place can treat her depression better than staying in a locked house where no one listens to her. Locking her in the house eventually worsens the depression and makes her lose sanity. Nevertheless, she obtains freedom in her mind at the end of her three-month stay in the house.
Most of the events and objects in the story are symbols that demonstrate Gilman’s lament about her troubled marriage and her eventual change of attitude towards marriage. Firstly, Horowitz believes that The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictional version of Gilman’s life history. He uses a biographical approach in the analysis of the story. He argues that the room in which John locks his wife is a symbol of how marriage curtails the freedom of a woman.
In the story, John locks his wife in the house and prevents her from leaving the house as a way to help her recover from the depression she suffers after giving birth. Horowitz’s argument correctly captures the symbolism behind these events. John is very domineering in everything. He rejects all her suggestions citing medical reasons. For example, when she asks him to repair the house, he says that they will be in the house for only three months. Hence, there is no need to repair it: “…I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three month’s rental” (Gilman 3). He does not know the impact the house has on her when in that state.
The symbolism of the story is also evident in the use of the wallpaper. The narrator sees a woman in the wallpaper and compares herself to the woman. She says, “And I have pulled off most of the paper, so you won’t put me back” (Gilman 12). The wallpaper is a symbol of her marriage to somebody who does not listen to her or give her freedom to do what she feels like doing. The narrator sees the wallpaper as a picture of a woman who is fated to remain on the paper forever. According to her, the woman is supposed to creep on her four limbs forever. “There are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did” (Gilman 11).
Secondly, the wallpaper plays the role of a trigger of the narrator’s mental distress. Initially, she hates it with a passion, but her husband does not bother removing it from the room (Forward and Heilmann 166). Therefore, she is preoccupied with it. She looks at it throughout the day and sometimes at night. Looking at the wallpaper makes her mind move from consciousness to paranoia then to the loss of consciousness. The transition in her mind makes her see things that do not exist on the wallpaper. For example, she sees a creeping woman and notices similarities between that woman and her.
She also believes that the other women she sees through the window are also creeping and might have come from the paper (Forward and Heilmann 166). At some point, she feels a strange smell from the wallpaper. “Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours trying to analyze it, to find out how it smelled like” (Gilman 4). The triggering effect of the wallpaper symbolizes the effect restrictive marriages have on women. Such marriages can lead to suicidal thoughts among women just as the wallpaper makes the narrator contemplate jumping through the window. The bad smell the wallpaper emits symbolizes the extent of her boredom with her marriage to an absentee husband.
Horowitz takes a biographical approach in analyzing the story. He sees lots of similarities between Gilman’s experiences in her marriages and the experiences the narrator encounters in her marriage to John. Gilman got married to Stetson, but the marriage did not work. When she broke up with him, she decided to look for a female partner. This change of attitude regarding marriage partners hints at her changed feelings about marriage at large.
She believes that men are not caring, and do not listen to their wives. Horowitz compares these occurrences to the narrator’s troubles in the story: the husband does not pay attention to her thoughts. He believes he has all the solutions to her problems because he is a doctor: “I could and I would, but you really are better, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know” (Gilman 6). Therefore, Gilman wrote about the experiences she had in marriage to a man and later to a woman and how they made her change her perceptions about marriage.
The other thing to note in the story is the narrator’s transition from fear and paranoia to obsession and the loss of touch with reality (Forward and Heilmann 166). At the beginning of the story, she exhibits lots of fear about the nature of the house. She hates the house and the wallpaper when they settle in it, but this hatred, fear and paranoia change gradually to an obsession that causes her to lose touch with reality. When the story begins, she says, “Then do let us go downstairs…there are such pretty rooms there” (Gilman 7).
This statement demonstrates her hatred and fear for the house. However, John consoles her that there is nothing to worry her. Eventually, the fear turns into an obsession with both the house and the wallpaper. As time passes, she becomes fond of the house. “I am really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper” (Gilman 6). She also develops an obsession for the paper such that all she sees in the house is the paper. Initially, she sees moving patterns on it, which later turn into the image of a woman. The woman turns out to be herself. This transition implies that married women lack the right to make decisions about their lives. As a result, they live in fear of their husbands. This fear develops into preoccupations about things that pose threats in their lives.
The main character refers to the room where she stays as a nursery even though she knows that the room was a playroom and a gymnasium (Forward and Heilmann 166). This attitude is triggered by not seeing her baby. Missing the baby makes her nervous. Though it is uncertain who made the decision to separate them, the separation leads to a bigger problem, where she is unable to make her decisions in life.
The deprivation of the rights to make decisions was something all women in her generation lacked. She calls the house a nursery because of the hatred she has for it. In addition to the disgusting nature of the house, she also dislikes it for the loneliness it brings her. She stays alone because her husband goes to attend to more serious cases of sickness. “She wanted to love and be loved and find sexual fulfillment in marriage. She imagined that love and marriage would bring happiness and remaining alone might entail deep self-denial” (Horowitz 2).
Horowitz compares Charlotte Gilman to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper who tries to reconnect with her husband after a stressful event of bearing a child. The husband Gilman married was not ready to meet her demands, and the relationship had to come to a sudden end. According to Horowitz, Gilman wanted the husband to buy her a house where he would only come whenever he wanted to see her. On the other hand, the narrator wants freedom to go through the recovery process without restrictions, but her husband does not allow her.
In summary, Gilman describes the experiences of women in marriage using several symbols in her story, The Yellow Wallpaper. She demonstrates how some men dominate their wives in decision-making. They do not allow them the freedom to make decisions about themselves. In the story, John prevents his wife from doing what she feels is right to help her recover. She believes that working, writing and excitement can help her recover from her depression, but her husband thinks resting is the best way out of her sickness. Eventually, her condition worsens instead of getting better. She completely loses touch with reality. Her story represents the troubles of many women in her generation who never made any decisions because of the patriarchal society in which they lived.
Works Cited
Forward Stephanie and Ann Heilmann. “Dreams, Visions and Realities.” An Anthology of Short Stories by Turn-of-the-Century Women Writers. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte n.d.. The Yellow Wallpaper n.d.
Horowitz, Hellen. Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of the Yellow Wall-Paper. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.