“…the color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight… This wallpaper has a kind of sub pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design… I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.”
The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman, C.
Introduction
The story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman – “The Yellow Wallpaper” – is rightfully considered one of the brightest examples of female prose. It is not only reflecting gender, social and intellectual representations of the turn of the century but also becoming an amazing example of specific artistic optics. It is no coincidence that Gilman’s work is of great interest to both representatives of feminism and literary critics. The story, which became a non-standard example of artistic optics of the writer-innovator of the turn of the 19-20 centuries, raised the problem of the role and place of women in a patriarchal society. The space of the heroine’s room can be read as a kind of disciplined practice, endowed with units of control (bars, wallpaper pattern, twisted bed), which is opposed to a system of images that fill the heroine’s consciousness.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a compilation of entries from a diary made by a young woman for three months at a remote home in the countryside. Her husband invites her there for the summer to boost her health. At the same time, he adheres to the tenets of the “recreation therapy,” depriving his wife of society, literature, and amusement and isolating her for an extended period of time. The heroine privately disagrees with her husband and writes a diary in which she chronicles her feelings. The story convincingly proves how destructive a policy of restriction and suppression is for a woman. In this paper, I argue that the poetry of space reveals the author’s intention in full and illustrates the connection of the poetics of space and the woman question through opposition – control vs. imagination.
Analysis
In the storyline, the image of a spouse – a powerful and authoritative doctor – is linked to the patriarchal manner of disciplining the female body through different prescriptions and practices. Her spouse picked an old nursery room for her, and his patronizing attitude toward her obviously infantilizes her (Pinsent, 2017). The protagonist is drawn to the wallpaper pattern in an environment devoid of any intellectual or emotional interest. After a while, she notices that it’s distinct; it also has a unique background: a woman incarcerated.
The story’s appeal comes from the first-person narrative’s innovative transfer of the experience of madness, the depiction of the progression of the picture of wallpapers and the indication of their symbolic importance, and the finale, which prompts additional contemplation on the text. The “cult of the house” and the “female sphere” are literally presented in Gilman’s story as the physical space of the room in which the story’s heroine is forcibly placed (Ouni, 2021). At the same time, the room and the experience of staying in it turn out to be a kind of laboratory of female imagination, female self-knowledge, and self-expression (Pinsent, 2017). The heroine’s madness, according to feminist interpretations, is a rejection of the patriarchal system and an attempt to flee it, and the process of going insane is a search for and discovery of their female identity.
Control (discipline) and imagination are the story’s most critical semantic oppositions. Gilman unambiguously brings out that a woman is deprived of her liberty and becomes imprisoned in marriage, even if she is unaware of it, by introducing numerous features into the subject world of the work that signifies the disciplinary methods of repression (bars, rings, a twisted bed) (Kuncara et al, 2019). As a result, the chamber becomes associated with the jail, symbolizing it as a method of control or regulation.
The author’s focus is best understood by looking at the room’s wallpaper, which serves as a surreal surface for reflection of her understanding of the situation. The fears of the heroine are inscribed in a strange pattern of wallpaper, which for her is both “meaningless” and “excruciating” (Gilman, 1892). The narrator’s speculation about the room’s purpose conjure up visions, which can be viewed as signs of control and discipline.
Another significant symbolic effect is created by the selection of colour – yellow. Yellow has traditionally been associated with illness and weakness, which is akin to the psychosis that the protagonist is afflicted with. It also reveals how difficult life has been for women in the face of oppression and struggle. Colour descriptors indirectly tell of how women’s inequality brought on by men can be “disgusting,” acting as a symbolic metaphor for how women are confined.
The complex pattern of the wallpaper is two plans: an eye-catching external (pattern) and only a guessed internal pattern (sub pattern). The external pattern of wallpaper, among other things, represents conventions that restrain and sharpen in the room (Murthy, 2021). The inner drawing gives the heroine a picture in which the image of a woman striving to escape from the shackles of an external pattern emerges (Sahoo, 2021). A vague, formless female silhouette begins to identify in the internal pattern of wallpaper; she distinguishes between a woman who “fell to the floor and crawls behind the pattern” (Gilman, 1892). The heroine equates crawling with a protest against the humiliation that women face as a result of society’s restrictions on their mental and physical freedom (Roethle, 2020). Within this protest, she underlines that women’s development has been disrupted by gender bias through unfair social attitudes towards women.
It is no accident that the heroine’s reaction to the wallpaper image changes dramatically in her mind: from rejection to curiosity, the need to examine the wall, and finally, the bold, agressive decision to remove the wallpaper. The number of journal entries reduces as the narrative advances to its conclusion: she is no longer interested or fears her spouse. This symbolic act of disobedience concludes the narrative.
Conclusion
It is an open question if the protagonist’s crisis was caused by her husband’s managed conversion over history or was it her own inner development. The heroine begins to gain her “I,” her individuality; from the instant she recognizes herself in the internal image of another woman, she begins to link herself with a lady who is incarcerated, and the wallpaper is a representation of her self-perception. It is also an identification with someone who need to break the chains and finally to be free. It is no accident that this occurs at night when the subconscious is unburdened by the demands of disciplinary processes. Control vs. imagination, where control is reflected in different objects, and the heroine’s imagination, consistently interpreting these images, is directly related to the issue of the women question. The story not only shows a woman’s emancipation from patriarchal limitations conceptually, but the poetics of space also clearly reproduces the sequence of the heroine’s actions that alter her awareness and release her from the suppressed “I.”
References
Gilman C. (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Small, Maynard&C.
Kuncara, S., Muhajir, F. & Romlah, I. (2019). Deconstruction perspective toward the characters in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Jurnal Ilmu Budaya, 3(2).
Murthy, A. (2021). The Symbol of the Wallpaper: Subjectivity and Agency in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. A Journal of the Critical Writing Programme.
Ouni, K. (2021). A holistic rreading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 8(1), 112-131.
Pinsent, H. (2017). ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as a case of dual consciousness. An Undergraduate Journal of Literary Criticism.
Roethle, C. (2020). A healthy play of mind: Art and the brain in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. American Literary Realism, 52(2), 147-166.
Sahoo, A. (2021). Interpreting ‘madwomen’: A study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Pratibha Ray’s “The Eyes”. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 44(1), 196-203.