The short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an example of feminist literature, which explains the choice of the topic and the images the author uses. The narrator is a woman who suffers from the symptoms of depression and apathy after giving birth to her child. She wants to live actively and have social responsibilities, but her husband decides that her mental health is too fragile for it. As a result, the narrator cannot escape from the house and realize her potential and talents. The imagery Gilman uses in the story allows her to show the gradual transition from apathy to insanity and the inability of the narrator to stop this process.
The narrator’s mental state aggravates significantly during the story, and her apathy evolves into insanity. In the beginning, the narrator writes that her husband is a reputable physician in her diary who persuades others that she suffers from “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 1). Everyone believes the man because he is a professional, and the woman has no opportunities to contradict him. At the end of the story, the narrator becomes mad and thinks the yellow wallpaper traps her. This image reflects the initial position that the woman describes in her diary, writing that she can do nothing with the reputable diagnosis of her husband.
Thereby, Gilman emphasizes the oppressive impact of the rest cure that male physicians of the end of the 19th century prescribed to women. It reflected the public attitude to females that dominated the American culture of that time. According to these views, women were diagnosed with neurasthenics instead of being them the opportunity to work and develop their potential (Roethle 147). The peculiar detail is the connection between mental diagnosis and stigmatization that Gilman emphasizes in the story. Neuroasthenics becomes the excuse for the bad behavior of the female protagonist and allows her husband to treat her as an ill person, even though her mental issues are not real.
Gilman opposes two images, the mentally stable man, whose opinion is credible to others, and the image of the mentally unstable woman, whose opinion is disregarded. The narrator refers to them as “creeping women” (Gilman 1). It is the metaphor for the female’s position in the patriarchal society and the description of the hallucinations the narrator sees on the wall. This opposition determines the conflict in the story, which emphasizes the powerless position of the narrator. It is convenient for the narrator’s husband to disregard the desire of his wife to work, communicate with others, and even write the diary because he considers her mentally unstable. His paternalistic, oppressive attitude to the narrator is justified by the objective inability of his wife to live as an ordinary woman.
The letters of Gilbert to Susan Gubar illustrate the similar position of the author, which makes The Yellow Wallpaper a semi-autobiographic story. She describes the passive role of females in the traditionalist society as the life of the parasite who cannot integrate into the community and whose opportunities are limited by the domestic sphere. Women are “imprisoned behind the paper” when they are not able to leave the mansion where “she and her husband are immured” (Roethle 148). These lines feature the image of the female trapped by the wallpaper and unable to leave the house. This metaphoric description reflects the vulnerable and voiceless position of females in the 19th century United States, a patriarchal country at that time.
Summing up, the isolation of the narrator and the emphasis on her traditional female role in society lead to aggravation of her mental state. The changes in the narrator’s behavior prove that such an attitude to women destroys their lives. The woman feels apathy from her inability to escape the domestic sphere in the beginning, but the restrictions her husband imposes on her make her a truly mentally ill person.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte P. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Project Gutenberg, 1999.
Roethle, Christopher. “A Healthy Play of Mind: Art and the Brain in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” American Literary Realism, vol. 52, no. 2, 2020, pp. 147–66.