“The Yellow Wall Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is a fascinating short story. Going through her essay “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, I realized her motive behind such a creation. She claims to have written it to help women who were on the verge of insanity to cope with the male chauvinistic world.
“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”
The story draws from her experience of ‘rest cure’. Suffering from chronic depression, she was prescribed by a renowned doctor to live a “completely domestic life”, and forfeit all intellectual activities. She suffered in this way for three long months before waking up from the nightmare—she was going insane because of this so-called cure! She rejected the prescription and took up her pen. She came back from the doors of insanity and it was time to call back the others. She hoped after reading her book the doctor would change his way of treating patients.
The story is mainly a series of journal entries of a woman who was being treated by her husband through the ‘rest cure’. For most of the time, she was locked up in a room, away from her newborn child and the rest of the family. Here we see the husband is in control as he forces this unreasonable practice on his wife. Locked in the room, the woman slowly sinks into the depths of insanity. We see a hint of rebellion as she keeps on writing in her journal, hidden from her husband. With nothing else to keep her intellectually stimulated, the woman becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper of the room.
She writes about the wallpaper obsessively in her journal, mentioning its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" scrawling pattern. At first she finds patterns in the wallpaper which later seem to shape themselves into a woman crawling on all fours. She thinks that a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper and feels it her duty to help her. She scratches at the patterns, tearing off the wallpaper. At this point, she is seriously losing touch with sanity and seems to be the climax of the story. Finally, she tears down the wallpaper entirely and locks herself up in the room. When the husband comes to check on her, she pretends that she was the one trapped beyond the wallpaper and starts crawling on all fours. The husband faints when he sees this and the woman crawls over him.
The woman, although mentally affected, seems to realize her imprisonment in the male-dominated world. Hence, she imagines that a woman was trapped beyond the wallpaper. It could be her representation. The fact that she finally tears off the wallpaper can be seen as her victory—she is finally able to extricate herself from the tangles of the male-dominated world. However, in the process, she has to sacrifice her sanity. From a feministic point of view, her crawling over her husband’s body is accepted as her victory—she could finally rise above the husband.
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ can be considered an epitome of feminist literature. It had huge impacts in the society although a group clamored its potential harm on the female mind.
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