The story under analysis belongs to American writer
and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was born on July 3, 1860, in
Hartford, Connecticut.
Gilman married artist Charles Stetson in 1884. The
couple had a daughter named Katherine. Sometime during her decade-long marriage
to Stetson, Gilman experienced a severe depression and underwent a series of
unusual treatments for it. This experience is believed to have inspired her
best-known short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892).
While she is
best known for her fiction, Gilman was also a successful lecturer and
intellectual. One of her greatest works of nonfiction is “Women and Economics".
A feminist, she called for women to gain economic independence, and the work
helped cement her standing as a social theorist. It was even used as a textbook
at one time. Other important nonfiction works followed, such as “The Home: It`s
Work and Influence” (1903) and “Does a Man Support His Wife”? (1915).
In 1900,
Gilman had married for the second time, her cousin George Gilman, and the two
stayed together until his death in 1934. The next year she discovered that she
had inoperable breast cancer. Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide on
August 17, 1935.
The title of the story is "The Yellow Wallpaper"
is suggestive and thought-provoking. When I saw the title, I couldn`t even
imagine how psychologically deep is this story. But let us return to the title.
I thought that this story will be about mentally ill
people or about asylum. Once I`ve read that asylums used to be painted in
yellow and partially my predictions were right but still so much left hidden up
to the moment I`ve read the story.
The actions in the story take place in the colonial
period. The narrator and her physician husband, John, have rented a mansion for
the summer so that she can recuperate from a “slight hysterical tendency.”
Although the narrator does not believe that she is actually ill, John is
convinced that she is suffering from “neurasthenia” and prescribes the “rest
cure” treatment. She is confined to bed rest in a former nursery room and is
forbidden from working or writing. The spacious, sunlit room has yellow
wallpaper – stripped off in two places – with a hideous, chaotic pattern. The
narrator detests the wallpaper, but John refuses to change rooms, arguing that
the nursery is best-suited for her recovery.
Two weeks later, the narrator’s condition has
worsened. She feels a constant sense of anxiety and fatigue and can barely
muster enough energy to write in her secret journal. Fortunately, their nanny,
Mary, takes care of their baby, and John's sister, Jennie, is a perfect
housekeeper. The narrator's irritation with the wallpaper grows; she discovers
a recurring pattern of bulbous eyes and broken necks, as well as the faint
image of a skulking figure stuck behind the pattern.
As more days pass, the narrator grows increasingly
anxious and depressed. The wallpaper provides her only stimulation, and she
spends the majority of her time studying its confusing patterns which, as she
asserts, are almost as “good as gymnastics.” The image of the figure stooping
down and "creeping" around behind the wallpaper becomes clearer each
day. By moonlight, she can see very distinctly that the figure is a woman
trapped behind bars.
The narrator's health improves as her interest in the
wallpaper deepens. At night, the woman in the wallpaper shakes the bars in the
pattern violently as she tries to break through them, but she cannot break
free. The swirling pattern has strangled the heads of the many women who have
tried to break through the wallpaper. The narrator begins to hallucinate,
believing that she has seen the woman creeping surreptitiously outside in the
sunlight. The narrator intends to peel off the wallpaper before she leaves the
house in two days.
The next night, the narrator locks herself in her room
and continues stripping the wallpaper. She hears shrieks within the wallpaper
as she tears it off. She contemplates jumping out of a window, but the bars
prevent that; besides, she is afraid of all of the women that are creeping
about outside of the house. When morning comes, the narrator has peeled off all
of the wallpaper and begun to creep around the perimeter of the room. John
eventually breaks into the room, but the narrator does not recognize him. She
informs him that she has peeled off most of the wallpaper so that now no one
can put her back inside the walls. John faints, and the narrator continues
creeping around the room over him.
One of the main ideas of this story is a life of a
woman in 18-19 century, the relations in family and in general the position in
society. As we may see it from the story it is not at all what we are having
now.
Women were
deprived of many things that they can do now. Men
were expected to live a public life, whether it was working in a factory or socializing
with like-minded men in public places, like clubs, meetings, or bars. On the
other hand, women were usually expected to live their lives largely homebound,
taking care of the cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. Free time for women
was not supposed to be spent socializing but doing other things related to the
maintenance of the family, from sewing socks to laundry.
Largely due to these traditional expectations for
women prior to the 19th century, very few women had the same opportunities for
education as men. Indeed, educating women was often seen as subversive, a
possible perversion of the correct social order. Women were also entirely shut
out of political activity. Women were not allowed to vote, and in Great
Britain, women were so bound to their husbands that under 19th-century British
common law, they were barely considered people at all.
Today, we are able to choose study, socialize and do
whatever we want or like and this story is definitely useful to read for women
in order to compare positions they obtain and that women used to obtain.
As to the type of narration, this story is written in
1st person narrative. The actions are described by the narrator,
whose name we don`t know. She experiences all the events by herself and she tells
them from her point of view.
The reader absorbs deeper in her story by getting true
descriptions, but on the other way knowing just one point of view and having no
additional information, judgements we can`t know for sure what was happening as
we know that the narrator obviously had mental problems.
Contextual type of this story is narration with
elements of description, meditation. We don`t have descriptions of characters
of this story. We may get information only from their actions. The author pays
attention to the description of the house, of the rooms. It helps the reader to
absorb into the setting, to fell the atmosphere of the house and to imagine the
life of the characters with more details.
The story is a secret journal of the narrator and she
writes down all her thoughts there, though she is forbidden to. That is her way
to share the information she can`t share with others, she knows they won`t
understand her.
Compositional structure of this text is not full;
there is no introduction and conclusion.
·
Exposition:
this part of story gives us some information about the characters and reasons
they went to the countryside.
·
Plot
development: the narrator writes about her everyday life, describes, shares
with the reader her secret thoughts that she writes down in her secret journal
and complains about the miserableness of her state.
·
Climax:
the characters feels the connection between her and the women from the wall,
she wants to set that woman free and the highest point is that she loses her
mind completely.
·
Anticlimax:
the husband enters the room and sees his wife crawling in the room and faints.
And now shall we look at the characters of the story.
Narrator
The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a young wife
and mother who has recently began to suffer symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Although she does not believe that anything is wrong with her, John, her
physician husband, diagnoses her with neurasthenia and prescribes several
months of “rest cure.”
In addition to
being confined to the nursery in their rented summer home, the narrator is
expressly forbidden to write or engage in any creative activity.
The narrator desperately wants to please her husband
and assume her role as an ideal mother and wife, but she is unable to balance
her husband’s needs with her desire to express her creativity. While attempting
to adhere to John’s wishes for the most part, the narrator secretly writes in
her journal. Over the course of the story, the narrator also begins to find
comfort in the hideous yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of the nursery.
She gradually begins to see a female figure trapped behind the bar-like pattern
of the wallpaper and realizes that both she and the figure are suffering from
oppression and imprisonment. As the narrator becomes more and more preoccupied
with the pattern of the wallpaper, she forgets her desire to become the perfect
wife and mother and thinks only of a way to release the imprisoned woman from
the wallpaper.
By the end of the story, the narrator has lost all
sense of reality, and John discovers her creeping around the perimeter of the
nursery, following the endless pattern of the wallpaper.
John
The husband of the narrator, John is a practical
physician who believes that his wife is suffering from nothing more than a
“slight hysterical tendency.” He prescribes the “rest cure,” confining the narrator
to the nursery and forbidding her to exercise her creative imagination in any
way.
Throughout the story, he treats her in an infantile
manner, referring to her as his “blessed little goose” and “little girl.”
Moreover, when the narrator attempts to discuss her unhappiness with the
situation in a mature manner, he refuses to accept her as an equal and simply
carries her back up to the nursery for more bed rest. He is fixed in his
authoritative position as husband and doctor and cannot adapt his strategy to
account for her opinion on the matter. He believes in a strict divide between
men and women; men work outside of the home, as he does, while women like
Jennie, his sister, and Mary, the nanny, tend to the house.
Although John is set up as the villain of the story,
he can also be seen as a more sympathetic character. He clearly loves his wife
and relies on her for his own happiness. Yet he is unable to reconcile her
creative desires with his own rationality or the chauvinistic expectations of
the time period. His wife is unable or unwilling to adhere to the ideal model
of domesticity expressed by the 19th-century society, and John is at a loss as
to what to do. His solution is to use rest cure to cure his wife, and he does
not realize that his own actions push her over the edge of insanity.
I think that one more character of the story is Woman in the wallpaper.
Although the narrator eventually believes that she
sees many women in the yellow wallpaper, she centers on one in particular. The
woman appears to be trapped within the bar-like pattern of the wallpaper, and
she shakes the pattern as she tries to break out. The woman is most active by
moonlight, a symbol of femininity and a sign that John’s strict daytime regimen
is no longer applicable to the narrator.
Over time, as the narrator’s insanity deepens, she
identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is trapped
within the wallpaper. The woman in the wallpaper also symbolizes female
imprisonment within the domestic sphere. Unable to break free from the room,
like the narrator, the woman in the wallpaper has only the symbolic option of
tending to the house as a wife or mother.
Jennie
Jennie is the narrator’s sister-in-law and takes care
of the house during the narrator’s illness. Although she does not play an
active role in the narrative, she is a constant reminder of the narrator's
inability to assume her proper role as John's wife and housekeeper.
Mary
Mary takes care of the narrator and John's baby. Mary
is even less present in the text than Jennie; she still serves to remind the
narrator of her personal failings as a 19th century woman, particularly in
terms of her own child.
Vocabulary of the story is mostly bookish, there no
cases of slang, jargon but we may find here several examples of medical terms: “physician”, “phosphates or
phosphite”, “temporary nervous depression”, “a slight hysterical tendency”.
As to the stylistic devices applied here, we may see:
·
Parenthesis:
“I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but
this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind” , “there is something strange
about the house”, “kind of " debased Romanesque" with delirium
tremens” , “privately”, “I always watch for that first long, straight ray”, “the
moon shines in all night when there is a moon”, “she turned around as if she
had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry” – all these cases of
parenthesis are used to show the chaotic way of thinking of the main character,
she couldn`t concentrate on what she was writing.
·
Repetitions:
“…perhaps -(I would not say it to a living soul, of
course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind -) perhaps that is
one reason I do not get well faster.”, “But
he said I wasn't able to go,
nor" able to stand it after I
got there…” , “The color is hideous enough,
and unreliable enough, and
infuriating enough, but the pattern
is torturing.”, “Round and round and round -round and round and round -it makes
me dizzy!” – these cases of repetition are used to put emphasis on the
repetition of routine every day.
·
Parallel
constructions :
“I don't know why I should write this. I don't want
to. I don't feel able.”, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally,
I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” –
to show the moral state of the main character.
·
Polysyndetons:
“So I take phosphates or phosphites whichever it is,
and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to
"work" until I am well again.”, “It makes me think of English places
that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and
lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.”, “He said that
after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the
barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.”, “And
dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me
on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.”,
“He said I was
his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself
for his sake, and keep well.” – these cases of polysyndeton were used to give
more dynamism to the utterances.
·
Asyndetons:
“It is quite alone, standing well back from the road,
quite three miles from the village.”, “You are gaining flesh and color, your
appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you.”, “I find it hovering
in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait
for me on the stairs.” – are used for showing the chaotic way of thinking of
the main character.
·
Epithets:
“physician of high standing”, “a delicious garden”, “sprawling
flamboyant patterns”, “The color…repellant, revolt…”, “a smoldering unclean
yellow”, “atrocious nursery”, “blessed little goose”, “riotous old-fashioned
flowers”, “velvet meadows”, “optic horror” – these epithets were used to give
more expressiveness and vividness to the text.
·
Similes:
“lie awake as a child”, “chair that always seemed like
a strong friend”, “it as good as gymnastics” – were used to make utterances
more understandable trough the comparison with some other objects.
·
Oxymoron:
“positively angry” – to show that the character is confusing the states in her
mind.
In the text there are also cases of capitalization
like: perhaps, does, delicious, draught, reason… . It was used to emphasize some points in the text in
order the reader to pay attention on these places.
To sum up, I would like to say that this story is
worth reading and reading for several times. Reading the story for one more
time helped to get me in it deeper. I`ve caught details that I haven`t notice
before. Besides the story of the main heroine, there is great mystery that
gives effect of closeness. For a moment I`ve imagined all the main character
went through.
Charlotte Perkins is an amazing writer, her work is
really detailed description and his description gives us a chance to imagine
more precisely all the things that main character went through.
Now I would like to read other her works and compare
how changed her literary style through years.
Thank you Victoria Viktorivna, for a chance to open a new page in American
literature about which I had no idea.
