The Yellow Wallpaper

The first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s little literary masterpiece of a woman’s descent into madness puts us in mind of a genetic splice between Poe and Woolf. But in the hours you spend thinking about it after turning the last page, you realise that there is so much more going on. 

One of the most compelling works of feminist literature, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a wife and mother who is forced into an isolated country holiday by her physician husband to cure a nervous breakdown. The nameless heroine, starved of intellectual stimulation, chronicles her feelings in secret as well as documents her feelings towards her bedroom’s repellent yellow wallpaper and her descent into madness as the patterns on it begin to consume her mind. 

Taken straight from her own experience, the story has a lot going on considering its length (a mere thirty-six pages long). On the surface, it reads as a Gothic horror complete with a nameless and faceless ‘unreliable’ narrator (unreliable as we quickly learns she’s going insane, though there’s an irony here that I’ll delve into later) a la Edgar Allen Poe. The short sentences and jagged paragraphs, never housing more than two or three sentences, are definitely not the lengthy and long-winded streams of consciousness that colour Woolf’s work, but still serve as a strong depiction of the heroine’s mind as well as tells entire stories and histories with few words. Through these techniques alone we are captivated and wrenched almost forcibly into a world seen through the heroine’s eyes. 

And this is where the true brilliance of the book comes through. The heroine becomes fixated on the wallpaper: hating it, being terrified of it, and then finally desperate to free the women trapped behind it that shake the patterns and make them move. Instantly, the wallpaper becomes a metaphor for marriage and the attitudes of a patriarchal society towards women. Victorian marriage and the demands on women to be wife, mother, and nothing more suddenly become the central villain of this chilling tale and there’s an eerie dramatic irony in the idea that this heroine (who is actually going mad and hallucinating) is simultaneously seeing the world for what it truly is: a structure of patriarchal inequality and female subjugation. Suddenly, everything you’ve read in the pages before takes on a different colour and a strong social commentary comes bursting out of the paper (to take an image from the story). 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s use of a popular mass-read genre, techniques reminiscent of other writers, and then brilliant use of metaphor makes The Yellow Wallpaper a wonderfully modern book as well as one that deals with themes that are relevant to this day. Everything from sexual to social attitudes are represented here, as well as perfect depictions of the relationships and attitudes between the sexes: not just men towards women, but also women towards women. It truly is a masterpiece that has not gotten the recognition that it deserves and I would strongly encourage people to change this by taking a mere hour out of their day to sit down and read it. 

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Published: 1892