The Yellow Wallpaper

At the beginning of the semester when I found out that we had to blog about a few of the short stories we read, I decided I wouldn’t blog until close to the end.  I wanted to give myself time to think about what we read, and then go back and write about several stories that stuck out to me.  There are some stories that I have kept thinking about.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of those. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about this story for a long time because of its step by step narrative of the woman going crazy and also one of its themes that it prominent in a lot of the stories we’ve read this semester. 

The main theme I saw in the story was the early 20^th century relationship between men and women.  It is similar to many of Hemingway’s depictions of men and women, like “Hills like White Elephants,” because the man is the authority figure for no reason besides that he is a man.  He is the one who decides the “rest cure” will be good for his wife, and he basically forces her to come to the country house and stay in the upper bedroom.  At first, she believes that he is only doing this because he cares about her, but as the story progresses, she realizes that he is manipulating her and disregarding her opinion, even though she knows more about her own condition.  She is suffering from post-partum depression, a feminine problem that male doctors didn’t recognize as a real condition until much later.  I think it is a sad commentary on the attitudes toward women in this society that Jane has to go crazy to be able to escape from her husband.  She isn’t able to assert herself until she completely loses her mind, and then she is able to (literally) walk all over him like he did to her.  Since the author is a woman, I think this story is an accurate portrayal of her frustration with the male-centered society. 

Aside from this theme, I also found the vivid descriptions of the setting and the narrator’s downward spiral into insanity interesting.  When the narrator describes her room in a journal entry (a form of writing that I enjoyed reading), she says it must have been a playroom or a gymnasium.  However, her description of the room- with rings on the walls, bars on the windows, and a bed nailed to the floor- leads readers to see that the room has really been used as an insane asylum.  The fact that Jane thought these details belonged to a playroom or a gym is a sign that she was probably a little crazy the whole time.  Her fixation with the wallpaper paints us a great picture of what it looks like.  The pictures we found on the internet in class show that everyone who reads the story has a clear vision of what that wallpaper looks like to them.  The way the narrator employs all the senses in her description of the setting made me feel like I was going crazy with her.  The way she describes the curling of the wallpaper, the “yellow smell,” the hideous patterns, and damp, musty air gave me a sense of the anxiety she felt there, and it made me want to get away from the room.  Jane’s journal entries seem a bit more desperate and disjointed every time.  They become much more focused on the wallpaper and the woman who creeps in the garden and less about her husband and how she hopes they can leave soon.  In the end, Gilman leaves no question as to whether the narrator has gone completely crazy.  Her use of her name in third person when she says “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane,” shows that she no longer considers herself the same person; she separates into a whole other being.  The overall effect of the story for me was unsettling.  It left me with a very clear image of Jane creeping around the room, crawling over her husband as if he wasn’t there at all.  It is a disturbing image that I have thought about again several times since reading the story, and it makes me glad that I live today instead of in the early 1900s, where I might have been a victim of the “rest cure.”