The Yellow Wallpaper
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The Yellow Wallpaper
During the change of the century, from 1865-1912, American women struggled to obtain freedoms and independence that is taken for granted today. The roles of women during this era were mostly defined by men, often in one of the many books of etiquette that taught them a proper “code of manners” and stated flatly, “The power of a woman is in her refinement, gentleness and elegance; it is she who makes etiquette, and it is she who preserves the order and decency of society” (Harper, 1999, p.1298).
This was particularly true of middle-class women, and men strived to keep them restrained within the influences of the home. The expectation was for the woman to be “fixed firmly within their sphere of home and hearth” (Harper, 1999, p.1298), tending to the needs of the family, caring for children, and taking care of the home. Women were expected to remain virtuous and pure, to be modest, devout in their faith , and submissive to their male counterparts. This was evident in the medical profession and in The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman demonstrates the arrogant attitude men display towards women when she highlights the fact that even her husband does not believe she is ill, that she merely suffers from “temporary bouts of nervous depression.”
In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman and her husband have rented a mansion for the summer so she can recuperate from the recent birth of their child. She rests in an upstairs room, a former nursery, with peeling yellow wallpaper, which becomes her obsession. She describes its color as repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow with dull yet lurid orange in some places. She emphasizes its unpleasantness by exclaiming, “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.”
Her husband forbids her to do anything, particularly write, so she keeps a diary in secret. She writes that when John comes in, she must hastily put the diary away, as he hates for her to write a word (Harper, 1999, p.1736). Her husband’s sister, Jennie, tends to her and the nanny takes care of their baby boy. As her condition worsens, the woman becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper, trying to trace its patterns and becoming convinced that someone is trapped inside, a woman who is trying to get out.
Each day, the image becomes clearer, and the narrator cannot wait for the woman to emerge. By moonlight, she sees the woman clearly behind bars; Gilman writes “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” (Harper, 1999, p.1741). The bars are on the windows of her room, which used to be a nursery, and this is one example of symbolism that it used in the story.
As the narrator’s health seems to improve, her interest in the wallpaper deepens, and now it takes on a distinctive odor that seems to permeate the entire house. She grows paranoid as she thinks she notices her husband and sister-in-law have become aware of something in the wallpaper also, and she catches them looking at it and touching it when they think she is not looking. “I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.” (Harper, 1999, p.1741).
At night she sees the pattern move as the woman behind the wallpaper is shaking it. Sometimes she sees the heads of other women, strangled by the pattern, with their heads turned upside down and eyes white. As they are leaving for home in a couple of days, she gets up at night and peels off the wallpaper as high as she can reach. “I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” (Harper, 1999, p.1744). On the last day, when all the furniture but the bed had been removed, she locks herself in the room with orders not to be disturbed, throws the key down into the front path, and sets about stripping off the rest of the wallpaper.
When John arrives home knocking on the door he is told, “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it! (Harper, 1999, p. 1745). Her well-hidden rope securely fastens her now, and the bars are too strong to tempt her to jump out the window. When John comes back from retrieving the key he enters the room and cries, “For God’s sake, what are you doing!” and she replies as though she is the woman from behind the wallpaper, “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Harper, 1999, p.1745)
One interpretation of the story can be that it serves as a metaphor for the position of women in society, imprisoned in their homes by their husbands, told what they could and couldn’t do. The narrator is one with the woman in the wallpaper, and in setting the woman behind the wallpaper free, she is liberating herself (Rexs