"The Yellow Wallpaper" as an Example of a Gothic Allergory Essay

Short Story Criticism. Ed. David L. Siegel. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 1993. From Literature Resource Center.

[In the essay below, Johnson discusses "The Yellow Wallpaper" as an example of a Gothic Allergory, noting in particular its themes of rage and regression.]

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In the autumn of 1830, shortly before Emily Dickinson's birth, her mother made an unusual request. At a time when her pregnancy-or as it was then called, her "confinement"-might have been expected to absorb her attention, Mrs. Dickinson abruptly demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Apparently dismayed by this outburst of feminine whimsy, her stern-tempered husband refused, prompting Mrs. Dickinson to her only recorded act of wifely defiance. Though "the Hon. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done," a neighbor's descendant recalled, "she went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born."

To place this incident in context, we should be note that Mrs. Dickinson, aged twenty-six, had just moved into her father-in-law's Amherst mansion and now faced the grim prospect of living with her husband's unpredictable relatives, along with the even grimmer perils of early nineteenth-century childbirth. Although Mrs. Dickinson was by most accounts a submissive, self-abnegating, rather neurasthenic woman-in short, the nineteenth-century ideal-it is tempting to read the wallpaper incident as a desperate gesture of autonomy and self-assertion. Emily Dickinson's most recent biographer, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, suggests that "The little explosion of defiance signaled fear and distress, and it was the prelude to unhappy, silent acceptance."

Though the color of Mrs. Dickinson's wallpaper went unrecorded, the anecdote forms a striking parallel to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," first published in 1892 but, like Emily Dickinson's work, under-appreciated until decades after her death. Both the domestic incident and the terrifying short story suggest the familiar Gothic themes of confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and "irrational" fear. Both include such Gothic staples as the distraught heroine, the forbidding mansion, and the powerfully repressive male antagonist. If we focus on the issue of the Gothic world and its release of imaginative power, however, the stories form a dramatic contrast. A woman of ordinary abilities, the unimaginative Mrs. Dickinson would later represent the nadir of female selfhood to her brilliant, rebellious daughter. "Mother does not care for thought," the poet remarked dryly in 1862; and by 1870, she could issue this blunt dismisal: "I never had a mother." But Dickinson surely would have admired the unnamed heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper," who willingly accepts madness over repression, refusing a life of "unhappy, silent acceptance." The poet would have especially responded to the woman's identity as a writer, and to the way in which her story adroitly and at times parodically employs Gothic conventions to present an allegory of literary imagination unbinding the social, domestic, and psychological confinements of a nineteenth-century woman writer.

The Narrator's Expression of Rage: A Reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Rather than simply labeling the narrator a madwoman at the story's close, we might view her behavior as an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown (like those actually suffered by both Dickinson and Gilman) but which represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption. This reading accounts for two elements of the story usually ignored: its emphasis upon the narrator as a writer, who is keeping a journal and putting forth her own text-"The Yellow Wallpaper"-as an antithetical triumph over the actual wallpaper that had nearly been her undoing; and its brittle, macabre, relentlessly satiric humor that suggests, in the story's earlier sections, her barely suppressed and steadily mounting anger. As in many of Poe's tales, this seemingly incongruous humor serves only to accentuate the Gothic terror of the narrator's situation.

In their pioneering study, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have examined the ways in which nineteenth-century women writers-Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre, for instance-express forbidden emotions in powerful but carefully distinguised forms. Just as that other Mrs. Rochester, Bertha Mason, may be read as a raging doppelganger whose burning of Thornfield Hall expresses her alter ego Jane Eyre's forbidden anger and allows her the Victorian redemption of blissful marriage, so are the maddening frustrations of Gilman's heroine allowed their fearsome release, resulting in her triumph over her husband in the story's unforgettable final scene. (At one point in "The Yellow Wallpaper," too, the narrator has fantasies of burning the house down.) Unlike Jane Eyre, however, Gilman's heroine identifies wholly with the raging "madness" of the double she discovers locked within the tortured arabesques of the wallpaper. Her experience should finally be viewed not as a final catastrophe but as a terrifying, necessary stage in her progress toward self-identity and personal achievement. Four years after her breakdown, Gilman is clearly allegorizing her own rage and justifying her defiant choice of art and activism over conventional feminine endeavors.

The narrative focus of "The Yellow Wallpaper" moves relentlessly inward, detailing the narrator's gradual absorption into the Gothic world of psychic chaos and imaginative freedom; but Gilman controls her heroine's deepening subjectivity through repetition, irony, parodic humor, and allegorical patterns of imagery. The two worlds of the story-the narrator's husband and sister-in-law's daylight world of masculine order and domestic routine, and her own subjective sphere of deepening imaginative insight- are kept clearly focused and distinct. Most important, Gilman reminds the reader frequently that her narrator is a habitual writer for whom "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a kind of diary, an accurate record of her turbulent inward journey. Drawing on Gilman's experience of post-partum depression and breakdown, the story is far more than an indictment of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women and an account of one woman's incipient psychosis. Gilman made her heroine a writer for purposes of art, not autobiography, and the story as a whole describes a woman attempting to save herself through her own writing, to transform what she calls "dead paper" into a vibrant Gothic world of creative dreamwork and self-revelation.

Transformation through Writing: Allegorical Patterns in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Two of the story's major structural devices are its contrasting of the husband's daylight world and his wife's nocturnal fantasy, and the religious imagery by which she highlights the liberating and redemptive qualities of her experience. When the story opens, she acknowledges that the idea of their rented summer house as a Gothic setting is laughable, a romantic fancy of the kind her husband wishes to repress. The allegorical opposition is quickly established: her husband (named John, suggesting a male prototype) is a "physician of high standing," a figure of dominance in every sense-social, domestic, intellectual, physical. He is a thoroughgoing empiricist who "scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." Throughout the story John, along with his like-named sister and housekeeper Jane, is associated with the rigidly hierarchical and imaginatively sterile daylight world that ridicules Gothic "fancies" and represses in particular the "hysterical tendency" of women. Before the story opens, the narrator had abandoned her own social responsibility of motherhood, and the object of this summer retreat is a "rest cure" (of the kind made popular by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the famous Philadelphia neurologist who treated Gilman during her own depression, and against whom the story enacts a brilliant literary revenge). That her husband exerts his tyrannical control in the guise of protectiveness makes the narrator feel all the more stifled and precludes outright defiance. As she remarks sarcastically in the opening section, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."

It is the daylight consciousness of late-Victorian America, of course, which has designed the flamboyantly hideous yellow wallpaper that the narrator initially finds so repulsive. Even John wants to repaper the room, but after his wife complains about the wallpaper, he benevolently changes his mind, since "nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies." Associating her nervous illness with her "imaginative power and habit of story-making," he forces his wife into daily confinement by four walls whose paper, described as `debased Romanesque,' is an omnipresent figuring of the artistic degeneration and psychic chaos she fears. It is here that John makes a significant error, however, as he underestimates the very imaginative power he is seeking to repress. By placing his distraught wife in a nursery, he is merely following the nineteenth-century equation of non-maternal women-that is, spinsters and "hysterics"-with helpless children. Yet he is unthinkingly allowing her the free play of imagination and abdication of social responsibility also characteristic of children. Thus as the story progresses, the narrator follows both her childlike promptings and her artistic faith in creating a Gothic alternative to the stifling daylight world of her husband and the society at large.

The story's terrific suspense derives from the narrator's increasingly uncertain fate and from the considerable obstacles blocking her path from one world to the other, not the least of which is her own self-doubt and debilitating psychic exhaustion. Near the end of the next section, she glimpses a subpattern in the wallpaper, which can be seen only "in certain lights, and not clearly then"; beneath the "silly and conspicuous front design" is a figure she describes as "strange, provoking, formless." These three adjectives suggest a notably ambivalent attitude toward her own inchoate, slowly emerging selfhood; but significantly, she notes that she is viewing the pattern by sunlight. Near the end of the next section, at sunset, she can "almost fancy" a coherent design in the wallpaper. Yet immediately after using her husband's forbidden word, she feels an emotional and psychological depletion that is emphasized by a series of brief, depressed paragraphs:

It makes me tired to follow [the pattern]. I will take a nap, I guess.

I don't know why I should write this.

I don't want to.

I don't feel able.

And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way-it is such a relief!

But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

This passage describes the narrator's spiritual nadir, and may be said to represent her transition from conscious struggle against the daylight world to her immersion in the noctural world of the unconscious-or, in other terms, from idle fancy to empowering imagination. The nature of Gilman's allegory becomes especially clear when, for the first time, the narrator watches the wallpaper by moonlight and reports with childlike glee: "There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will." Yet the transition is incomplete and puzzling. While John sleeps, she lies awake "trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately," noting that "by daylight" the pattern is a constant irritant to a "normal mind." Then comes the moment of terrified but thrilling revelation:

By moonlight-the moon shines in all night when there is a moon-...