The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1892 in The New England Magazine; many literature scholars consider it a classic of feminist literature. The story contains a critique of the restrictive and counterproductive “rest cure,” invented by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell and popular in the late 1800s, as well as a comment on patriarchy, marriage, gender roles, and the female voice.

The stream of consciousness style of narration as well as the structure of the story allows the reader access to the inner world of the narrator, a woman whose post-childbirth experience follows the emotional and psychological path of Gilman’s own episode of postpartum depression. Through the ten diary entries that make up the whole of the short story, the reader experiences the narrator’s mental breakdown alongside the narrator herself. The diary entries and sentence lengths change and transform as the story progresses, reflecting the narrator’s rapid decline into madness.

The narrator has been prescribed a version of the rest cure by her physician husband John, so she writes from the confinement of her bedroom in a rented country house where they are spending the summer with their young baby and two members of staff. The literary framework of the diary entries allows the reader entry into the narrator’s private musings. The intimacy of this arrangement enables the reader to understand the narrator on a very personal level, as the narrator reveals her secrets only to her diary. This private written voice brings authenticity to the voice of the narrator. As she becomes increasingly unstable, her narration becomes unreliable, and this unreliable narration is all the more powerful for her genuine fluctuations in awareness and perception.

Early in the short story, the narrator characterizes her relationship with her husband John as traditional for this era. Gender roles at this time meant that many women had no voice in their marriages, even in matters of their own health, and the narrator herself has no agency, neither in her current weakened state nor in her marriage in general. John is a physician, and he subscribes to Dr. Weir Mitchell’s notions of the rest cure as a suitable treatment for so-called nervous illnesses, so the narrator spends most of her time alone and idle. The lack of stimulation and the condition of being infantilized appears to accelerate the narrator’s condition, hastening her mental collapse despite her claims that more interaction with others and with her own ambitions as a writer will have a healing effect.

Gilman’s use of setting enhances the suspenseful tone of the story. The isolated mansion, surrounded by gardens and trees, appears hospitable and cozy, but the descriptions of the bedroom in which the narrator is imprisoned are deliberately ambiguous. The bedroom was once a nursery, according to the narrator, who misinterprets the bars on the windows as a safety feature for young children. However, the rings on the walls and the damage done to the furniture suggests that the room was not previously inhabited by children, but by someone else who suffered from mental illness and fought against his or her imprisonment. The narrator makes no note of John’s surprise at these details of the bedroom, and he insists that the narrator spend her days here. While he may have selected this home specifically because it has structures in place for the mentally ill, it is possible that he ironically lacks awareness of these details. The ambiguity of this issue intensifies the irony of the situation: John is a doctor and should know what will help his wife feel better, yet he inadvertently makes her condition worse.

At several points throughout the story, the narrator reveals her own internal conflicts between herself and her diminishing state of mind. She also struggles with the concept of the self, particularly in who she thinks she should be in John’s eyes. This tension is constant, and the narrator knows that she is struggling to maintain her grip on reality, but her concerns go unacknowledged. John interprets her explanations as evidence that she is choosing to be unwell, minimizing his wife’s problems as if she is unable to know her own mind. The narrator’s attempts to rationalize John’s patronizing dismissals of her statements are also well-documented in her diary, which indicates that on some level, she desires to protect her husband from criticism, as befits a wife of this day and age. Eventually, the outcome becomes clear, and she unravels completely, submitting to the madness that creeps up on her like she creeps in her bedroom, searching for the woman in the wallpaper.

Many scholars assert that this short story has its origins in autobiographical details. Gilman herself was prescribed the rest cure by Dr. Weir Mitchell as treatment for her postpartum depression, and her mental health problems worsened as a result, just as the rest cure’s isolation and infantilization exacerbated the narrator’s condition. According to literary scholars, Gilman sent this story to Dr. Weir Mitchell. After he read the story, he apparently never prescribed the rest cure again.