The Yellow Wall-Paper

A story of a woman's unraveling and the archeology of her silences

Hello, fellow close reader.

As we discuss today’s Halloween reading — in my mind, one of the best short stories ever written in all of history — I invite you to pull up a copy of the story. This is one of those stories that, once you begin closely reading it, it’s nearly impossible to stop yourself from underlining every single word. It’s jam-packed with layered meanings, deep implications, and a multiplicity of potential readings.

My own copy of the story is so profoundly layered in notes, drawings, arrows, question marks, highlights, and underlines that I found myself needing a fresh copy for this week’s reading experience. As I went through my stacks, I realized that I have read this story dozens of times, and it somehow gets better every single time.

Reading the story this week also reminded me why the current trad-wife trend and narrative is so f*cking dangerous and how handing your power over to anyone is a deeply effacing enterprise. At best, you’ll find yourself limited in self expression. At worst, you’ll turn into a crawling, creeping maniac who sees visions of her own entrapment in the walls.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Key context

As you may have noticed, the narrator makes mention of “Weir Mitchell” in the text—her husband has threatened to send her to this man if she doesn’t get better soon. This is a reference to the very real twentieth-century physician, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who invented and championed the implementation of “rest cures” for people (almost always women; men were prescribed the “West cure” instead) who suffered from a range of neurasthenic diseases—or conditions of “nerve strain” that were thought, at the time, to be caused by modernizing society. (Yes, this has profound overlaps with “survival of the fittest” Darwinian thinking!)

There is a deep and rich history of psychiatric treatment at the turn of the century, and I’ll include some sources for you at the end of today’s reading. But the richest piece of context for this story is the fact that Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself had been “treated” by Mitchell with her own rest cure, for “nervous prostration” in the years before she wrote this story. Edith Wharton and Jane Addams were also prescribed rest cures by Mitchell.

“Historians now view Mitchell’s “Rest Cure” as a striking example of 19th century medical misogyny.” —Anne Stiles

This makes for a rich and delightfully maddening reading experience—one expertly crafted by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who effectively takes us on a whirlwind tour inside the mind of a woman who is slowly, and then rapidly, unraveling as she attempts to endure a limiting, months-long “rest cure,” while staying in a “queer” “colonial mansion” for the summer with her husband, John, a “physician of high standing” who “assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with [her] but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.”

“You see,” the main character and narrator tells us, “he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?”

On this most recent re-read, I was captivated by the conflation of the role of narrator, main character, and mad person into a single role.

In the story, we view all events and learn all details from a single subject. While the physicians around her do everything they can do undermine her credibility and make us question her self awareness (she’s not really sick, she doesn’t know what’s best for herself, there is no reason to suffer), as readers, we are granted a more intimate view of her than even her own husband seems willing to engage with.

We see her struggles, her questions, and her ever-increasing doubts about the diagnoses and prescriptions she has received, as well as learn about her desire to write and to be creative—both of which her physician-husband forcefully denies her as part of her rest cure.

And on top of all this, we also see her continual pain and anguish as she struggles to care for herself or spend any meaningful time with her child or spouse. We see that she clearly knew what was best for herself (space in her garden, time to write and express herself) and how those with power over her take those things away from her and, in the end, drive her mad by denying her any sense of self or security.

This seems, then, a story about the forceful silencing of the individual in the name of dominant power: The Doctor, The Husband, or The Patriarchy writ large.

""The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a story about hypocrisy, oppression, and legacy. It’s a story about patterns hidden beneath patterns. The wallpaper oppresses the narrator until she starts to see herself in it, to identify with it. She becomes the woman in the wallpaper, becomes the wallpaper itself, and then she escapes, barely—and deeply tainted. If we can learn from the story’s enduring literary idea…it’s that a half-truth is not an answer. What’s hidden is dangerous. Motives are important.” —Halle Butler

In other words: We can read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as the story of a meticulous and intentional silencing by dominant power forces (in this story, these forces are coded as patriarchal) of whatever does not fit the definitions of the dominant narrative. In this way, we can also read the story as a powerful battle between what Michel Foucault would’ve termed Reason and Unreason.

In his book Madness and Civilization, Foucault writes,

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman….As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness at the end of the eighteenth century affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archeology of that silence.

Foucault’s historical and philosophical work seems to match Gilman’s in goal: to focus not on the “monologue of reason about madness” but instead to trace “the archeology of that silence.”

By this, I mean that Gilman seems to use “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as a way to trace the intricacies of being silenced. She showcases the continual “broken dialogue” between John and the narrator, in which they arrive to the country home with a “separation as already effected,” in which the young wife and mother has already been relegated to the status of inferior (as a woman) and troublesome (as someone who believes herself to be sick, but is not actually sick, but who is prescribed a rest cure nevertheless).

Indeed, in the “serene world” of the story, the “modern man,” John, “no longer communicates” with his wife, nearly at all, except to berate her for asking for fresh air or to threaten her with increasingly damaging “treatments” for her supposed “nervousness.”

Additionally, the story continually refuses and refutes the “monologue” that John/Patriarchy represent, and instead focuses on the mind, experience, feelings, and sensations of the one who cannot be heard—the one who has been told she must not, cannot, will not be writing her story. Gilman traces, then, the “archeology” or the many layers, of the silenced woman and “of that silence.”

Our narrator has been silenced; and yet, here, we read her story, in her own words, following her as she chases patterns in paper. She is, perhaps, working to un-silence herself in the act of writing; as much as John fears her “fancy” and imagination, she uses her trampled voice in the story to push back, however she can, against those forces-that-be.

Gilman, as our author, seems to play on this tension between patterns and paper, suggesting that the very act of writing can set free the truths of experience—can give voice to whatever has been systematically silenced.

What many readers seem to love about the story is how Unreason seems to win out in the end—even causing the Ultimate Patriarch of the story (Physician, Husband, Father) to faint, a quite feminine expression of physical overwhelm, in the presence of whatever does not fit his “practical in the extreme” worldview. So let’s talk about how all those tensions get set-up in our close reading.

Three key tensions

One way to organize your thoughts after closely reading a story as deep as this one is to ask yourself what the central questions, problems, or tensions in the story seem to be. This is because the tensions of a story usually act as focal points, against which much of the action (as plot) or development (within characters) takes place.

Doing this can also help you unlock connections between plot and character, as well as setting. Rather than seeing them as separate story components that you might prefer over one another, examining the tensions in stories as key focal points across which plot and character and setting are organized can help attune your reading to the interwoven relationship between story elements.

It can point you, in other words, to developing a keener sensibility for craft.

This story simply would not work without the carefully and brilliantly crafted relationship across all three that Gilman achieves.

So let’s look at how character, plot, and setting all work together in the story.

As the story unfolds, our narrator (character) becomes increasingly enthralled (plot) with the heavily patterned, yellow wall-paper in her prescribed room (setting), in which she takes her rest cure (plot) and is confined (setting) at all times. Eventually, she (character) starts to see (plot) a woman trapped behind the bars of the paper’s pattern (setting) and keenly watches it all night long, foregoing sleep, to track the ghostly woman’s presence (plot).

By the end of the story, succumbing to a madness induced by her confinement, our narrator begins to creep and crawl along the paper—becoming herself the ghost-woman in the walls. When John finally recognizes the extent of her madness, he faints at the sight of her as she continues to “creep over him” in pursuit of the evasive, ever-shifting patterns.

Okay, so there’s the basic setup for what happens. Now, we can dig a little deeper into what these happenings seem to convey or how these story elements—character, plot, and setting—all work together to give us a story.

1. This story compellingly captures profound binaries: husband and wife, physician and patient, not sick and sick.

   1. This is our central “character” tension, as each of our main characters is heavily detailed, rendered in description and action, so that we understand their beliefs, their desires, and their emotional states.

   2. Binaries, or “something that has two parts,” work to provide a black-and-white worldview. Notice how Gilman leverages the tension of the husband-physician’s worldview, as someone who deeply believes in and lives his life within strict and practical boundaries of binaries, and the wife-narrator’s worldview, as someone who is wracked with doubt, questions, and uncertainties—with what we might call grey areas.

2. The story also investigates (and indicts) a key power dynamic of the early twentieth century: the doctor-husband (a composite of patriarchal power) and the wife-mother who believes she is sick but is not being treated as such.

   1. The story becomes a kind of “mad-woman’s guide to what being gaslit looks like,” as it carefully details for us how John gaslights her by not listening to her, dismissing her very clear (and valid!) health concerns, and preferring the science of the day to her actual lived experience.

      1. This forms our central “plot” tension, as we watch John and the narrator tug and pull against each other, and get first-row seats to the narrator’s mental unraveling as she undergoes a rest cure.

      2. Asked to summarize this story in the future, you might simply say: “it’s a story about why rest cures don’t work.” Which is exactly what Gilman intended the story to be.

3. Finally, the story examines the differences between people who believe in the strange and ghostly, and people who refuse to accept things they cannot see or understand: “John is practical in the extreme” and has “no patience” with things he cannot tangibly assert via mathematics and science. He is contrasted with his wife, this story-writer, who on the “dead paper” we read as her tale, becomes enthralled with the paper on the walls and its patterns, as she attempts to read meaning, and begins to see visions of her entrapment, in its intricate design.

   1. This is our central “setting” tension, in which the yellow wall-paper in the room becomes our most powerful focal point, and amps up the haunting elements of the “queer” summer home that John has rented for his family, for the summer.

   2. The home, and its decorative elements (the furniture, the paper, the shabby conditions therein) become key markers of the building tension in both plot (the rest cure) and character (how the woman experiences her rest cure).

Isn’t this curious? Every single one of our key story elements—character, plot, and setting—emerge from the same core tension between the Powerful and the powerless, between the Man and the wife, between the Doctor and the mad-woman.

“He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.”

What we get, in other words, is a story that meticulously surfaces not just the fact of these tensions (which I imagine most readers can readily identify with or claim experience to), but delves into the interiority of experiencing the powerless subject position.

We read the narrator’s tension within herself, as she internalizes her husband-physician’s repeated dismissals. We watch her strain herself to stay in one place, even as her entire being longs for fresh air and paper to write on. And, as the story develops, we follow her down each and every twist and turn of the pathway to losing her grip on reality, as she slowly goes mad.

As I said before, the story would not work if it were not for the intricate braiding of story elements to help us understand and believe her experience.

Ever since I was diagnosed with a chronic health condition and major depression (likely thanks to the chronic health condition), I have thought of the narrator in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” more and more often. Oh, I shudder to think what I would’ve been diagnosed with, and how I would’ve been treated, in the early twentieth century.

Then I wonder how much has really changed.

I’ve met with too many doctors like John over the last ten years. Physicians—men and women—who have told me, as John tells our narrator, “No one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control,” and who tell me it is “good for me,” to be so tired all the time, that it’s just what being a woman is like, that “the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition.”

They have told me, as I’m sure many of you have been told, that I’m really not sick at all. Bootstraps. Take your vitamins. Stop complaining.

“It is so hard to talk with John about my case because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.”

Luckily, there is little wallpaper in my home. Luckily, there are some doctors who actually will run tests and look at your bloodwork. Luckily, therapists are, at least some of them some of the time, learning to speak with us rather than at us when we seek their help.

Luckily, there are stories like “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” which I have often reached for after particularly heartbreaking appointments or test results. It was the story I reached for when I had been told by male church leadership, endowed with Patriarchal Power, that I did not know myself and they knew what was best for me. It was the story I read three times in a single evening after someone asked me if I was really sick, because I “didn’t look sick.” It was the story I reached for in the depths of my own depression this spring, when the claustrophobia of feeling trapped inside myself made my eyes swim with imaginary patterns, desperate to make sense of it all.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, and I lay there for hours “trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately,” I take deep breaths and stop looking for sense, for answers, for reason. I think of whatever my busy mind is silencing in its hurry; I think about how much the woman alone in her attic was desperate to be listened to.

Deepen your reading

1. Wear and Tear; Or, Hints for the Overworked by S. Weir Mitchell

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's grammar of ornament: stylistic tagging and the politics of figuration in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Unexpected’ | Peter Betjemann (my master’s thesis mentor) — and no paywall!

3. The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman | The Paris Review

4. The Yellow Wallpaper: a 19th-century short story of nervous exhaustion and the perils of women’s ‘rest cures | The Conversation

5. Postpartum depression in the 19th century | PubMed

6. Go rest, young man | American Psychological Association

7. Go West, You Nervous Men | via JSTOR

Now, you tell me

• What was your favorite part of the story? What did you like about it?

• What did you resist in the story? Did anything feel sticky or unsettling?

• What is the wall-paper meant to represent?

• What do you make of the ending?

• What themes or other ideas did you track?

‘Til next time, happy reading —

(And if you’re joining me to read Shirley Jackson over the next few weeks, let’s get this party started!)