Review: The Yellow Wallpaper (Short Story)

Title:  The Yellow Wallpaper

Author:  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First Published in 1899

Plot Summary:
A young family goes to a country home in a small American town for the summer.  The husband is a physician who hopes that being in the country will help his wife over her currently unhappy state.  The wife has just recently given birth to a son and is probably suffering from what we would today call postpartum depression.  She feels sad and tired often, and her physician husband's cure for this is to isolate her in the attic of their rented home.  The attic has barred windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and hideously yellow wallpaper.  As time moves on, we see the woman, who narrates the story, become more and more enthralled with the wallpaper- first she sees it as ugly, then she sees patterns and shapes in it and finally she sees that there is a woman trapped behind it, trying desperately to get out.  And she decides to help this poor woman.

After reading Wish Her Safe at Home late last year and loving it, I heard a lot about this short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.  It is very short- I read it in two "longest" DailyLit installments.  This is also the first e-story I've ever read.  I highly recommend clicking the link on the title above and reading the story!

In Wish Her Safe at Home, we also had a woman narrator who is slowly going insane, but in a completely different situation.  The narrator in that story chose to go insane, and live out the life she always wanted for herself.  In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator asks her husband multiple times to let her out and to allow her to socialize and write and enjoy her life, but he refuses, citing her health as his reason.  As the narrator says, her husband "is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."  Thus, isolated as she is and suffering from what starts as a seemingly mild form of mental illness, the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper descends into insanity and no one even notices until it is too late.

I think this is a very important story when one considers women's health and the coddling way in which women were (and still often are) treated.  Here is a story of a woman who tried to stand up for herself, but was told to just relax by her dear, sweet husband who always knows and wants what is best for her.  The narrator's thoughts on the yellow wallpaper also morph and change with her mental state and her own feelings.  What begins as ugly wallpaper turns to moldy and smelly paper and then finally becomes a prison for a woman stuck behind it, yearning to break out.  And the narrator tries to help this imprisoned woman get out, in much the way she herself wants to escape her room and her life.  And much the way the narrator of Wish Her Safe at Home wants to escape.

A theme in women's fiction of the early 20th century is often escape.  You see the same happen in Kate Chopin's short story, The Awakening.  Women take extreme measures to get out of their traditional roles, often ending in madness or death or unhappiness.

Even though this story is so short, I am still counting it for the Women Unbound challenge.  I think it conveys a great deal in a very limited amount of space.  It's also a very important work for its time- it sheds light on both mental illness and the role and rights of a woman in a family.  It really makes clear just how unhappy women were in some circumstances and, just as Kate Chopin shows in the longer story The Awakening and just as Stephen Benatar did so brilliantly in his novel Wish Her Safe at Home, Gilman proves in her short story that unhappiness can lead us all to commit desperate acts.  Whether to gain love, or freedom, or just to remove herself from horrible circumstances, a woman will leave her person and personality behind to escape her reality.

I am really enjoying the Women Unbound Challenge!  It's really interesting to read women's literature, particularly, through the ages and see how much has and has not changed, and what issues are relevant at a certain time.  I'm really enjoying everyone else's reviews, too!