The Yellow Wall-Paper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper’ is written as a journal which tells the secrets of a woman who fails to gain joy from marriage and motherhood, and is sentenced to rest in the country to cure her. She longs to write but she is forbidden and confined to her bedroom where she stares day after day at the yellow wallpaper – a pattern that symbolises her own imprisonment. The text depicts a woman decent into insanity, but also demonstrates the importance of freedom and empowerment to women.

Despite it being only 20 pages long this text is truly scary. It tackles issues such as patriarchy, post-natal depression, the position of woman in society in general and how they are silenced. Due to the first-person narrative, the story becomes incredibly claustrophobic, and the reader becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and its significance. Perkins Gilman masterly blends the techniques of her narrative and writing style, which is parallel to how the protagonist’s mind is disoriented by the wallpaper. Upon reading this text I can see how some people may feel the narrator (Jane) is weak and at the mercy of her husband who is a physician. However I see that the forefront of the text is how Jane rebels everything, e.g. she is discouraged from writing, but she shyly hides her writing from everyone and acts as her saviour. Her biggest act of defiance is when she scrapes away the yellow wallpaper from the walls and oddly begins crawling around the room and terrifying her husband who now can no longer control her.

What is pivotal to understanding the protagonist ‘Jane’ is understanding her position in society at the time. Published in 1892, at the time many medical professionals were obsessed with ‘rest cure’ for women and depriving them of any stimulation, which thereby limited the role of women even more in the patriarchal society. Perkins Gilman explicitly demonstrates the havoc and effect this leaves on people and how it destroys their sense of self. Jane’s madness is her only form of escape from her oppressive and controlling husband and there she is free.

Without spoiling the ending, the way Perkins Gilman writes an end so tragic yet so liberating, evidence the paradox with which women were confined to within the 19th century.