The Yellow Wallpaper A Study Of Insanity

Essay, Research Paper

For the women in the twentieth century today, who have more freedom than before and have not experienced the depressive life that Gilman lived from1860 to 1935, it is difficult to understand Gilman’s situation and understand the significance of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman’s original purpose of writing the story was to have gained personal satisfaction if Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might change his treatment after reading the story. However, as Ann L. Jane suggests, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is “the best crafted of her fiction: a genuine literary piece?the most directly, obviously, self-consciously autobiographical of all her stories” (Introduction xvi). More importantly, Gilman says in her article in The Forerunner, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (20). Therefore, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a revelation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own emotions.

When the story first came out in 1892 the critics considered “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a portrayal of female insanity rather than a story that reveals an aspect of society. In The Transcript, a physician from Boston wrote, “Such a story ought not to be written?it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it” (Gilman 19). This statement implies that any woman that would write something to show opposition to the dominant social values must have been insane. In Gilman’s time setting “The ideal woman was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good humored”

(Lane, To Herland 109). Those women who rejected this role and pursued intellectual enlightenment and freedom would be scoffed, alienated, and even punished. This is exactly what Gilman experienced when she tried to express her desire for independence.

Gilman expressed her emotional and psychological feelings of rejection from society for thinking freely in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is a reaction to the fact that it was against the grain of society for women to pursue intellectual freedom or a career in the late1800’s. Her taking Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure” was the result of the pressures of these prevalent social values. As Gilman came from a family of well known feminists and revolutionaries, it is without a doubt that she grew up with the idea that she had the right to be treated as anyone, whether man or woman. Not only did this strong background affect her viewpoint about things, it also affected her relations with her husband and what role she would play in that relationship. From the beginning of her marriage, she struggled with the idea of conforming to the domestic model for women. Upon repeated proposals from Stetson, her husband, Gilman tried to “lay bare her torments and reservations” about getting married (Lane, To Herland 85). She claimed that “her thoughts, her acts, her whole life would be centered on husband and children. To do the work she needed to do, she must be free” (Lane, To Herland 85). Gilman was so scared of this idea because she loved her work and she loved freedom, though she also loved her husband very much.

“After a long period of uncertainty and vacillation” she married Charles Stetson at 24 (Lane, Introduction x). Less than a year later, however, “feelings of ?nervous exhaustion’ immediately descended upon Gilman, and she became a ?mental wreck’” (Ceplair 17). In that

period of time, she wrote many articles on “women caught between families and careers and the need for women to have work as well as love” (Ceplair 19). The stress that Gilman was under of rejecting the “domestic model” of women led to her breakdown and caused her to meet Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. She attempted to express the tensions she felt her work, her husband, and her child in her writing. She did her best to fight against the depression but finally “she collapsed utterly in April 1886″ (Ceplair 19), forcing her to turn to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a nationally renowned neurologist in women’s nervous diseases. He told Gilman that “she was suffering from neurasthenia, or exhaustion of the nerves” the diagnosis required his renowned “rest cure” (Lane, To Herland 115). The treatment required for the cure involved “1) extended and total bed rest; 2) isolation from family and familiar surroundings?” (Lane, To Herland 116). The treatment was basically a version of how to be submissive and domestic according to the dominant social values outside of the sanitarium.

After being treated for a month Gilman was sent home and was told to “live as domestic a life as possible?and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”(Lane, To Herland 121). Having a strong love for her work and being a free thinker and writer, Gilman would naturally consider this way of treatment a cruel punishment. In her diary she wrote, “I went home, followed those directions rigidly for a month and came perilously near to losing my mind” (Lane, To Herland 121).

In the late 1800’s women did not have the opportunity to have both a career and their families. They have to give up their families if they waned to pursue a career. Despite the great

controversy she created, Gilman decided to choose her work over her family when she divorced her husband in 1887 and moved to California. A few years later, she gave her child to her ex-husband in order to lecture across the country. In1890 she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in reaction to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure”. In her “Why I wrote ?The Yellow Wallpaper’?” in The Forerunner, Gilman portrays the “years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown” and goes on to talk about the doctor who treated her and how in reaction to treatment had “sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad” (Gilman 19, 20). And she says, “the best result?years later I was told the treat specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading ?The Yellow Wallpaper’” (Gilman 20). Despite what Gilman said, we can sense a tone of this work being close to her emotional and psychological reality.

Many studies have been carried out to find what Gilman’s intent was in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Joanne Karpinski says, “one theme that seems to run through all her works?is a desire for order and coherence in lived experience” (3) while Lane suggests, “(it) is an intensely personal examination of Gilman’s private nightmare” (To Herland 127). This implies that she wrote this story to sort through her emotions and fears in her own life. If her revenge for Dr. Mitchell is part of the reason in writing this work, it is also true that her creation of this story allows her to reveal her emotional and psychological state of mind. Although “The Yellow Wallpaper” is just a story that is most probably fictitious, there are amazing similarities between Gilman’s real life experience and what is depicted in the story. Lane describes one of Gilman’s diary entry where she wrote, “I made a rag baby?hung it on the doorknob and played with it. I

would crawl into remote closets and under beds to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress” (To Herland 121). This is amazingly similar to what is described of the narrator in the story, who crawls and creeps in the corners of the room.

Gilman showed her emotions in the story and tried to discover “what happens to our lives if we let others run them for us” (Lane, introduction xviii). The attempts to discover was hard for her “(it) must have haunted Gilman all her life because it answered the question: what if she had not fled her husband and renounced the most advance psychiatric advice of her time?” (Lane, Introduction xviii). “The Yellow wallpaper” is a testament to Gilman’s own life experience. We can feel the tough decisions she made and how those decisions affected her emotionally as Lane puts it, “perhaps the emotional truth and intensity of ?The yellow Wallpaper’ drained her; perhaps it frightened her” (To Herland 127). Gilman delved deep into her emotions and feelings in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and that is why it is Gilman’s best-know work today (Charters 318).

Bibliography

Berkin, Ruth Carol. “Self-Images: Childhood and Adolescence.” Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Joanne Karpinski. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Ceplair, Larry. “The Early Years.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-fiction Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 5-19.

Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (Compact Fifth Edition). Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, 1999 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’?” The Forerunner (Oct. 1913): 19-20.

Karpinski, Joanne B. Introduction. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Lane, Ann J. Introduction. “The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. X-xviii.

Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Penguin, 1990.