Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most “over-interpreted” works of fiction in the last few decades. Writing is here figured as a mode of activity–which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men). On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband’s orders. On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined–this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness. Two orders of writing are figured in the novella. Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping. In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and “creeps” “smoothly” across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground. The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper’s intricate web and is seen “creeping up and down” in the “dark grape arbors” of the courtyard. She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure–not necessarily a “woman,” but rather a “shape… like a woman”–entangled in the radiating network of festooning fronds and vines. Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her. She is prohibited from writing she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him. John prescribes for the narrator a “rest cure” that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell. The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer. What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration. The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown. Above all, she must not write.įive years later, Gilman published the novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the “cure” to female depression and hysteria that he advocated. The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated. Bed rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced. She must submit unquestioningly to the physician’s will and obey all of his prescriptions - one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady. He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body’s habits. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL. An Analysis of THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
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