Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

Who was Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a New Woman ( women that have independent thinking, want to be free from the patriarchal constraints and domesticity, and the constrains of marriage and motherhood, and want to go into the path of self-fulfillment)from the 19th century. She had access to a high education, which allowed her to be one of the best feminist, intellectual and writers of the United States in the late 19th century and beginning of 20th century, until her death in 1935, in which she was suffering from cancer and decided to end her own life.

·Following her relocation to California, Perkins started composing poems and stories for different magazines when she moved to California. Among her works, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” which appeared in The New England Magazine in January 1892, excelled  for its realistic first-person depiction of the mental decline of a young wife who is physically cared for but emotionally neglected.

·An important work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman was Women and Economics, published in 1898, a manifesto that received widespread attention and was translated into seven languages. She examined with sharp intelligence a great deal of the idealized convention surrounding notions of womanhood and motherhood, in a radical appeal for women’s economic independence.

-What is "The Yellow Wallpaper" about?

The story presents an unnamed female narrator who is taken by John (her husband and a doctor). He decides to take her to a colonial mansion so she can recover from her diagnosis of a “temporary nervous disorder” after their daughter’s birth. Although she’s not allowed to write in the haunted colonial mansion, she does so secretly. She writes secretly and is confined to a bedroom in the attic of the house. The attic in which she resides has barred windows, a heavy bed fixed to the floor, and yellow wallpaper that is badly damaged and truly disturbing, displaying a strange and unusual pattern. This wallpaper full of strange and missing parts, hinting at either neglect or violence happening, becomes the full obsession of the female narrator. Though the wallpaper is ugly, it becomes captivating to the woman as the weeks go by. Gradually, the woman starts to perceive a woman creeping and imprisoned within the wallpaper, until she decides to free her. 

·The story strongly relates to Charlotte Gilman's personal life: She suffered from postpartum depression after giving birth to her daughter, and the doctor told her that the remedy was to dismiss any kind of intellectual activity for her mind and body, and to be all the time resting and eating. However, Gilman started to recover from her postpartum depression when she started to disobey her doctor and also her husband, who was also endorsing this kind of remedy upon his wife. Gilman decided to take her daughter and move to the West Coast (California). 

-What or who makes the woman go crazy in "The Yellow Wallpaper"? We see her slow decline into madness, and she sees herself as not recovering from the situation she is going through. She has no control over her own life as she cannot have freedom, she cannot write, she’s separated from her baby, and her husband tells her what she can or cannot do. First, she resigns herself into the "rest cure" that is diagnosed by her huband. Then, as she is isolated in the attic, she gets obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and its strange but fascinating design and pattern. She starts having allucinations by looking at it and starts seeing a female prisoner in the wallpaper that she decides she has to set free. This obsession leads her into becoming rebellious and locking herself into the bedroom and creeping around the room like an animal.  When the husband enters the room, at the sight of seeing his wife acting in this manner, he faints and she steps over his fainted body as if she was an animal. Stepping over her husband's body has a great significance, as it means that she finally is able to free herself physically, mentally and emotionally from her husband/doctor, who represents the two patriarchal instittuions that decided to apply to women the "rest cure". As it is seen throgout the personal journey of the protagonist of the story, what was actually driving women at the time crazy was this physical and mental imprisonment from pursuing any intellectual activities.