Résumé : une jeune femme mariée est isolée dans une maison de campagne de location avec sa belle-sœur Jenny qui fait le ménage pendant que John son mari, médecin, travaille. Ce dernier passe souvent ses nuits en ville...Elle ne se sent pas bien du tout et a tenté de faire comprendre à son époux qu'elle était en pleine dépression mais ce dernier lui assure qu'un peu de self-control et de bon air suffiront à lui faire du bien. Mais oui bien sûr. En fait, elle est en plein post-partum mais je ne l'avais pas compris malgré l'évocation d'un enfant absent de l'histoire, je l'ai lu plus tard.
Elle voudrait inviter des amis à venir la voir mais il le lui interdit car selon lui, cela l'exciterait nerveusement et nuirait à sa santé. Il est médecin, il sait ce qu'il dit. Elle a beau le supplier de partir de cette maison, il lui répond qu'il a déjà payé la location et que ce serait trop compliqué d'emménager ailleurs et qu'il ne reste que trois semaines. Alors elle passe ses journées à rester couchée dans sa chambre dont elle déteste le papier-peint jaune, quand elle n'écrit pas en cachette. Oui, parce que vous l'aurez deviné aussi, elle n'a pas le droit d'écrire non plus : c'est une source d'excitation nerveuse, l'écriture.
À force de rester à déprimer dans son lit, elle fait une fixation sur ce papier jaune et commence à imaginer qu'une femme y est retenue prisonnière voire plusieurs. Elle rentre dans des délires psychotiques et paranoïaques : elle soupçonne John et Jenny d'entretenir des relations suspectes avec la femme du papier peint.
À la fin de la nouvelle, elle s'identifie à la femme du papier peint, s'enferme afin de déchirer le papier peint et lorsque son mari désespéré parvient à rentrer (elle avait jeté la clef), elle le considère comme un inconnu et le prévient qu'elle a arraché tout le papier peint et qu'on ne pourra plus la retenir prisonnière désormais.
Citation : "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."
Critique : Trop long mais c'est l'histoire qui commande cette sensation de longue agonie : nous sommes dans la conscience souffrante de la narratrice, on agonise comme elle et on se sent prisonnier de cette nouvelle uniquement parce qu'on veut savoir la fin.
On ne s'attache pas du tout à cette héroïne fragile finalement si passive, si soumise, malgré ses velléités à raisonner par elle-même pour elle-même. Elle passe pour une "faible" (au début) et une "folle" (à la fin), ce qui bien sûr est fait exprès dans ce contexte d'oppression voire de répression envers les femmes mais nous sommes soulagés de constater qu'aujourd'hui, nous ne sommes plus confrontés à ce genre de problème même si certains préjugés subsistent.
On apprécie toutefois l'idée de la métaphore entre l'emprisonnement mental d'une femme séquestrée et celle d'un personnage imaginaire bloquée dans un papier-peint. C'est dans cette métaphore que réside tout l'intérêt de la nouvelle aujourd'hui à mon sens.
La nouvelle m'a fait également penser à l'ambiance de n'importe quelle nouvelle fantastique d'Edgar Allan Poe où un narrateur devient fou. Chez Poe, le héros et narrateur est plutôt toujours un homme romantique et hypersensible. Ce que je veux dire par là c'est que l'analyse d'un point de vue féministe n'a pas cours dans les critiques de Poe mais tout simplement l'analyse des personnes hypersensibles, au tempérament mélancolique, inclines à la dépression. Il me semble qu'autrefois on attribuait surtout aux femmes ces tendances et qu'aujourd'hui, au-delà de la question des genres, il faut s'interroger sur la place possible des âmes sensibles dans notre monde auxquelles je pense appartenir aussi. Est-ce que la voie de la création est leur unique moyen d'expression ? Il semble que oui. À mon plus grand désarroi car je n'ai toujours pas écrit de grande nouvelle ou de grand roman à mon âge (36 ans).
Plus bas, est évoqué plutôt Lovecraft.
Lien intertextuel : C'est marrant de constater que la narratrice fait une fixation sur un papier-peint et ses horribles motifs quand Henry James, quatre ans plus tard, publie en 1896 The Figure in the Carpet où le narrateur fait une fixation mentale qui rend fou à partir d'une métaphore sur le motif complexe d'un tapis persan.
Cela pourrait devenir un exercice de style pour les élèves étudiant la nouvelle fantastique dont la consigne serait la suivante :
"Un narrateur est intrigué par un motif bizarre sur un mobilier quelconque de son domicile (papier-peint, tapis, plafond, cheminée, porte, fenêtre, etc.) et devient progressivement fou avant de commettre quelque chose de complètement irascible et irréversible. Racontez l'histoire à la première personne, aux temps du récit."
Contexte historique : il s'agit d'une autofiction de l'auteur, féministe active et sociologue de son époque en plus d'être écrivain. Elle a vécu un peu tout ça (la dépression) avant de quitter son mari. Charlotte Perkins Gilman est une féministe américaine qui voulait dénoncer les "rest cure" administrées aux femmes de son époque (fin du dix-neuvième siècle).
Son but en écrivant cette nouvelle n'était pas de rendre le lecteur fou (et en l'occurence, la lectrice potentielle) mais de la faire réfléchir afin d'éviter la folie comme l'explique le commentaire ci-dessous de l'auteur de l'article de Wikipedia.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman circa 1900
Gilman's interpretation
Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.[6]
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time women’s rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance for them. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few rights.[6]
Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways".[7] She had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.
After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response.
She added that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.[8]
"Martha J. Cutter in her article "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction" discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women" (Cutter 1). Gilman's works challenge the social construction of women in patriarchal medical discourse by displaying women as "silent, powerless, and passive" who refuse treatment. At the time in which her works take place, between 1840 and 1890, women were exceedingly defined as lesser than—sickly and weak. In this time period it was thought that "hysteria" (a disease stereotypically more common in women) was a result of too much education. It was understood that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. In fact, many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as the result of a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman is one who is "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician" (Cutter 3). A hysterical woman is one who craves power and in order for her to be treated for her hysteria, she must submit to her physician whose role is to undermine her desires. Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to "tame" them and basically keep them imprisoned. Treatments such as this were a way of ridding women of rebelliousness and forcing them to conform to social roles. In her works Gilman highlights that the harm caused by these types of treatments for woman i.e. "the rest cure" has to do with the way in which her voice is silenced. Paula Treichler explains "In this story diagnosis 'is powerful and public...It is a male voice that...imposes controls on the female narrator and dictates how she is to perceive and talk about the world.' Diagnosis covertly functions to empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patient's". The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to participate in her own treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says. The male voice is the one in which forces controls on the female and decides how she is allowed to perceive and speak about the world around her".
Other interpretations
"The Yellow Wallpaper" sometimes is referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness.[13] Alan Ryan, for example, introduced the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not."[14] Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) that "The Yellow Wall Paper rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined." [15]
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her book Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper", concludes that "the story was a cri de coeur against [Gilman's first husband, artist Charles Walter] Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded." Gilman was attempting to deflect blame to protect Gilman's daughter Katharine and her step-mother, Gilman's friend Grace Channing.[16]
Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley used the story as a reference and a metaphor for the situation of women in the church in his sermon at the ordination of the first women priests in Australia on 7 March 1992 in St George's Cathedral, Perth.[17]
Sari Edelstein has argued that The Yellow Wallpaper is an allegory for Gilman's hatred of the emerging yellow journalism. Having created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy headlines. Gilman was often scandalised in the media and resented the sensationalism of the media. The relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper within the story parallels Gilman's relationship to the press. The narrator describes the wallpaper as having "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin". Edelstein argues that given Gilman’s distaste for the Yellow Press, this can also be seen as a description of tabloid newspapers of the day.[18]
Quotations by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time women’s rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance for them. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few rights.[6]
Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways".[7] She had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.
After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response.
She added that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.[8]
"Martha J. Cutter in her article "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction" discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women" (Cutter 1). Gilman's works challenge the social construction of women in patriarchal medical discourse by displaying women as "silent, powerless, and passive" who refuse treatment. At the time in which her works take place, between 1840 and 1890, women were exceedingly defined as lesser than—sickly and weak. In this time period it was thought that "hysteria" (a disease stereotypically more common in women) was a result of too much education. It was understood that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. In fact, many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as the result of a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman is one who is "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician" (Cutter 3). A hysterical woman is one who craves power and in order for her to be treated for her hysteria, she must submit to her physician whose role is to undermine her desires. Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to "tame" them and basically keep them imprisoned. Treatments such as this were a way of ridding women of rebelliousness and forcing them to conform to social roles. In her works Gilman highlights that the harm caused by these types of treatments for woman i.e. "the rest cure" has to do with the way in which her voice is silenced. Paula Treichler explains "In this story diagnosis 'is powerful and public...It is a male voice that...imposes controls on the female narrator and dictates how she is to perceive and talk about the world.' Diagnosis covertly functions to empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patient's". The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to participate in her own treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says. The male voice is the one in which forces controls on the female and decides how she is allowed to perceive and speak about the world around her".
Other interpretations
"The Yellow Wallpaper" sometimes is referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness.[13] Alan Ryan, for example, introduced the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not."[14] Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) that "The Yellow Wall Paper rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined." [15]
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her book Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper", concludes that "the story was a cri de coeur against [Gilman's first husband, artist Charles Walter] Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded." Gilman was attempting to deflect blame to protect Gilman's daughter Katharine and her step-mother, Gilman's friend Grace Channing.[16]
Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley used the story as a reference and a metaphor for the situation of women in the church in his sermon at the ordination of the first women priests in Australia on 7 March 1992 in St George's Cathedral, Perth.[17]
Sari Edelstein has argued that The Yellow Wallpaper is an allegory for Gilman's hatred of the emerging yellow journalism. Having created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy headlines. Gilman was often scandalised in the media and resented the sensationalism of the media. The relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper within the story parallels Gilman's relationship to the press. The narrator describes the wallpaper as having "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin". Edelstein argues that given Gilman’s distaste for the Yellow Press, this can also be seen as a description of tabloid newspapers of the day.[18]
"The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses."
"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it."
"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver."
"There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago."
"To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind."
"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it."
"The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain – the hardest and most iron-bound as well."
"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."
"When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one." (from her suicide note).
"Here she comes, running out of prison and off the pedestal; chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman."
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