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
"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."
