The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman * * * * *
And technically, this is not a book at all. It is a short story, first published in 1892, and it is told in the first person through the secret writings of a woman who has recently had a baby and appears to be suffering from what we would now recognise as postpartum depression. What makes the story particularly disturbing is that she is surrounded by people who supposedly know what is best for her. Her husband, John, is a physician, and her brother is a physician as well. They insist that there is essentially nothing physically wrong with her, so there is no real reason for her to feel the way she does. Of course, from a modern perspective, the distinction itself is ridiculous. Mental illness does not somehow exist separately from the body, and postpartum depression is connected to enormous physical and hormonal changes after pregnancy and birth. But they do not have the understanding or even the vocabulary to recognise what is happening to her.
That was one of the most interesting aspects of the story for me. Gilman is giving a voice to an experience that women had always been having, but that the medical establishment of her time did not know how to understand. Worse, because doctors could not identify a physical disease that fitted their expectations, they could decide that there was effectively nothing wrong with the woman at all. The narrator knows that something is wrong. She knows that the treatment she is receiving is not helping her. But the men around her have more authority over her own condition than she does.
John takes his wife and baby to a large rented house in the country for the summer, supposedly so that she can recover. His sister Jennie takes care of much of the household, while a woman named Mary looks after the baby. The narrator therefore has almost nothing that she is actually expected or allowed to do. She is supposed to rest.
And that rest becomes a kind of imprisonment.
The room John chooses for them is upstairs and appears to have once been a nursery or playroom. It has damaged walls, barred windows, a bed that is fixed in place, and this absolutely horrible yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper is already peeling and damaged in places, and its pattern is ugly and confusing. At first, the narrator simply dislikes it. Then, because she has almost nothing else to occupy her mind, she begins studying it.
That gradual progression was probably my favourite part of the story because Gilman does not suddenly announce that the narrator has lost touch with reality. Instead, we watch it happen through the way she describes the wallpaper. At first it is just ugly wallpaper. Then she begins noticing peculiarities in the pattern. Then she becomes convinced that there is another pattern underneath it. Eventually she starts seeing a woman behind the wallpaper, trapped behind the outer pattern and trying to get out.
Meanwhile, the narrator is spending an enormous amount of time alone. John is frequently away because of his work, sometimes even overnight, and she has very little stimulation or meaningful human interaction. She is discouraged from writing, even though writing is clearly one of the things that gives her an outlet for her thoughts. She is separated from caring for her baby. She is told to rest and not think too much. Basically, they take a woman who is already suffering psychologically, isolate her, remove almost everything that might give her a sense of purpose or connection, and then wonder why she is getting worse.
The woman behind the wallpaper gradually becomes more real to her until the narrator begins identifying herself with this trapped figure. She sees the woman creeping behind the pattern. She imagines her getting out at certain times. Eventually the boundary between the woman she sees and the woman she is disappears almost completely. By the end, she is tearing the wallpaper from the walls in an attempt to free the woman, but she is also, in a sense, trying to free herself.
It is very strange to read because we are trapped inside her perspective while that perspective is disintegrating. At the same time, there is a terrible logic to it. The wallpaper becomes the one thing she is allowed to concentrate on, so she concentrates on it until it consumes her entire reality. The woman is trapped behind a pattern she cannot escape. The narrator is trapped inside a room, inside a treatment she does not want, inside a marriage in which her husband has medical as well as marital authority over her, and inside a society that does not recognise her as the most reliable witness to what is happening inside her own mind. Of course she sees herself in the woman behind the wallpaper.
By the end, she has descended into a complete psychological breakdown. It is disturbing enough on its own, but what makes the ending even worse is knowing that the people around her are probably still not going to understand what has happened. From their perspective, their treatment has failed because she was sicker than they realised. From ours, we can see that the treatment itself helped drive her further into illness.
There is also an important autobiographical element to the story. Gilman herself suffered a severe mental breakdown and underwent the famous “rest cure,” which required her to drastically restrict intellectual activity. She was even advised to give up writing. She later returned to intellectual and creative work instead, and The Yellow Wallpaper grew partly out of that experience. That context makes the story considerably more powerful because Gilman was not simply imagining what it might feel like to have your own understanding of your mental state dismissed. She knew what it was like to have a medical authority tell her that the things she needed to do in order to feel like herself were exactly the things she should stop doing.
I think that is ultimately what affected me most about this story. It gives a voice to an experience that women had been going through for centuries without necessarily having the language to explain it, while also showing how easily women's accounts of their own bodies and minds could be dismissed by the people who supposedly knew better.
And that aspect unfortunately does not feel nearly as historical as it should.
Reading it now, at a time when postpartum depression and postpartum mental health are being discussed so much, made the story hit differently for me. I was lucky not to experience anything remotely like the narrator's psychological collapse after having my child. But reading this still made me think about the women who did experience postpartum depression, anxiety, psychosis, or other serious mental health problems and were told that they should simply be happy because they had a healthy baby, or that they were tired, hormonal, dramatic, ungrateful, or somehow failing at motherhood.
That is what makes The Yellow Wallpaper more than simply an unsettling story about a woman becoming obsessed with some horrible wallpaper. The wallpaper is memorable because it gives a visible shape to something much larger. There is a woman trapped behind it, trying desperately to get out, while the people outside cannot see her.
More than 130 years later, that image is still far too easy to understand.
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