The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is about an artist’s fetal development within a room, symbolic of her extra-embryonic membrane (amniotic sac). This room is bounded by a patterned yellow wallpaper, indicative of an “amniotic fluid.” The boundary lining the room of this “haunted house” (Gilman 576) is a translucent portal into the realm of intuition, imagination, and artistic magic. The narrator’s conflict stems from the baby-like artistic impulses, within her self, and her weakened will power to give birth to them. Hindering the gestation transformation are numerous hyper-analytical attitudes from people around her, which cause her to worry about her own state of sanity. Instead of having a fiery-red, energetic will power steeped in motherly intuition, the woman suffers from an “hysteria” of Gothic images. In analyzing these shadows of madness and imaginative creation, she attempts to abort them, because she confers way too much faith and trust in a reasonable, objective patriarchy.
The gestating artist within the narrator is prevented from crossing the birth canal of enchantment and imagination, because the masculine thinkers, allegedly taking care of her, prevent the new woman from birthing past any point of reason. Like the stages of embryo-logical development, gradually and eventually, the narrator’s umbilical tug-of-war with the mashy, mushy web of fluid uncertainty (the yellow wall paper), constructed by the egoistic Mother of Reason, forces her to split into another Being, a woman who “creeps all around the garden” (Gilman 585). This new woman is a theriomorphic entity who helps the narrator rrrip through the amniotic fluid of the Mother’s womb, thus birthing a baby Imagination. Near the end of the story, the woman splits into numerous selves. This embryo-logical process, known as differentiation, is a development of cells and tissue types. It is essential for the maturation of the developing fetus. Eventually, a rebirth liberates and actualizes the woman’s Self from the amniotic pool of merely potential creation.
The story ends with the narrator unlocking the gates to her magical imagination by tearing at the amniotic sac. However, just like during an actual birth, the embryo logical induction she traverses to get there is quite painful. The room in which she resides is an oppressive one, for her imagination has gestated to maturity and now wants out. From the over-stimulation and bombardment of reason, via her faith in her physician-husband’s reasonable opinions, which includes “an intense horror of superstition” (Gilman 576), the woman constantly allows uncertainty to stifle the birthing process of creative growth. Her husband represents the stereotypical 19th century male whose predominant characteristic was to abuse the function of consciousness, reason. This function consistently controlled many weaker individuals, especially women, to their detriment; it weakened their own wills to creative power. “I wouldn’t have a child of mine, . . . live in such a room” (Gilman 581) the narrator admits with uncertainty of the fetal imagination inherent within. This weakened power to create, when she claims, “Your exercise depends on your strength” (Gilman 577) speaks of her attitude towards general health, but also of artistic development. She’s speaking of so-called “writer’s block,” though not entirely self-imposed, it comes from too much reason. It is like a mother who is unsure of her maternal instincts, and who may contemplate abortion. Eventually the narrator grows accustomed to the womb (room), “Perhaps because of the wallpaper,” (Gilman 580), and she slowly drifts into “hysteria.”
Hysteria comes from the Greek, hustera, which translates as “womb.” Doctors of the 19th century erroneously assumed that any abnormal displays of emotion were typically feminine aberrations, and could be cured through physical rest. However, the narrator shows the reader that this is not her diagnosis. She shows a gradual development of the wallpaper as a sort-of “morphogenesis,” the development of pattern and form, and for differentiation, the development of cell and tissue types. On the surface of the membrane (amniotic fluid/wallpaper) there are “bloated curves and flourishes . . . [that] go wadding up and down in isolated columns of fatuity” (Gilman 580). The bloated curves seem to be allusions to pregnancy, a fecundity of potential creation of which the narrator cannot be anymore full; it is also the womb of gestating creativity. Pregnant with artistic potentialities, but restrained by the chains of patriarchy, the narrator struggles to birth, to free herSelf from the Demonego of Reason.
Sort of like rain washing down a pane of glass, or the multicolored sheen in a filmy soap bubble, the yellow wallpaper is actually a slippery sheath separating the narrator’s ego from her subconscious, imaginative creativity. The images that she can see in the wallpaper are coming from her breeeathing subconscious; they are a developing fetus in its developmental stages of growth. For instance, when an actual pregnant woman sees an image of her developing fetus through a sonogram, she may see an alien-like creature with a reptilian spine, and huge bug-eyes. Yet, if the expecting mother could not “see” or “envision,” within her own magical imagination, what that little “alien’s” potential maturation will be upon birth, then she would be uncertain of whether to abort before it is born.
An abortion of imaginative potential is the criminality of reason. Reason can be just as bad as a lack of magic, or an imagination of darkness. Readers should discern that there is nothing wrong with this expository of her intuition, her magical imagination. Every great artist ought agree, when the material world is overcome, the spiritual world takes hold, a new realm of mysticism is invoked. The problem with the narrator is her distrust in her own imaginative powers; she places too much trust in the world of materiality and reason. Furthermore, she has no will power to direct and control her own imagination. One key factor to being an artist is the power of the Will. If one allows the imagination to passively exist, without any control via the Will, then the imagination could dwell upon various sorts of negativity and darkness. “I wish John would take me away from here!” (Gilman 581). She summons John, because he personifies reason, and reason is a safe and secure place, away from the penumbra that takes umbrage on the artist with a weakened will.
The narrator is deceived into thinking reason will save her from this slippery slope into “hysteria.” Reason tells her that the imaginative realm is foolish; furthermore, the reasonable doctor tells her not to write, nor to create; she tries to convince herself into ignoring her imagination. But, she can’t; those images on the wall are dying to be born. To make matters worse, she believes the patriarchal authorities of reason, for she has “spent hours in trying to analyze” (Gilman 584) the paranormality in the wallpaper, for “It strikes me . . . as a scientific hypothesis” (Gilman 583) that the images are a psychosis. The doctor is a sort-of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who assists people in committing suicide; he provides the yellow toadstool fungal treatment of Göetia; otherwise, knows as black magic. He doesn’t know to give her the creamy succulent mushroom of angelic magic, whereupon she shall be reborn. As a dutiful wife, though, she puts all her faith and identity in her husband, (feminists would argue the sole and central struggle in the 19th century). As an artist, though, she is going mad for desire to emanate her imagination.
The narrator, as well as the author, could have saved themselves from “those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 577), if they realized courage is all one needs in embracing the will to internalized power. There is no concept of “artistic sin,” except the abortion of a work in progress. In the world of the magical imagination, freedom from materiality is what liberates the soul, and hands over control to the artist magician. If the narrator only had a friendly, kindred spirit inform her that the only cure for this diseased hyper-rationality is the magical imagination, then she might have been spared the dread of the “curves [that] suddenly commit suicide . . . [that] plunge off . . . [and] destroy themselves” (Gilman 577). The yellow wallpaper is a weakened, or jaundiced will power to create.
Everything in the end is destroyed. The Demiurge (God) giveth and the Demiurge taketh away. There is no point in fearing this inevitable “truth.” If monsters reveal their ghoulish grins and sinister snickers, then one should allow them birth, then redirect the will into a transformation of light-blasting angels. It’s as simple as that last sentence. Demons change into angels; now, if one has difficulty understanding this process, it stems from too much dissection. Every human being witnesses these demonic forms within, in one form or another, for they are Archetypal forces born in the psyche. If anyone denies this fact, they are lying to themselves, and one ought not to trust them until they admit, for in them reason has elicited its own black magic superstition; they have been fooled into THINKING demons are not real. It is as Goethe once masterfully put it, “We are never deceived, but we deceive ourselves.” If the narrator only learned to watch the contorted faces, listen to their echoing screams, then redirect her will, she would have seen they eventually subside, for they too are fated to destruction. Once one realizes this she WILL become a magician, and WILL not be not afraid, and her WILL to creative power WILL grow. Doth thou seest how the WILL of the magician determines the course of the future?
Of course, the rationalist will reveal another deception that mental institutions are full of deranged people, and that “hysteria” was a legitimate disease. One conjecture asks, “who here is really insane?” The doctor who concocted the notion eventually recanted his postulations after reading Gilman’s story. The doctor was practicing a subtle voodoo. Even though he wore a suit and tie, and spoke the great line, he was practicing Göetia.
Yeah, though she walks through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the narrator should fear and WILL no evil, for she is the shining light that illuminates the darkness. Yet, if she continues to exclusively listen to reason, which deceives her into thinking the images are not real, then she will distrust her own magical powers, and eventually spray a confetti of flesh along that jaundiced wall. Mostly, this confusion stems from a persistent uncertainty, a constantly second guessing of one’s intuitions. Dr. C. G. Jung once stated that “if you don’t take a hint from life, it will eventually hit you.” He also used a term from the Greek, enantiodromia, which is the eventual lashing out of one’s shadow, or dark forces, caused by the suppression of a weakened function of consciousness; in the narrator’s case, reason suppressed intuition. A question to ask the skeptical rationalist is that if the images in the wallpaper are not real, then why are they present and affecting the woman’s Reality, hmm?
As a recurring motif in Gothic Romanticism, the “mad woman in the attic” is also seen in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, in Bertha Mason Rochester. Similarly, in Bronte’s story, the woman lashes out of the room, yet in a more heroic manner. She actually attempts to kill her captive, Mr. Rochester, her husband, by setting his bed and room on fire. The Gothic tradition is a wonderful exploration of this conflict twixt reason and the intuitive, magical imagination. Various rationalists wholly distrust the Gothic tradition or Dark Romanticism, because they accuse those writers of “triteness,” their poor use of language and adolescent images of gore. However, these so called scholars do not realize their own guilt of committing the same slow homicide, and eventually suicide. As the doctor and the husband in Gilman’s story, they atrophy their own magical imaginations by teaching a distrust for such “intense horror[s] of superstition” (Gilman 576). Furthermore, they may assume any interest in this “genre” is suspect, because it may seem sensationalistic. Condemning any student with an interest in the Gothic is akin to condemning an FBI profiler of studying serial snipers; or it is akin to condemning priests who study Demonology.
Well, ironically, horrible superstition is what keeps many people sane; that’s why there is such a vast market for that type of fiction (Gothic Romanticism). It is more than a commercial art full of trite, horrific language and adolescent images of gore. The Goth-Romantic is a psychotherapeutic remedy for people like the artistic narrator in Gilman’s story. By showing others that one may sanely experience those paranormal images in the wallpaper, she is telling people, with a kindred spirit, to not be afraid. The wall paper is merely an amniotic membrane separating the individual from the uncertainty of one’s imagination, which ultimately is the darkness of the mother’s womb of pure Creation. Ultimately, Gilman shows artists, especially women, how to birth themselves from the demonegos of the rational, material world, and how to give life to an emanation from within. While in the womb, a fetus grows, but it is the baby’s will that decides, in accordance with the mother’s pushing forces of power, that emanate the final masterpiece into the world.

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

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