Women and Ghosts

I wrote this based on the full-text version of the story here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf.

Questions of mind and body abound throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” as the narrator quickly descends into mental illness that her husband denies. When the narrator’s husband tells her she is getting better, the narrator says, “Better in body perhaps—” to which John replies, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours” (5-6). He refuses to believe or discuss the idea that she is mentally ill, even as he acknowledges her unusual “temperament.” His resistance toward acknowledging her mental illness may represent a greater unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of her mental life. She is more than a physical object—more than a sexual partner and bearer of children—but her husband denies the importance of her mental life.

Even though John forbids the narrator to discuss it, her mental illness is nevertheless real. Things that are purely mental or seem purely mental can still be real, and this idea repeats at various points throughout the text. Early in the text, the narrator tells her husband that “there is something strange about the house” (1), but her husband says it’s just a draught and closes the window, signaling an unwillingness to acknowledge anything but physical causes and reality. Later, the narrator writes, “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (4), but she is doubtlessly crying about or at something, even if it isn’t tangible or expressible. Her sorrow is real even if John won’t recognize it. This tension between the narrator’s mental life and John’s denial of anything but physicality culminates in the final scene, in which John enters the room that has acted as both physical and mental prison for his wife. His wife crawls around on the floor in the guise of the woman-behind-the-wall, dissociated from herself and from him. The ghostly woman in the wallpaper has become a physical reality, a manifestation of his wife’s mental illness, and John is overcome and collapses. Throughout the story, John denies the whole self of the narrator; her mental life and writing life are ghosts to be exorcised. In the end, the narrator becomes a ghost—an incorporeal being outside of human society—but she is a ghost freed into the physical world, having escaped the imprisoning wall-paper. The narrator’s mind is gone, but her body remains, crawling around the room like an animal.

This reading is a bit simplistic in assuming a sharp demarcation between mind and body. A better read might be that the narrator is unable to integrate her mind and body because of her husband’s mechanistic, physical approach to medicine. The narrator has no way to reconcile her active mental life as a writer or her mental illness with the physical realities of her life as a woman—sex and childbearing represented by the bed, which is the only immovable piece of furniture in the room.