Writing about the Yellow Wallpaper

When reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I originally thought that the late Victorian period apparently brought a great deal of resistance to patriarchy in the physical, medical treatment world. This was apparently not so, as a cursory glance at the scholarship on this short story reveals, it was originally received as not so much as a commentary on the domestic sphere, but as an interesting look at psychosis. Many of its contemporary reviews reveal an anxiety about identification with the narrator—the audience feels crazy after descending into madness with the unnamed narrator. The narrator, furthermore, is more than unnamed—it feels as though she is disembodied in the text, only finding an expression of her desire for physicality through the hallucination of another woman trapped behind the narrator. Her actions (other than eating, resting, and, when the revolutionary spirit overtakes her, writing) all seem to involve a kind of consumption until she had to “creep over him” once she has been wrapped in her delusions.

I seem always to go back to generic concerns, but I thought that the form the story took—diary entries addressed to no one, but seemingly prepared for a posterity only mentioned in passing (her child)—adds another layer of tension to this anxiety. Readers are forced to construct the narrator through a dialectical relationship. We are often asked impossible questions by the narrator: “You see he does not believe I am sick! and what can one do?” This instance is hardly rhetorical, as the narrator feels the need to follow up on her question—“ If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression…what is one to do?” We have a kind of “one-sided conversation” with this story, reflecting indeed the one-sided nature of the diagnosis which her husband appears to give her.

The narrator’s madness, I found, in a strange way also involves her becoming increasingly secretive as the story progresses. At the beginning, each entry is seemingly interrupted by some outside force—“there is sister on the stairs!” or “There comes John, and I must put this away, --he hates to have me write a word.” As the narrator becomes increasingly locked in her room, however, the sentinels either cannot control when she writes or she becomes more apt at hiding it. After the episode on the Fourth of July (another interesting moment, as the birth of the nation corresponds to the rebirth of the narrator, as it is in that entry we see the first glimmers of her identification with or affection for the wallpaper becomes obvious), she is no longer interrupted by outside influences as she attempts to write. She is in control of when her writing ends and begins, even as the second half of the story begins “I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able.”

The point at which the narrator seems to lose control of the most important facility of language—distinguishing the self from the object—is when she is most in control of how she is able to write. Can the readers expect that the narrator creeps around the room in a seemingly endless carousel of crazy and then stop in a moment of sanity and fervently pen what has transpired? Either way, what this story clearly reveals is that there exists a necessarily social element to medical science (so often talked about in contemporary society as patients and doctors struggle, almost against one another, to be mutually comprehended) which Gilman is clearly indicating in her treatment and eventual fate of the narrator.