I kept on creeping just the same
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Today we’re looking at “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman (1860-1935). Like her coeval writers, Pauline E. Hopkins and Charles Chestnutt, and her aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe, Perkins Gilman wrote for a social purpose. In this case, her writing served to free women from the “rest cure,” a then-popular treatment for post-partum depression.
No, she was not trying to relieve new mothers from rest. God knows they need it. She was trying to free them from confinement and isolation.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” recounts, through the literary device of the diary, the mental deterioration of a young woman who has been confined for her health following pregnancy. Perkins Gilman wrote this story in two days in 1890, and according to the essay she published, “Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” it was a semi-autobiographical account. She writes:
For many years, I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.” This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near to the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
The “noted specialist” she mentions above was the neurologist Dr S. Weir Mitchell, who prescribed his rest cure for women with hysteria, depression (melancholia), and post-partum psychosis. Perkins Gilman writes elsewhere that she suffered from depression her entire life, but during pregnancy and after the birth of her daughter in 1885, her symptoms worsened to include psychosis or as she called it, a nervous disorder.
After three months, she gave up the “cure” and moved with her daughter to Pasadena, where she found the rest and community that she needed to recover. She became a noted feminist (or as she would prefer us say, humanist) and suffragist, and a prolific writer (“twenty-one thousand words per month”). And she wrote this story to bring attention to the dangers of lockdown — sending a copy to Dr Mitchell, who according to her, stopped the practice.
The story has only 4 pages — go take a look or listen:
It begins somewhat conventionally, with a tinge of the Gothic, so we are tipped off that this is not a sunny, summer holiday:
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Imagine you are reading this story without the knowledge that the narrator is suffering a mental breakdown. She’s leading us into her terror by the nose. But, when you re-read this story — highly recommend a second round! — some clues and notes tip you off: first of all, where is she? Is it an ancestral hall? A colonial mansion? A hereditary estate? A haunted house? Why does this setting require so many descriptors, and then, why does she take all these names for her location away with “that would be asking too much”? On the first line she is “mere ordinary people” then in the third: she “proudly declares” her assessment. The house is both too good for her and not enough.
This is no house. Her husband, John would say that she has let her fancy get away with her, again. But we will soon learn that he is lying. As in an asylum, the room she has been confined in for hours a day during that summer has bars on the windows and rings in the walls. The furniture is bolted down.
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see, he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
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—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
Her husband John acts on his ideas about how to help her — tonics, foods, and rest — hours of rest — with almost total control. She sneaks in wakeful hours when she should be sleeping, and makes notes in this journal when she shouldn’t be writing. In other words, she is desperately trying to stay sane despite him.
The first pages seed the imagination and set the stage so beautifully. Students usually point to the first description of the wallpaper as the moment when they realized that something was well and truly wrong:
The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
A wallpaper pattern that commits suicide? A smouldering unclean yellow? A pattern that tortures her, like a “bad dream”? The paper is torn off — at her height? In the following pages, she spends a great deal of time describing the pattern, the way it moves in the daylight and moonlight, and later, how she discovers that it has bars in the foreground, with a woman (or many women) moving behind.
The genius in this short story lies in how Perkins Gilman does this. She establishes what is happening through the literary device of the journal, in this case, a secret journal. The narration creates instability in the text — the writer secretly writes, journaling, noting down what she sees in the wallpaper, in short, one or two-sentence paragraphs that become increasingly discontinuous and confessional. She knows that she is sick. She also knows that the world around her has details that do not make sense and that her husband is not being straight with her, so the journal serves as a space for rationalization and record-keeping.
John comes across in these pages as almost comically overbearing, scheduling her every hour, insisting that she is a “little girl” who is not sick. When the narrator draws up the courage to tell John that she is scared and concerned that she is getting worse, not better, he invalidates and gaslights her.
“She will be as sick as she pleases”
Then he rolls over and goes back to sleep. She decides not to put further stock in the help of this husband. She decides to stare at the wall.
I think back on a halcyon period of about three months when kiddo was small and I got to be at home with him in a one-room tiny house at the edge of town in New York State. I loved it and learned all sorts of things about myself and him. It was beautiful and hard.
The family next door had a lot going on — in the front of the house lived an elderly couple, and in the back apartment was a threatening man, an adult son perhaps. Every day he would emerge from the house, get in his black F150 truck, and drive off in a mad screech, with heavy metal music blaring. This happened most days at around the same time: NAP TIME. Then a few minutes later, he’d be back, tearing into the driveway, slamming the door shut.
I saw the elderly couple a few times on their neighborly walks and waved hello.
Anyway, I mention all this because I started to overthink this situation in my motherly isolation. It began simply — the loud exit and reentry, which always seemed to happen during naptime, raised a hot frustration in me. The man once harassed me and my kiddo over the chain link fence, a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he did chin-ups on the rusty play set they had in the backyard. Ugh. So, I became hyperaware of when he was outside and when he was inside — for our safety, I became attuned to his comings and goings. And, in a few weeks, I began to tell myself the story that I had not seen the elderly couple in a long time. I started to daydream all sorts of stories about what had happened to them, and finally, landed on the idea that they were locked in their basement.
A few anxious days into this idea, I felt I had two choices: I could go knock on their door and introduce myself — rescue them if needed — or I could tell someone. Thankfully, I told another neighbor, who invited me to join her mother’s group, and I called my sister and my doctor (in that order).
The next Sunday, I saw the elderly couple in the sunshine, on their way back home from church. I introduced myself, just in case. Shortly thereafter, kiddo started daycare, I started writing again and booked a photography studio for myself to work in, and all that made all the difference.
I divulge all this because this slip into the unreal was as real as anything I have experienced, and it happened so fast. And the idea that further isolation in this state would have any benefit at all is ludicrous to me now.
After her terrifying brush with “utter mental ruin” Charlotte Perkins Gilman found solace in her writing. She became a prolific and internationally read essayist and novelist, with her most important work on the economic potential of feminism: Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1899) and part 2: The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903). In these books, she advocated for a truly equal idea of marriage and the work of the home — and by her own account, she found that equality in her second marriage.
Her ideas for equality stem from the radical idea that women are people, and she advocated female empowerment through financial independence, freedom from isolating and unseen domestic work, and gender neutrality for children and social roles. A woman ahead of her time, but also of it.1
At the end of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Perkins Gilman leaves us in an uneasy place. The ending of the story is enigmatic precisely because it must contain both the dissolution of the marriage and her mental health. It has to convey that the narrator is not only free of John’s control but also, unfree, as she is on the other side of a mental break.
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said—very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my darling!”
“I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!”
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it, of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
“What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!”
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
The narrator (Jane?) and her projection have swapped places. The unreal has taken up her real role in our literature as the woman in the wallpaper, Jane stepping over John, over and over again.
If you are struggling, please start a conversation with someone. In the Netherlands, you call #113, and in the US #988.
Contemporary scholars are finding notes of white supremacy, eugenics, and anti-immigration in her writing too. A brief introduction to this scholarship here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/03/11/the-trouble-with-charlotte-perkins-gilman/