Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Author(s): Loralee MacPike

Source: American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 286-288
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27747980
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286

Ann Douglas Wood, "'The Fashionable Diseases': Women's Complaints and Their
Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America," JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY, 6
(1973), 25-52, esp. 41-44.
Gail Parker, "Introduction," in THE OVENBIRDS / AMERICAN WOMEN ON WOMANHOOD,
1820-1920, ed. Gail Parker (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 37-63.
5Charlotte Perkins Gilman, THE LIVING OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN / AN AUTO
BIOGRAPHY (NY: Appleton, 1935), p. 121.
6Elaine Hedges, "Afterword," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, THE YELLOW WALL
PAPER, ed. Elaine Hedges (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973), pp. 37-63.

7Ibid., p. 39.
8Ibid., p. 41.
g
Parker does attempt a psychoanalytical interpretation of Gilman's a
raphy in pointing to Gilman's fears of dependency. However, she does not
ficient use of it for the interpretation of the story.

10Even this "life-style" is based on a "fiction," an "as-if conditi

cording to Adler. Adler sees human personality as an organic entity that c
ly strives towards ideals of perfection. In the early periods of his life
man being unconsciously interprets the physical, emotional, and social con
that surround him within the framework of this striving. As a result of
terpretations he builds up a "life-style" that determines his responses t
mands life makes on him and that is neurotic to the degree that his fictiv
lacks what Adler calls "social feeling."
i:LGilman, LIVING, p. 80.

12Ibid., p. 83.
13This can be deduced from the grand scale of her self-chosen task as well as
from her constant apologetic references to the incapacitating effects of her break
down on her mental energy. Therefore, it can be said that the breakdown served her
both to escape from her marriage and to find an excuse for possible failures in her
work.

Beate Sch?pp-Schilling
John F. Kennedy Institute
Free University Berlin

ENVIRONMENT AS PSYCHO PATHOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," first published
in 1892, is a study of social degeneration into madness. As such it may seem an un
likely focus of American literary realism; yet it is a very fine illustration of realist
symbolism. The furnishings of the narrator's room become a microcosm of the world
that squeezes her into the little cell of her own mind, and the wallpaper represents
the state of that mind.

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 287

The story line is deceptively simple. The narrator, a writer, finds herself in
creasingly depressed and indefinably ill. Her husband John (a physician), her brother,
and her doctor all concur that she needs complete rest and a cessation of her work if
she is to "recover, " by which they mean "appear as a normal female in a world creat
ed by and for men. " Gilman is not speaking in any militant feminist terms; she mere
ly shows how her narrator needs to work in order to feel at ease with herself and the
self's potential. Instead, she is hustled off to the country into a life of enforced idle
ness of body and mind. Although she would have preferred a room opening on the gar
den, her husband consigns her to the upstairs room, a former nursery, whose major
features are ancient yellow wallpaper, bars on the windows, and a huge bedstead
nailed to the floor.

The fact that the narrator's prison-room is a nursery indicates her status in
society. The woman is legally a child; socially, economically, and philosophically
she must be led by an adult?her husband; and therefore the nursery is an appropriate
place to house her. The narrator's work threatens to destroy her status as a mere child
by gaining her recognition in the adult world; this is reason enough for her husband to
forbid her to work. Her work is, as he suggests, dangerous; but its danger is for him,
not her, because it removes her from his control. The nursery, then, is an appropri
ate symbol for the desired state of childlikeness vis-?-vis the adult world that her
husband wishes to enforce.

The nursery's windows are barred, making the setting not only a retreat into
childhood but a prison. The narrator is to be forever imprisoned in childhood, for
bidden to "escape" into adulthood. She instinctively feels that, just as only her work
can transport her out of the world of childhood, so too can it alone free her from her
dependence upon her husband in particular and the male-created world in general.
Emergence from the chrysalis of childhood would also free her in the larger sense,
making her a responsible member of society rather than merely a cloistered woman. It
could provide for her a physical movement out into an active life, but the bars in the
unchosen room of her existence effectively prevent such an emergence.

The bedstead is the third symbol of the narrator's situation. A representation

of her sexuality, it is nailed to the floor, ostensibly to prevent the former youthful
occupants of the room from pushing it about. As the nursery imprisons her in a state
of childhood, so the bedstead prevents her from moving "off center" sensually?not
merely sexually--in any sort of physical contact with another human being. Her in
ability to care for her own child is but another fixity in her life, and the immovable
bedstead symbolizes the static nature of both the expression and the product of her
sexuality, thus denying her this outlet for her energies just as the bars deny her physi
cal movement and the nursery her adult abilities.

These three items?the nursery, the bars on the windows, and the bedstead?
show not only the narrator's mind but the state of the world that formed that mind.
Her dilemma is not strictly personal, for the forces that shaped her, cutting off all
possibility of personal realization, movement, or sexuality, are the processes that
shape many women's lives. Gilman shows, through the normality of the narrator's
life, the sources of her frustrations. The apparently unusual circumstances of bars,
a nailed-down bed, a nursery for a bedroom are all explained as possible occurrences
in a normal household. Although unusual perhaps, they are not extraordinary in the
way Hawthorne's settings or Wilkie Collins' plots can be said to be extraordinary.
It is not necessary for Gilman to give any background whatever, neither social com

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288

ment nor history; for her use of the stuff of the narrator's life as symbolic of her state
of mind and its causes suffices.

The three symbols of the narrator's existence coalesce in the yellow wallpaper,
which is the primary symbol of the story which not only represents the narrator's state
of mind but becomes that state of mind. As she grows increasingly fond of the wall
paper, the narrator realizes that it may well be the only part of her life she can con
trol. She learns to use it on an intellectual level to replace the adult intellectual ac
tivity forbidden her. Seeking a human with whom to interact, she finds heads in the
wallpaper, sees them move as if behind undulating, almost-imperceptible bars. At
first she becomes angry with the heads' "impertinence" and "everlastingness, " not
recognizing that these are the two qualities she herself exhibits: the impertinence of
trying to achieve humanness against all restrictions and the everlastingness of her
own stubborn core of self which can never fully yield to outside expectations. Her
refusal to accept the wallpaper as either ugly or meaningless is a representation of the
tenacity of her own character, which can yield to such outside constraints as a prison
nursery but will never surrender its right to remain outside interpretation, as does the
wallpaper. In relation to the "principle of design" imposed by the masculine universe,
both the wallpaper and her mind refuse to follow any logic other than their own.

Slowly, the wallpaper becomes something more than an object for the narrator.
She begins to see in it a movement and a purpose she has been unable to realize in
her own life. As her madness develops, she shifts her own desire for escape from the
limitations of her husband's expectations onto the figure behind the undulating bars of
the wallpaper, the figure of a woman, "stooping down and creeping about" behind the
pattern as she herself creeps behind her restricted life. The rescue of that woman be
comes her one object, and the wallpaper becomes at once the symbol of her confine
ment and of her freedom. The disparate symbols of Gilman's story coalesce in the sym
bol of the wallpaper, itself imprisoned in the nursery, with the humanoid heads, be
hind their intangible bars, denied the sexuality of bodies.

If realism is to be defined, as Wellek has defined it, as "the objective repre

sentation of contemporary social reality, " Gilman's story is indeed realism; but her
realism, like Henry James's, is a representation of what is real to the author. There
can be no "objective reality" as such because it is always seen by subjective obser
vers. Gilman was such a subjective observer insofar as she was a member of a group
(women) viewed as external to integral (male) society. Her reality she presented not
directly, but through the objects comprising the backdrop of her narrator's life?ob
jects which symbolize her assigned status in the world but which, paradoxically, also
give her the opportunity to achieve complete freedom. In a world where half the human
race must be rendered non-entities in the most radical sense of the word, insanity is
the only creative act available to those doomed to be defined as subhuman by submis
sion to society's standards. In this sense Gilman anticipates R. D. Laing, who says
that in an insane world only the mad are sane.

Loralee Mac Pike

Los Gatos, California

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