Work record

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1892 · 19th Century · Short Stories · English

Public domainClassic Psychiatryhigh medical relevanceRead full text Download EPUB Five-minute digest

Abstract

Written: 1890; published 1892
Setting: Late nineteenth century, one summer; A rented country mansion in the United States
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Country: United States
Language: English
Genre: Psychological and Gothic short story
Form: First-person secret journal in short entries
Recommended: Grades 10–12 (Short; a woman's mental breakdown under enforced rest, told from inside her mind.)

Background. After the birth of her daughter, Gilman fell into a long depression and in 1887 underwent the rest cure of the neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who advised her to live domestically and give up writing. In a 1913 essay she explained that she wrote the story, with invented embellishments, to warn others against that treatment.

Plot. A new mother, diagnosed by her physician husband with a nervous condition, is confined for the summer to an upstairs room in a rented mansion and forbidden to work or write. She keeps a secret journal and becomes fixated on the room's torn yellow wallpaper, in which she begins to see a trapped woman creeping behind the pattern. On the last day she locks herself in, strips the paper and creeps around the walls, and her husband faints at the sight.

Ideas. The tale examines medical authority over women, the effects of isolation and enforced idleness, and the patient's voice. Its unreliable journal form lets readers watch a mind come apart while seeing what the doctors miss.

Reception. Some early readers took it as a horror story. Rediscovered in 1973, it became a central work of American women's writing and is widely taught in literature and medical humanities courses.

Main characters

The narrator: Young wife and new mother
John: Her physician husband
Jennie: John's sister
The woman in the wallpaper: Figure the narrator sees

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, c. 1900. Source · Public domain

Summary

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in The New England Magazine in January 1892 and issued as a small book in 1899. It takes the form of a secret journal kept by an unnamed young wife and mother whose husband, John, a physician, has diagnosed her with "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby. For the summer John rents an old country mansion and installs his wife in a large upstairs room that she believes was once a nursery, with barred windows, rings in the walls, a bed nailed to the floor and torn, sickly yellow wallpaper. She is to rest, take tonics and avoid all "work", including writing, and is kept from company and from her baby, who is cared for by a nurse. She writes in secret and comes to hate the wallpaper's sprawling pattern. Confined and idle, she studies the paper for hours and begins to see a woman trapped behind its pattern, shaking it and creeping about by moonlight. Her husband, his sister Jennie and her own brother, also a physician, treat her concerns as fancies, and John warns that if she does not improve he will send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall. In the final entries she locks herself in and tears the paper from the walls to free the woman, whom she now identifies with herself. When John gets the locked door open he finds her creeping around the room, and he faints; she must creep over him as she goes. Gilman drew on her own treatment with the rest cure in 1887. The story was little read for decades, but its 1973 reissue by the Feminist Press made it one of the most widely taught American short stories, read both as a Gothic tale of madness and as a criticism of nineteenth-century medicine and marriage.

Plot or Argument

The rented mansion
The narrator explains that John, her physician husband, believes she is not seriously ill and has forbidden her to work; she describes the house and the yellow-papered room.
Rest and the forbidden journal
Kept from writing, visitors and her baby, she writes in secret, while her repugnance for the wallpaper grows and John dismisses her requests to change rooms.
The woman behind the pattern
She begins to see a sub-pattern and then a woman crouching and creeping behind the paper, especially by moonlight; John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell.
Obsession
She becomes secretive and watchful, suspects John and Jennie of studying the paper, and believes she sees creeping women outside in the garden and along the road.
The last day
Locked in on the last day in the house, she tears off the paper, creeps around the walls and tells the fainting John that she has got out at last.

Characters

The narrator, protagonist
Unnamed young wife and mother suffering from what her husband calls a nervous condition, who records her thoughts in a secret journal.
John, major
Her husband, a physician, affectionate but controlling, who prescribes rest and forbids work.
Jennie, minor
John's sister, who keeps house and watches over the narrator.
Mary, minor
The nurse who looks after the baby.
The woman in the wallpaper, major
Figure the narrator sees trapped behind the pattern and finally identifies with herself.

Lessons

Medical authority and the patient's voice
The narrator's husband and brother, both physicians, overrule her own sense of what would help her. The story asks how illness should be understood and who gets to decide.
- What does the narrator believe would do her good, and why is she not allowed it?
- How does John speak to her, and what does that reveal?
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  Vision becomes dangerous when it authorizes action. Joan's voices were not private consolations; they justified travel, clothing, military intervention, and political obedience. That public effect made them intolerable to enemies and difficult for church authorities to manage.
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- Villette, Ch. IV
  Lucy nurses the rheumatic invalid Miss Marchmont, hears her story on her last night, and finds her dead in the morning.
The unreliable narrator
Everything is filtered through a mind in crisis. Readers must judge what is real and what the narrator imagines.
- At what point did you begin to doubt the narrator's account?
- Why might Gilman tell the story as a journal?
Related across the library
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- Persuasion, Lesson: Composure in a crisis
  Composure in a crisis. At Lyme, when the others faint or panic, Anne calmly directs help for Louisa. Austen presents practical competence as a form of moral worth.
- Villette, Lesson: An unreliable, honest narrator
  An unreliable, honest narrator. Lucy conceals that she has recognised Graham, misleads the reader about her own feelings, and admits it afterwards. Brontë uses this reticence to make us feel how a proud, poor woman guards her inner life, and to make us read more carefully.
- Our Oriental Heritage, Lesson: What a historian means by civilization
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- Burmese Days, Lesson: Moral cowardice
  Moral cowardice. Flory knows the truth but will not speak it.
Confinement as symbol
The barred room, the nailed-down bed and the trapped woman in the paper all suggest the narrator's situation. Students can trace how setting becomes meaning.
- What details suggest that the room is a kind of prison?
- Who is the woman behind the wallpaper?
Related across the library
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- 12 Years a Slave, The Tanning Business--Stabbing Of Uncle Abram--The Ugly Wound--Epps
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- A Treatise on Insanity, Section III: of Malconfohmation of the Skulls of
  some maniacs to shut themselves up in their own chambers and to treat with great rudeness and abuse any person that should offer to molest their solitude Fanatics belonging to this class of mad- men often fancy themselves inspired and under di- vine requisition to perform some sacrificial act or acts of expiation Those deluded and dangerous beings can commit most barbarous homicides in cold blood An old monk driven to a state of insanity by religious enthusiasm believed that h had one night seen the virgin in a...
- Mrs. Dalloway, Lesson: Choices and the unlived life
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Context

In the late nineteenth century, many physicians attributed women's depression and anxiety to "nerves", neurasthenia or hysteria. The rest cure, developed in the 1870s by the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), who was also known for his studies of nerve injuries in Civil War soldiers, prescribed weeks of bed rest, isolation, a rich diet and massage, and was widely used for women patients.

Composition

Gilman suffered a severe depression after the birth of her daughter and in 1887 was treated by Mitchell, who sent her home with advice to lead a domestic life and to give up writing and painting. In her 1913 essay "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper", published in her magazine The Forerunner, she wrote that following this advice for some three months brought her near to mental ruin, that she recovered by returning to work, and that she wrote the story, with additions of her own, to save other people from being driven mad. She also wrote that she sent a copy to the physician, who never acknowledged it.

Reception

Horace Scudder of The Atlantic Monthly declined the story; it appeared in The New England Magazine, where some readers took it as a horror tale and a Boston physician protested that it could drive readers mad. William Dean Howells included it in The Great Modern American Stories (1920). The Feminist Press reissued it in 1973 with an afterword by Elaine Hedges, and it has since become a central text of American women's writing and of literature and medicine courses.

Madness / Mind Gender Women Marriage Illness / Body Isolation / Alienation Identity Self Language / Storytelling