The Yellow Wallpaper

Introduction

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman attempted to publish her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892, she met with the consternation of disapproving males. Horace Scudder, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, declared himself repelled by the morbid nature of the tale. He explained that he could not publish the story as he "could not forgive" himself if he made others as miserable as he had made himself by reading it. Ironically, these remarks echo the words of the domineering husband within Gilman's story. John is unable to appreciate the seriousness of his wife's illness. Instead he insists that as a physician and her husband, he knows her fears about her illness are merely morbid (Allen, 74).

Thesis statement

The critics examine the theme which is inherent in the "morbid" tale--woman's oppression--dismissing Gilman's own commitment to feminist issues.

Critical Analysis

Dismissed by most critics when the story finally appeared in The New England Magazine in May 1892, it was virtually ignored for fifty years. In 1982, Elaine Hedges, editing for the Feminist Press, articulated the irony inherent in Scudder's reaction.

Gilman, in fact, wrote the story in hopes of pointing out the dangers of the "rest cure," developed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a nerve specialist, a treatment Gilman herself underwent. According to Gilman, "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways (Gilman, 189)". This treatment, commonly prescribed to women diagnosed with hysteria, attempted to help the patient through reintegrating her into her "proper" position as wife by forcing her to focus only on her home and children. When Gilman underwent this treatment, she came perilously close to having a nervous breakdown. In contrast to Mitchell's seemingly self-serving theory, Gilman felt she had only regained her health when she left her marriage and returned to her literary career.

Since this (re)emergence of the story, which Hedges declares a "feminist document," feminist critics have embraced the story as fervently as Gilman's male contemporaries shunned it. Three prominent critical works have recently discussed "The Yellow Wallpaper": Madwoman in the Attic, The Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination by Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar; "A Map for Rereading: Or Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts," by Annette Kolodny; and "Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life," by Jean Kennard (Gilbert, 84). These critics have raised the story to the level of a parable for feminist readings--the work becomes a tale extolling the value of feminist readings or "revisionary readings." (Gilbert, 85)

This type of reading, which Adrienne Rich calls for and defines in "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," entails "a radical critique, feminist in its impulse, that would take the work first of all as a clue to how we [as women] live, how we have been living…and how we can begin to see--and therefore live--afresh" (Cixous, 122). Taken together, these recent interpretations of the story draw two parallels. First, they align the inability of the narrator's husband to understand ...