The Yellow Wallpaper

Introduction

The work regards as a significant early novel of an American feminist literature; demonstrating stance in the 19th century in the direction of female's physical as well as mental healthiness, the narrative plays a Gothic, as well as a horror fiction. Written in epistolary style, the novel "The Yellow Wallpaper" is specifically a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. Forbidden to do work, she hides her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency, “diagnosis common to women in that period. Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. A key locks the door.

Thesis statement

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

Argumentative Analysis

Dismissed by most critics when the story finally appeared in The New England Magazine in May 1892, it 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 (Allen, pp.74-77).

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 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 his wife's condition, in effect to read her text, with the difficulty Gilman's contemporaries had in understanding the work itself. Second, they associate the narrator's forging her own independence, and by "extension the independence of all women," through her interpretation of the wallpaper, with their own re-readings of the text (Cixous, 122).

Using as a foundation the laudatory piece Hedges wrote on "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilbert and Gubar proclaim that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the story all "literary women would tell if they had the voice" (Cixous, 120). They explain that when ...