Charlotte Gilman Perkin's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been discussed in so many of my classes at Indiana University Southeast I practically know it by heart. I’ve heard many interpretations but now it's my turn to put a spin on this classic story. My focus of on the story comes from the reprinting of the tale in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th Edition, Vol. C): the assigned textbook in L352 with Dr. Mann. Avid readers of classic American literature, feminist literature or, as you’ll see, gothic literature fans are encouraged to read on. Likewise I extend this invitation to any who appreciate a good, scholarly article.
This story post-dates ghost stories the Gothic Period boasts so well; however, my interpretation involves just that. I believe, from the very beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” everyone in the featured house are actually ghosts stuck in a Purgatory of sorts. The story is recounted from the Narrator’s own journal. From the very beginning, the text alludes to the house being "haunted:" "A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house..." We are then told that there is something "queer" about the estate, and that it was unoccupied for the longest time until Doctor and his household moved in for a suspiciously low price. Because of the house’s pre-affected nature, the new inhabitants are easily subjected to the spirits’ malevolence. Within the story, the wallpaper represents the psychological and physical deterioration of The Narrator’s mind, due to the initial haunting of the house, the poisoning by her husband, her subsequent possession, and the death of the child. Because of the doomed nature of events, the uneasy spirits of all involved are forced to repeat their atrocities.
The Narrator is trapped not only in her room, but by her husbands’ treatment. Shown by his attention to “medical procedure” and great “care,” the Narrator is being poisoned by her husband for months: "John is a physician and perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster." He gives her "phosphates or phosphites;” medicines which she has no idea the ingredients. The poisons her husband feed her put her in weakens the Narrator greatly in all functions: physically, mentally and emotionally. They create an effect of complacency with the inhumane way she is being treated. "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” Even in her altered state of mind, she disagrees with the way she is being treated, but feels defeated: "Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?"
For possession itself: as she spirals downward and the ghost gains influence, she murders her child. The shade takes control of her “nervous condition” by way of this, leading her to be trapped in the upstairs room to begin with. “I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to.” She seems to remember something, but she doesn’t want to write it. Further down the page she remarks, “…John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed.” The narrator says things like: “No one but me can help me…” and “I must use my will and self-control.” The ghost begins speaking in her conscience: “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will” the Narrator remarks after mentioning “What a fortune escape! Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.” While she was downstairs, it is my contention that she murdered the child.
While trapped in the room, she remarks on the wallpaper’s physical aspects. It is “stripped off in great patches,” “I never saw a worse paper in my life.” As the story goes on, John’s ill-treatment of her leaves her as easy prey to the demons that warp her mind further.
She begins to see “the pattern loll(s) like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” on page 811. She begins to personify the wallpaper. It looks at her; she obsesses over it. The ghost is gaining power, for this is not the voice of a sane person: “up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.”
The passage on page 809 of “The Yellow Wallpaper” explicates my point that they are ghosts: “That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don’t care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive…”
This scene is where the story resembles a sort-of “gothic ghost story.” The moonlight is striking. Here is this sick woman, probably pale and thin, sitting in a beam of moonlight. The “draught” described is the instance of possession as the ghost enters her body. It is a very ethereal image. She then talks about how angry she gets with John lately and how she doesn’t understand why she does it. The spirit plays off her emotions and the true nature of haunting begins. Furthermore, we catch a glimpse of the demon, continuing on page 812: “But in places where it [the wallpaper] isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless short of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.”
Her “break” or “snap” is evident, on page 816 where she has degenerated to a new level of sickness. She talks as if she’s accepted the strange occurrences concerning the wallpaper: “John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper. I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper”.
The room she is kept in is distinct; this is the biggest key to my possession theory. The floor is “scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster is dug out here and there.” The bed is “a great heavy bed, which… looks as if it had been through the wars.” The bed is nailed to the floor. Combined with the rings on the walls; the barred windows; the wallpaper torn, especially near the bed; and the fact that the room itself is away from the rest of the house… These images conjure thoughts of William Friedkin’s movie The Exorcist: a story of young girl besieged with possession by a malevolent spirit. The Exorcist, while an obvious fictionalized account of possession, was based on the nonfiction account of novelist and historian Thomas B Allen in his book Possession, with remarkably similar imagery. In both instances, in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Possession, a room was used for something of a dark nature. Each person suffered from a supposed mental illness and each were secluded to these rooms by an overbearing force. Their oppression and confusion manifested itself in fits of anger; the damage of their psychotic bouts are literally written on the walls.
As I have mentioned, I believe the characters are trapped in a kind of “purgatory;” each for their own reasons. For example: the Narrator talks about John. He is another crucial key to my thesis. John is the rational type. He is described as being "practical to the extreme," "no patience with faith," "an intense horror of superstition," and "he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” on page 808. This sounds like the perfect set-up for why John's soul is kept in this "purgatory" of a house.
John fears death. Take his profession for example. The purpose of a doctor is to help one “cheat death” so to speak. He fears it so much that he doesn't even accept it when it comes. Because he can't come to terms with his own death, he prolongs his stay in Purgatory. His "intense horror of superstition" is the icing on the cake, as it allows no room for faith in a world outside of science. He is kept in a limbo as a ghost of his former self because of his lack of faith and his hubris in fully trusting medical procedures in his time period. Furthermore, I argue that John is kept in purgatory because he never nurtured his wife, as a man in love, adoration, or obligation: he only cared for her as a doctor would a patient.
How does Jennie fit into this equation? Jennie, at the end of the tale, is murdered in a rage by the Narrator. The Narrator is so warped by being poisoned and possessed that she perceives Jennie’s caretaking as a threat towards her wellbeing. She also sees her as a threat as the replacement mother for the child she can’t be around. The Narrator alludes to Jennie’s demise on page 811. “I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.” Jennie is held captive in this purgatory, bound and murdered out of unadulterated malice.
The newborn child is trapped within the same Purgatory for the baby’s soul is as much a part of the tragedy in this story as everyone else. This alone has trapped the others; however, in Catholic tradition of purgatory, its innocent soul may also not be released for there is no one left to pray for the creature and to my knowledge, no baptism was performed upon birth.
Thus concludes my interpretation of this classic short story. I hope you bloggers out there have enjoyed this new view of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and I look forward to seeing your comments.
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