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The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Lisa's review
bookshelves: 19th-century, 1001-books-read, kindle, usa
Jan 08, 11
bookshelves: 19th-century, 1001-books-read, kindle, usa
Recommended to Lisa by:
A Rat in the Book Pile (Sarahbbc)
Read on January 09, 2011
** spoiler alert **
I read this short novella because Sarah from A Rat in the Book Pile (http://tinyurl.com/2fmncmv) wrote such an intriguing review of it, but now that I come to write my thoughts about it, I find that I have tagged it as one of the 1001 Books I Should Read and it is a very famous little novella indeed.
The narrator is unreliable, to say the least. She is a mother confined to a room upstairs in a rented house, separated from her baby and prevented from doing anything at all. This is (according to 1001 Books and Wikipedia) because she was undergoing the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure, but although there is an oblique reference to this, the reader only knows that the woman is subjected to a tyranny of deprivation imposed by her husband who is a doctor because she suffers (according to her explanation of his diagnosis) a 'temporary nervous depression'. This means he has even greater authority over her.
She tells us that the room has bars on the windows and rings on the walls because it was a nursery, but it is obvious that it has been set up as a secure place for a mentally-ill patient. There is a gate at the top of the stairs, and even the bed is nailed to the floor. The horrible yellow wallpaper is torn, but it doesn't take the reader long to work out who is tearing it.
She tells us that her husband's strict instructions are motivated by his love for her...but are they?
The question is, is she really mad or did this treatment make her so? Is she, in the beginning, perhaps suffering from post-natal depression and acting out her boredom because she's imaginative and creative and has no other outlet for her intellect than to imagine things within the wallpaper?
Before long, she has developed an obsession about the wallpaper and imbued it with all kinds of fantastic, hostile characteristics. She talks about creeping around, as if she has to be invisible in order to get out of the cage she has created out of the wallpaper. She is cunning, just like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, because she locks herself in and throws away the key so that she can free the woman that she thinks is trapped in the wallpaper. When her husband finally gets in, the journal tells is that she has pulled off most of the wallpaper and is creeping around on all fours, oblivious to everything - but what has she done with that rope she had hidden up there somehow?
The woman's secret journal is written in a bleak, fractured style, which adds to the sense of disorientation. Is she really writing anything at all?
The narrator is unreliable, to say the least. She is a mother confined to a room upstairs in a rented house, separated from her baby and prevented from doing anything at all. This is (according to 1001 Books and Wikipedia) because she was undergoing the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure, but although there is an oblique reference to this, the reader only knows that the woman is subjected to a tyranny of deprivation imposed by her husband who is a doctor because she suffers (according to her explanation of his diagnosis) a 'temporary nervous depression'. This means he has even greater authority over her.
She tells us that the room has bars on the windows and rings on the walls because it was a nursery, but it is obvious that it has been set up as a secure place for a mentally-ill patient. There is a gate at the top of the stairs, and even the bed is nailed to the floor. The horrible yellow wallpaper is torn, but it doesn't take the reader long to work out who is tearing it.
She tells us that her husband's strict instructions are motivated by his love for her...but are they?
The question is, is she really mad or did this treatment make her so? Is she, in the beginning, perhaps suffering from post-natal depression and acting out her boredom because she's imaginative and creative and has no other outlet for her intellect than to imagine things within the wallpaper?
Before long, she has developed an obsession about the wallpaper and imbued it with all kinds of fantastic, hostile characteristics. She talks about creeping around, as if she has to be invisible in order to get out of the cage she has created out of the wallpaper. She is cunning, just like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, because she locks herself in and throws away the key so that she can free the woman that she thinks is trapped in the wallpaper. When her husband finally gets in, the journal tells is that she has pulled off most of the wallpaper and is creeping around on all fours, oblivious to everything - but what has she done with that rope she had hidden up there somehow?
The woman's secret journal is written in a bleak, fractured style, which adds to the sense of disorientation. Is she really writing anything at all?
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Comments (showing 1-8 of 8) (8 new)
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Sarah wrote: "Thank you, Lisa.'Is she really writing anything at all?'
I think that sums it up wonderfully. And although the story was written (as the author averred) to help other women suffering under the ..."
I was astonished when I found Spark Notes about this book - such a little novella, and such a wealth of interpretation about it!
I read this novella the year I was a member of The Bookies Lisa. I don't really remember the discussion, think that was 2001?I felt the book was dated and was meant to be a social statement for women at that time. But like you and Sarah have commented, I felt the book didn't say much at all.
My interpretation was that she was just playing along with her husband's wishes, probably suffering from post natal depression with no-one to talk to about it and not a lot of interest in anything and wanting to shut the outside world out. I think the harsh treatment forced her into a worse mental condition than she was when she arrived for the 'rest cure'.
My mohter had shock treatment after my youngest sister was born and I thought of her suffering whilst reading this book. Electric shock treatment was so harsh too.
Maybe the psychiatrists and psychologists of the day were enthusiastic readers and reviewers!
I wonder how many other novels were written about psychiatric treatment such as this.
Hi Chele, from what I could see at Spark Notes, it's a book of great interest from a feminist perspective now, but in its day it was intended to show the damage done by this type of psychiatric treatment. Have you read Janet Frame (the NZ writer who was committed to an asylum and given shock treatment) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is about men in a psychiatric ward in the US and shows how the definition of 'normal' is a fraught issue?
Hi Lisa, I am not surprised that this book was picked up by feminists, nor that it was an anthropology for that treatment!It was awful in any language or time!Yes, I read Cuckoos Nest a couple of times and also works by Janet Frame. also Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar.
A great aunt of mine (paternal side) was institutionalised at Kew Cottages maybe circa 1940 and died in a fire there. No-one seemed to know what her condition or for that matter, her symptoms were that I could glean. My grandmother either didn't know or didn't want to discuss such a private matter with anyone. Such was the Victorian attitude wasn't it? I didn't want to pry either I guess, it wasn't that relevant to me.
'Is she really writing anything at all?'
I think that sums it up wonderfully. And although the story was written (as the author averred) to help other women suffering under the 'rest cure' it does mimic the characteristics of the wallpaper with a multiplicity of elements that don't quite mesh in the way that we expect that they should.