The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories in On Paths Unknown

Dec 06, 2015 BrokenTune rated it really liked it

Shelves: reviewed

"This wallpaper has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."

Classic horror in small doses provided by an author I had not heard about but who is now someone I will seek out for other stories.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yell "This wallpaper has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."

Classic horror in small doses provided by an author I had not heard about but who is now someone I will seek out for other stories.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a woman who is incarcerated in her own house and basically confined to rest in a room without being allowed to do anything. No work, no mental diversion. All because her keepers - mainly her husband - believe this is what is best for her, even though he does not understand the reason for the woman's illness:

"John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him."

Over the three months (!) of her confinement, the woman has nothing to occupy her mind except for the room she is in and the wallpaper hanging in pieces:

"It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin."

In fact, the description of the room strongly reminded me of Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, where a prisoner is held and where isolation, inactivity, and a bare room is used as a form of torture. In order to keep sane, the prisoner starts an imaginary chess game against himself, which he cannot win.
So, when reading The Yellow Wallpaper's first few chapters, I suspected that the story might reveal similar motives. As the paragraphs went on, however, I became less interested in the motives of the "carers" (or captors) and instead increasingly interested in the woman's identity. She is not named. Was she a person or was she a ghost?

For a story written in 1890, The Yellow Wallpaper packs a lot of punch. I had not expected that the story was not really written as a horror story, but was written as social commentary based on the author's own experience, which in fact just adds to its poignancy.
When Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the The Yellow Wallpaper, she knew about suffering from post-natal depression and had first-hand experience of the then newly developed prescription on rest cures - a treatment consisted primarily in isolation, confinement to bed, dieting, electrotherapy and massage - because she had been a patient of the developer of said cure, Silas Weir Mitchell, who even gets a mention in The Yellow Wallpaper.

I guess, this is another instance where fiction and fact are inseparable, and where circumstances that once described the fate of real people will now pass as classic horror. ...more

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Jan 17, 2014 Himanshu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: hulk-smashed-my-mind, quickies, reviewed, unforgettables, favorites

I'm sick--NO! I'm fine--I just need to lie down for a while--PLEASE! ...more

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Sep 30, 2013 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: usa, girls-girls-girls, short-stories

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" can certainly be read on a number of levels. On the surface it is the stirring story of a woman descending deeper into a neurasthenic psychosis, chronicling her descent in a secret diary, but there are many other layers and angles which haunt Gilman's slim story.

There is the feminist angle, which is perhaps the most common strata of meaning employed in analysis of this short story, and one on which I will not dwell. In many ways it echoes Ibsen's Doll's House, wi Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" can certainly be read on a number of levels. On the surface it is the stirring story of a woman descending deeper into a neurasthenic psychosis, chronicling her descent in a secret diary, but there are many other layers and angles which haunt Gilman's slim story.

There is the feminist angle, which is perhaps the most common strata of meaning employed in analysis of this short story, and one on which I will not dwell. In many ways it echoes Ibsen's Doll's House, with a perhaps more serious young woman as protagonist. John's diminutive treatment of his wife ("blessed little goose") is immediately redolent of Torvald's sobriquets for his wife ("squirrel," "lark") and their relationship is as much defined by husband-wife as it is by patient-doctor. The "woman in the wallpaper" is trapped and pinned down by the harsh conventions of feminine propriety, belittled and forced to "creep" when no one is looking, to shake the bars of her prison when she is left to herself.

But what struck me, perhaps more than the feminist angle, though it is perhaps less fully developed in my mind, is the madness of inspiration, of artistic creation. Our narrator is a writer "with [an] imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness [which is] sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies." Put to bed rest and refused the escape of writing for its "intellectual work" the narrator slips and slips further away from herself, her creative and writerly self. The whole of the short story, which of course could be doubly fictive, the imagined story of our narrator, is her reconciliation of estranging society and country loneliness with her idea of Self. I am immediately reminded of James' The Turn of the Screw, where convention and suppression in the idyllic countryside drive a young woman over the mental brink. And like James' unnamed governess, our narrator here too has a very romantic imagination:

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity -- but that would be asking too much of fate!

But in fact, the house is haunted. Or perhaps not the estate, but her house, her keep and chamber, her mind. She is haunted by her own creative impulses.

Another companion novella or short story, depending on your definition, is Maupassant's La Horla: the story of a man, also in a country house, haunted by something which ever escapes him, and is perhaps the brother story to Gilman's. I read in Maupassant, as I read here, the horror of inspiration: how it is horrible as well as it is beautiful. The ugly yellow wallpaper, the mysterious pattern, the seeming multi-layers of the pattern: our narrator can neither ignore them nor understand them, but has an ineluctable desire to decipher them: in fact she feels it is a mortal imperative: she must free that which is chained down beneath the horrible pattern of life. She writes in her diary, not to tell her unknown reader what lies beyond the horrid paper, but to discover in herself what it is: to chronicle her observations and to synthesize them, to reconcile her realities and unrealities, to reveal something which is both horrible and true. In Maupassant's La Horla, the male diarist admonishes:

Solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

This is precisely the case with our narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For her health, her sanity, she requires communion: with visitors, yes, but ultimately she requires that auto-communion of writing, of an imaginative communion with the Self and the other Self, the self with lives in fiction, which is both real and unreal. It is this other Self which is trapped behind the wallpaper, who takes over writing in the final entry, who creeps around the room like a madwoman. The narrator's lonesomeness breeds in her a second Self, a companion which is a horror, which is an even meld of real and unreal. She is the consubstatial host of sanity and insanity, of the real and the unreal, of the Self and the Other. This Other is the body of the imagination, and it is freed, by her writing, and at the Pyrrhic expense of her self and sanity. ...more

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Jul 30, 2015 Phil J rated it really liked it

Shelves: classic, 500-essential-cult-books

More than just The Yellow Wallpaper
OR
Let's Talk About Peter Butts!

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an established classic. Here is some spoiler-laden analysis:

(view spoiler) More than just The Yellow Wallpaper
OR
Let's Talk About Peter Butts!

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an established classic. Here is some spoiler-laden analysis:

(view spoiler)

What of Gilman's other work? It's very good, and in much the same way that Yellow Wallpaper is good. She has a firm grasp of character voice and perspective. She masterfully balances explicit information against withheld information, which keeps the reader engaged and guessing. Her plots speed along economically, with revelations and unexpected twists at the end. She plays fluently with mood and genre- "Three Thanksgivings" is an Austenesque comedy, "If I Were A Man" is a satirical fantasy, "Cottagette" is a heart-tugging romance, etc.

All seven stories in this collection tackle feminism and gender relations to some degree. Generally, she uses her stories as minute case studies rather than grossly reduced propaganda. This allows them to keep their force and immediacy. The last two, however, ("If I Were A Man" and "Mr. Peeble's Heart") go overboard on messages and lose their effectiveness as a result.

Anyone interested in "The Yellow Wallpaper" would do well to check out "Making a Change," which provides a contrasting story of a stressed-out new mother and a husband who doesn't get it.

The real star here, though, is "Three Thanksgivings," which is just awesome. If you read this story, you will have the pleasure of meeting a character named Peter Butts who reads like what would happen if Charles Dickens tried to write a Jane Austen story. I can't say more without spoilers, but there's one line this character says that I had to read three times because I couldn't believe how funny it was.

Peter Butts is so great that he deserves his own series of novels. I want to know more about his amorous adventures and his worldview. The man is a comic goldmine. ...more

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