The Yellow Wallpaper

Stephen WelchStacy CarolinBilly Garrity

Sarah McNeese

The Story

• Opens with the narrator and her husband moving to a rental mansion in the country for the summer

• The narrator suffers from mild nervous depression.

• Her husband, John, is a prominent physician

• He believes that rest here for the summer will cure her

The Story

• She is put in an old nursery upstairs to recover and forbidden to do any work or writing

• With almost no outside stimuli and limited human contact, her depression worsens

• Her focus now begins to shift to the defining characteristic of the nursery, its yellow wallpaper

The Wallpaper

• “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions”

The Story

• As the narrator becomes more depressed and perhaps schizophrenic, she begins to see a woman behind the wallpaper

• She sleeps all day so she can stay awake all night and watch this woman “creep” around the edge of the room

• She believes that the woman is trying to escape from the wallpaper

The Story

• With the narrator’s new found interest in the wallpaper, her health actually improves.

• As their stay at the mansion draws to a close, she begins to tear the wallpaper at night, trying to free the woman

The Story

• On the night of their stay in the mansion, the narrator locks herself in the nursery and begins to work at removing all the wallpaper

• She hears shrieks from inside the as she works

• She contemplates jumping from the window, but it is bared

The Story

• At this point, she believes herself to have escaped from the wallpaper and begins creeping around the room with re shoulder to the wall

• Her husband arrives and begins pounding on the door

• She continues to creep around the room, and informs him that she has thrown the key out the window.

The Story

• Upon retrieving the key and entering the room, John discovers his wife creeping around the room and faints

• The story concludes with the narrator still creeping around the room, now forced to step over her husband’s body with each lap

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Feminist vs. Housewife

“From the paternal Beecher-Perkins side of her lineage, she received a relentlessly demanding legacy: to take pride in her womanhood, to courageously assert her own viewpoint to be

fearless in the face of censure, and to achieve through serving society at large. In contrast, her mother brought a heritage more traditionally feminine, though comparably independent-minded”

(Kessler, 1995)

Depression

“She was torn between her desire to fulfill the Beecher family's ‘call to larger world service’ in the ‘reform of women's condition in society’ and

the traditional pull towards marriage” (Kessler, 1995)

Breaking Off

“She saw the submergence of women as a critical handicap retarding the best

development of society" (Lane, 1990)

The “Rest Cure” or “Weir Mitchell Treatment”

Treatment included:

-seclusion and rest, massage

-patients not allowed to see families

-no reading, writing, or any activity that would cause straining

-average duration was 6 weeks, usually in an institution or private retreat

Silas Weir Mitchell

“All the rage among upper-middle-class American women” (Patricia Benjamin)

Women’s Health

Women engaging in intellectual pursuits were considered unnatural, unhealthy and a danger to the future of civilization

It was considered fashionable for women to look and act sickly and weak

In 1889, Dr. Arabella Kenealy proposed that boredom rather than intellectual work was the cause of women's neurasthenia

Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper“Something of the world she lived in she has seen from her barred windows”

(Gilman, Women and Economics)

BOTH GILMAN AND HER FICTITIOUS CHARACTER:

-depressed following birth of child

-prescribed the rest cure, in which depression only becomes worse

-want to escape

Depression

• The narrator feels sick, but her husband tells her she is merely suffering from a mild case of depression, and that bed-rest will help to alleviate her feelings.

• As she rests in the room, she begins to miss her baby, and notices the gaudy yellow wallpaper hanging on the wall. This wallpaper fills her with disgust.

Depression, continued...

• This wallpaper causes the narrator’s depression to worsen due to her obsession with it, along with the bars on her windows.

• She keeps talking about how nice the house is, but then she adds on how horrible the wallpaper in her room is anytime she mentions her room.

Isolation

• One other reason for the narrators depression, besides the garish wallpaper she is forced to look at every day, is that she is forced to live in isolation from her family.

• On the occasional times she sneaks out of her room, she feels better, which shows that perhaps being locked up all day worsens her condition.

Isolation, continued...

• The entire time the narrator longs to be able to leave her prison of a room…

“I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus…”

Schizophrenia

• As the story continues, the narrator’s mental condition worsens, and she begins to turn schizophrenic.

• She sees a woman behind he wallpaper who is shaking “bars” that are in the pattern in the wallpaper. People who are schizophrenic usually see things, hear voiced, and/or develop alternate personalities.

Schizophrenia, continued...

• According to schizophrenia.com, some symptoms of schizophrenia are… “Hearing internal voice or experiencing other sensations not connected to an obvious source (hallucinations) and assigning unusual significance or meaning to normal events or holding fixed false personal beliefs (delusions.)”

Schizophrenia, continued...

• The narrator eventually becomes delusional, and believes that she herself is caught inside the wallpaper, and that is the peak of her schizophrenia.