Reading Behind the Pattern: A Literary Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper

There are few in the modern Western world who have not heard of author Charlotte Perkins Gilman—and for good reason. A social activist, economic theorist, and leading reformer of the American women’s movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Gilman’s writings reflected and encouraged her hope for the future: women’s economic independence from men, the abolition of the sphere of domesticity, and, as a result, a complete breakdown of the gender hierarchy. Alongside her nonfiction pieces like Women and Economics (1898), which examined women’s roles in society and their basis on socially-constructed gender—rather than the ostensible basis of biological sex—and urged women to break free of those roles, Gilman also produced fiction works to more subersively introduce her beliefs into the mainstream. The most notable such piece, which has persevered as a topic of psychoanalytic feminist debate since its publication in 1892, is The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story following a woman diagnosed with a “slight hysterical tendency” on her prescribed “rest cure,” as she slowly loses her sanity from a lack of sufficient treatment. The story is a clear condemnation of the consequences of patriarchy’s influence on the medical field, namely the tendency of male physicians of the nineteenth century to dismiss women’s psychomedical struggles as trivial, that “there is really nothing the matter” (Gilman 648).

Though Gilman herself “[abominated] being called a feminist” (Butler), this piece has garnered unique celebration—though only since its rediscovery in the 1970s—as a feminist success story of a woman’s “confinement [by] and escape” from the domestic sphere and the debilitating subjugation of the wives, mothers, and daughters who inhabited it (Strohmer). Its recent praise buttresses Gilman’s original intent to “use the story to reform women's mental health treatment” (Roethle). However, in looking past the more evident messaging of The Yellow Wallpaper, one finds a contradictory tone of despair in the literary techniques Gilman employs, whether consciously or subconsciously, that give the novella’s somewhat perplexing conclusion a much less triumphant quality. As evidenced by the central symbol of the enclosed room, the recurring motif of unending patterns, and the narrator’s pervasive suicidal diction, The Yellow Wallpaper, though undeniably a feminist work, is not the inspirational, victorious work of social reformation that it was intended—and is now celebrated—to be.

To illustrate this point, the room in which Gilman’s narrator is sentenced to “rest,” with “that horrid paper,” “a smouldering, unclean yellow,” (649) is a central figure of The Yellow Wallpaper, despite being inhuman and inanimate. It is through Gilman’s personification of the room’s wallpaper with all of the human characteristics of patriarchy, and its cooperation with her narrator’s husband, John, to entrap her narrator, that Gilman spotlights the room itself as a representation of the restrictive, prison-like nature of the domestic sphere. The wallpaper’s pattern is given “two bulbous eyes” which watch “[the narrator] as if it [knows] what a vicious influence it [has]” (649), literally enclosing the narrator in the four-walled room and figuratively circumscribing the narrator to her place under the watchful eye of her husband-patriarch. John is paradoxically “very careful and loving, and hardly lets [the narrator] stir without special direction” (648), and thus the wallpaper keeps her in place too: it captivates her, and the closer she fixates on it, the more she conforms to the confining standards of womanhood as dictated by patriarchal rule. It keeps her stationary, “on this great immovable bed,” “quiet by the hour” (650, 653), as she attempts to overcome its oppressive gaze, only for it to “[slap her] in the face, [knock her] down, and [trample] upon [her]” (653), as man does to woman (Ford). The symbol of the enclosed room, with its bars on its windows and rings in the walls, as it works in conjunction with the panoptical vigilance with which John’s and the wallpaper’s eyes encircle her, imprison her not only physically to her place in the home, but emotionally to a state of silent complacency—it drives her insane, simultaneously to distract her from her own suffering and to render her mentally infirm, unable to resist it.

Such an exercise of enclosure as a representation of and protest against patriarchal oppression has been used a great many times before and since The Yellow Wallpaper (Carlson), but Gilman’s story is unique in that her protagonist never truly escapes from that enclosure. Criticism of the novella tends to disagree with this point, as arguments range from Jon S. Bak’s assertion that the narrator’s “paranoia makes [her] schizophrenic…[which] itself frees her from patriarchal ideas of proper feminine behaviour,” to Paula A. Treichler’s claim that the narrator “follow[s] her own logic, her own perceptions, her own projects” to a satisfying conclusion, “in which madness is seen as a kind of transcendent sanity.” These interpretations ignore a prominent aspect of the story’s conclusion: that, though the narrator has torn down her oppressive wallpaper, she remains entrapped in the four-walled room, self-restrained by her rope, with her oppressor positioned between herself and the only door. She is never freed, and her condition continually worsens as it is fed by her delusions; she is sentenced to maintaining the cycle of her own abuse. As such, this story fails to promote Gilman’s ideals—the reform of the medical field, women’s independence from men, the destruction of the domestic sphere—in that it does nothing to protest against women’s struggles, nor to provide solutions for them, but merely reinforces the vicious cycle of patriarchal oppression.

To continue on a parallel point, the unending pattern is a motif which permeates the text and its subtext, through the wallpaper’s “outside pattern” and through Gilman’s implications that this narrator was not the first such prisoner, nor will she be the last. The wallpaper’s captive power over the narrator stems from its endlessness, the “impertinence of it and the everlastingness,” the way it “makes [her] tired to follow it,” but “[she] will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (650-651). It is this perpetual cyclical pattern which represents the futility of the woman’s fight against patriarchy; the narrator laments, “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are” (653). The continual cycle is what ensares the narrator in yet another, derivative pattern of a rising sense that she is gaining her freedom until the cycle turns and she falls, once again defeated. Gilman understands the struggles that come with the battle for reform, most of which she had experienced from first hand, but her narrator, in ostensibly reflecting Gilman’s aspirations, represents a fight that will inevitably fail. Rather than inciting hope in her women readers that the fight will end, The Yellow Wallpaper depicts a future that is no different from their present, but rather a continuation of their futile cycle of oppression—which is itself depicted in every interaction between the narrator and her patriarch-husband. At its worst, the narrator begs her husband to let them leave, and he “pretends to be very loving and kind,” until he silences her with “Bless her little heart!” and refuses to hear another word about it (655). Ceaselessly John infantilizes her, dismisses her very real suffering, and keeps her constantly under his dominion in doing so.

Further, the condition of the room itself, and the house it is in, implies that the narrator’s experience is not unique, but as part of that repetitive cycle. The manor which houses the narrator’s distress is “a hereditary estate,” which, like the agony of womankind, has been passed down through generations of men, establishing its structural stability. The yellow-wallpapered room itself shows signs of generations of wear: the wallpaper is already “stripped off…in great patches,” “floor is scratched and gouged and splintered,” the “bedstead is fairly gnawed,” and along each wall is “a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over” (648-656). However, these are not the types of wear one would expect from a retired nursery; they paint the specific picture—though the reader cannot wholly envision it until the end—of a woman tearing at the wallpaper, scraping her nails across the floor as she crawls, teething at the bedstead that stands, immovable, as she slinks around the perimeter of the room, “round and round and round” (654). That this wear existed before the narrator and her husband rented the mansion, and that each sign of wear corresponds with the narrator’s behavior as she descends into insanity, suggests that she is not the only one to experience such a mental break. Being a representation of all women, and their suffering under the subjugation of men, the narrator should not be isolated in her struggle; in fact, historically it was the simultaneity of the women’s movement, and the unifying empathy which one woman felt for another, which largely amassed the twentieth-century women’s movement such that they won their suffrage. But it is the striking similarity between the narrator’s experience and that of the woman who was imprisoned there many years before her (648) that ignites in the reader a sense of dread, rather than of fellowship or support. If the woman who suffered before the narrator did not truly escape—and nor did the narrator herself, who suffered after—nor will, one may infer, the woman who is fated to suffer next.

As a last example, throughout the text permeates a diction of suicide and of self-destruction, most notably in reference to the wallpaper’s pattern and to the behavior of the narrator during the peak of her psychosis. It is this diction which subliminally, rather than plainly, evokes in the reader a feeling of terror, amplifying the horrific scene of the narrator’s mental deterioration. Like a hanged woman, the pattern “lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down” (649). She begins to see the deaths of all the women who were tortured to the point of death before her: “[the pattern] strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off” (654). The only places where the wallpaper’s interminable pattern ever ends are those at which it “suddenly [commits] suicide—[plunges] off…[destroys itself]” (648), perhaps suggesting, quite grimly, that death is a woman’s only escape from the prison of patriarchy. As she begins to tear at the wallpaper, she deplores the way it “sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes…just shriek with derision!” (655). The wallpaper itself not only brings about its own destruction by tantalizing the narrator into insanity, it also masochistically relishes the way she “kills” it, continuing to taunt her feeble attempts to escape its clutches.

Her mental state continuing to devolve, the narrator debates committing suicide herself: “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.” Deciding against it, she contemplates how she will trap, and possibly hang, the woman behind the “outside pattern”—“I’ve got a rope up here….If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!” (655). This is a stark change from the way she had previously hoped to personally set the skulking woman free: “I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself” (654). As her torment worsens, she comes to equate herself with the woman behind the pattern, the woman who came before her; her sense of identity becomes confused as she feels the compounded pain of every woman’s agony under male oppression. The woman behind the pattern, at first a mere reflection of the narrator, develops into the narrator’s mirror-enemy, ready with a rope to hinder her own escape, to tie herself up, to step through the pattern and strangle herself in it. This language that is wrought with death, yet the story itself does not bring about any deaths, gives the narration a tone of despondence, of grief; it is as if Gilman is mourning the death of her narrator to the wallpaper, and thus the death of woman to the patriarchy, before it even happens. In portending a fate even worse than life in the domestic sphere, the story’s tonal dejection fails to inspire the reader to continue to fight, contradicting Gilman’s very goals in writing it.

To conclude these thoughts, this is not all to say that The Yellow Wallpaper is not a successful piece of feminist literature—though Gilman would scoff at such a notion. The singular achievement of creating a story that instills in the reader, man or woman, such a devastating feeling of existential dread as this, so as to accurately reflect Gilman’s and other women’s experiences at the misogynistic hands of physicians like Weir Mitchell, is significant in itself. The cultural upset that it produced at the time of publication is proof that The Yellow Wallpaper was successful in condemning the patriarchy and its hegemonic masculinity, its oppressive control over women, and its infantilization and trivialization of women’s issues. However, as evidenced by the above, and its lack of any acclaim at its publication, the novella failed to accomplish Gilman’s goal to motivate her readers toward societal, economic, or political change. That it is celebrated today as “[effecting] social change, not just [representing] reality” (Strohmer), is a misguided view, influenced by a presentist conviction that what is socially accepted and culturally affecting today would have been just as accepted and affecting over a century ago. In reality, Gilman was ahead of her time in writing The Yellow Wallpaper, and it is unfortunate that the “rest cure” would be renounced before the story was revitalized and appreciated, but to have a legacy as intelligent and impactful—though somewhat retroactively—as the oeuvre Gilman left behind means that she will receive her due acclamation through the centuries to come.

Works Cited

Bak, John S. “Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 31, no. 1, winter 1994, pp. 39+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15356232/GLS?u=nysl_me_pace&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=61b67103. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Butler, Halle. “The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Paris Review.” The Paris Review, 11 March 2021, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/03/11/the-trouble-with-charlotte-perkins-gilman/. Accessed 7 April 2024.

Carlson, Hannah. “Enclosed Women: On the Use of Enclosure Imagery by 19th-Century Female Authors to Expose Societal Oppression.” California State University Stanislaus, https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/honors/documents/journals/Edgings/EnclosedWomen.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2024.

Ford, Karen. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Women’s Discourse.” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 182, Gale, 2013. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420114788/GLS?u=nysl_me_pace&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=e6c9b078. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024. Originally published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 4, no. 2, 1985, pp. 309-314.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2024.

Roethle, Christopher. “A Healthy Play of Mind: Art and the Brain in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” American Literary Realism, vol. 52, no. 2, Wntr 2020, pp. 147+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643053050/GLS?u=nysl_me_pace&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=cbac7a17. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Strohmer, Shaun. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 182, Gale, 2013. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/ZJZOCM255661556/GLS?u=nysl_me_pace&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=7bdee1ed. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Treichler, Paula A. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 3, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 61–77. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/463825. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.