“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a young woman who relieves herself of her domestic duties, like caring for her child, and is encouraged – by her husband – to isolate herself in the upstairs nursery of a secluded house. While confined to this space, the narrator becomes very aware of and familiar with the surroundings of her room, and her obsession with certain elements signals a decline in her mental health. Gilman portrays the setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in such a way that it explains the narrator’s predicament. While the narrator prefers to live on the main floor, her husband, John, decides that the nursery upstairs will be a better fit. She is not physically locked within this room, but she is mentally and emotionally imprisoned. The nursery and the items that surround her further explain this sense of confinement and isolation. Therefore, the setting of this story reveals both the way in which women are controlled and imprisoned by the overwhelming authority of their male counterparts, and the predetermined roles women have in society.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. She married her first husband in 1884, and she “proved to be totally unsuited to the domestic routine of marriage…which eventuated in complete nervous collapse” (Encyclopædia Britannica). The inability to conform to her gendered role and her subsequent mental decline are speculated to have been the inspiration for “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Biography.com). Gilman was a strong feminist and activist for women’s rights, claiming that women should gain economic independence; she argued that we needed to “redefine domestic and child-care chores as social responsibilities to be centralized in the hands of those particularly suited and trained for them” (Encyclopædia Britannica). While the narrator within “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not necessarily Gilman herself, her biography is helpful to know in order to contextualize the conflicts raised by the story.
The culturally sanctioned role of middle-class women during the nineteenth century was limited to “marriage and motherhood” and “both choices resulted in domestic dependency” on their male counterpart (Cruea 187). Additionally, women were also expected to imagine themselves as reliant on men for protection because of their supposed “emotional and physical frailty” that made them “prone to fainting and illness” (Cruea 189). According to the science of the time period, a woman “dared not exert herself too much physically or be emotionally startled for fear of her health…. [W]omen were considered to have ‘much more delicate nervous system[s] than…men’” (Cruea 189). These portrayals of women are directly seen within “The Yellow Wallpaper” through the narrator’s health condition, medical advice, and dependence on her husband. However, as J. Samaine Lockwood argues, Gilman’s story is now considered “a representative feminist text (if not the representative feminist text of the nineteenth-century United States)” and is “the last in a sequence of three imaginative works that Gilman wrote in early 1890 that explore gender in relation to radicalized national and regional histories” (Lockwood 86). Gilman’s text strengthens the feminist attitude of the time period through challenging the prevailing role and status of women.
Gilman constructs this story with the particular setting of the hidden nursery in order to emphasize the restraint and separation of the narrator. It is, ultimately, the narrator’s inability to fulfill her domestic duties that causes John to recommend she spend time resting in the nursery of a home which they rent for the summer. The room is filled with many symbolic objects that can be directly related to her mental and emotional imprisonment: a bed that is nailed down, barred windows, gates, and the wallpaper; the location of the house and the use of locks further emphasize the narrator’s predicament. Much of the setting of this room has been forced upon her, and she realizes that there is a lot that she cannot change. This reminds the narrator that she is not the one in control and she is essentially powerless, since she is unable to move the furniture to how she would like. Additionally, while she attempts to peel much of the wallpaper off the wall, she is unable to remove it fully and this causes her to be completely consumed by it. In a world where she would ordinarily have much of the control over her household’s appearance, her inability to change the way in which her household, or room, is presented, is dehumanizing for her.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is extremely relevant and important to our historical moment. The narrator’s lack of control over her situation as a woman in society, most times enforced by the male figure in her life, is a feeling still well-known today. However, the narrator’s ability to prevail as the person in control of her own situation is what makes this story truly matter within its historical moment; similarly, the way in which this text has laid the foundation for later feminist texts is important for our historical time period.
