Like most of my blog posts from the last five years, the idea for this post came to me months ago and then sat in my drafts folder. When I returned to the draft, it was only one and a half cryptic paragraphs and I couldn't quite remember what My Point had been. (If you are a regular reader or you read far enough back in my blog, you'll know that having A Point - or not having one - is an important part of my writing process.)
So, I decided to read the short story again and blog my thoughts, and see if I could conjure up the sequence of ideas that comprised the planned draft. Someone once told me that my instant messages were like stream of consciousness -- I hit enter at the end of every thought rather than at the end of every sentence or paragraph. I suppose this is a bit like that.
The very first line, which is also the first paragraph of the short story, suggests that the writer is some kind of impostor or that she is out of place. She describes her and her husband as "mere ordinary people", and because this is the late 1800s, she means economically = class = lineage.
She describes their rental home as "secure ancestral halls", which seems rather pompous now, but I suppose was accurate then. Perhaps I am simply misreading her pride and pleasure in living in a beautiful place. I tend to be a spendthrift and "A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate" sounds like unnecessary expense for two people.
The other thing the first line does is introduce their home "for the summer" as a presence in "The Yellow Wallpaper". I was tempted to describe the building as a 'character', but that suggests some kind of permanence (not the fixed concrete kind, but more the flowing cement kind), because identity, especially when you're writing a character, requires a common thread, something holding the conflicting parts of a character together. (There are so many holes in that statement, but I am going to leave it be for now.)
As you'll see (or as I'll argue), the building is more a reflection of the narrator's character than a character on its own.
The best thing about the short story is the sense of unease that stalks every line and makes the reader wince. It's like hunting a mythological creature from the sea -- a giant squid, maybe -- that, you'll discover at the last moment, is really hunting you. This unease first appears like a darting dark shadow and accompanying ripples in an otherwise calm sea that rears its head like that of a sea-beast eyeing its prey at the end of the first page.
The narrator notes there is "something queer" about the house because it is being rented out "so cheaply" and because it was empty for so long. (She also describes her assertion as "proud", which is the very last thing I would call the woman in the pages that follow.) The scales of the sea-beast's spine breach the surface as she notes that her husband "laughs" at her justified concerns, "but one expects that in marriage".
I'm not married, but "laughing at your partner" is not part of the marriage vows.
Like women have done throughout history, the narrator justifies her husband's 'micro-aggression' (I believe that's the 'it' term) saying that he "is practical in the extreme" and believes only in things that can be "put down in numbers". You see, Johnnie boy is a doctor and one of "good standing". I struggle to reconcile the two as medical data is qualitative as well as quantitative, but okay.
The narrator then makes a crack about voicing her concerns on "dead paper".
Further proving that she is rational, the narrator writes that her doctor-husband might be the reason she is not recovering (note: this is the first time we time she confides in us about her sickness): "You see," she says, "he does not believe I am sick!" Instead, Dr Husband minimises her illness by diagnosing it as "temporary nervous depression, -- a slight hysterical tendency".
Ah right. Here we have The History of Women's Mental Health in the Western World aka There's Nothing to See Here and Women Be Tripping.
Instead of getting angry, Mrs Doctor shrugs and says "what can one do?" Twice. At first, I was angry at her compliance, but then she writes that her brother is a doctor, too, and he agrees with her husband. Well, obviously, she's the problem then. Darn these women and their emotions.
So she complies with their treatments (for a disease that they say does not exist). And here we come upon my favourite line in the short story: part of her treatment is that she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until [she] is well again". I did some research and as the narrator suggests, many doctors believed that "women's problems" were the result of them thinking. (That's it -- the full stop's in the right place.) Women were just not psychologically strong enough to have thoughts. So the treatment was often to "not think". It was called "the rest cure".
I wish I were making this up but I'm not that creative.
Once again, the narrator disagrees with her husband and her brother. She thinks that the best treatment would be work and change (I would argue for purpose and a routine), but "what is one to do?" Indeed.
She does rebel by writing (what she is writing is not clear) and concedes that it is exhausting -- not the act of writing but of rebellion.
She tires of the topic so she changes the topic to -- can you guess? The house. The first thing she says is that it is "beautiful" and the second is that it is "quite alone", surrounded by "hedges and walls and gates that lock". Well, if that isn't a metaphor for something, I'll burn my English literature degree. She goes on about the gardens for a paragraph and mentions how the house stood empty for years ...
And then she says, "there is something strange about the house -- I can feel it". Isn't this kind of intuition part of what got you into this situation, Mrs Doc? Best keep that close to your chest. Oh no, too late. Mrs Doc tells her husband about her feeling and he tells her it's a "draught". I, too, struggle to differentiate between strangeness and a breeze -- it's an easy mistake to make.
Finally! She gets angry with her husband for thinking she's an imbecile and I am with her for all of two seconds before I notice the adverb "unreasonably". Now she attributes her entirely justified emotion of anger to a disease of the emotions that she doesn't really think she has. If she has a condition, it's in that tangled mess.
He won't even let her have the room she wants! She wants one on the ground floor because it opens onto the patio and the windows are bordered by flowers, but no. The fun police insist that they use a bedroom upstairs and again she justifies his iron rule, saying he's so "careful and loving". Those are not two adjectives I would usually put together and, to be honest, I'm willing Mrs Doc to run as if this were a horror movie and they had just discovered that the phone no longer worked.
Her husband is treating her like a child, which is perfect, because she reveals that the room they end up taking (the one he chooses) is -- wait for it -- the nursery. Next level of the metaphor locked and loaded.
Mrs Doc describes how "big" and "airy" the room is, with "air and sunshine galore", but I have watched enough horror movies and read enough ghost stories to know that bad things happen in broad daylight too. And the fact that the "windows are barred" is definitely not alarming, even though she immediately notes that they are barred as a safety precaution for "little children". Is that a thing? Do children often hurl themselves out of windows?
She then notes that the wallpaper is ripped -- but it's ripped above her bed to as far as she can reach, contradicting her little children theory. So she says it looks "as if a boys' school had used it". Again, is this a thing? Do boys at school rip the wallpaper from the walls?
The narrator rambles on for a minute about the artistic quality of the wallpaper and then chucks the 'S' word at you like a practical joke that isn't funny. Still describing the wallpaper, she writes that it's made up of "lame, uncertain curves" that "suddenly commit suicide -- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-off contradictions". Obviously the narrator has death on the brain if that's the first metaphor she thinks of for wallpaper patterns.
There's some more description of the "repellant" yellow-orange wallpaper, before Mrs Doc hurriedly notes that she must stop writing because Mr Doc is coming and "he hates to have me write a word". Luckily for her, for the next page or so she doesn't feel like writing, even though her husband is away day and even night -- say what? Apparently he's tending to "serious" cases. Oh, I'm sure he is.
The contradictions now pick up the pace: the narrator says, in one breath, that her case is not serious, and in the next, that "John does not know how much I really suffer".
Then comes a line that I highlighted on first reading: "He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him". I beg to differ, but that's another post.
Here we have the first mention of the baby -- her baby. But she doesn't talk about the child himself. She describes how "Mary is so good with him" and how she can't be with him because of her nervousness. At this point, my bet is on post-partum depression, which sounds like a darn good reason "to suffer" to me.
She quickly changes the subject back to the wallpaper. Hubby won't replace the paper because apparently the worst thing you can do for a depressive is "give way to such fancies". He convinces her that this is her idea, that the room a moment ago she was calling "atrocious" is now "airy and comfortable", by hugging her and calling her his "blessed little goose". I genuinely want to throw up.
She likes the room, she now says, but not the "horrid wallpaper".
Mrs Doc describes how this room gives her a view of the garden and the bay and a "shaded lane" that runs from a dock to the house. She thinks she can see people walking along the lane, which doesn't sound unreasonable, but of course hubby gaslights her by advising her not to "give way to fancy" (again) because a "nervous weakness" like hers will lead to all sorts of ... well, more fancies. Fancies, being bad, I gather.
"So I try," she writes.
She thinks that writing might relieve some of the "press of ideas" she feels, but she's too exhausted -- that's definitely not a symptom of depression. I mean, it's not a symptom, it's one of the primary symptoms of depression, but I'm not a doctor.
I don't know much about abusive relationships, but to recap, we have a lot of gaslighting and some isolation. I have a feeling there's some love-bombing ("blessed little goose") and now she tells us that she can only see her family when she gets well, because "he would as soon put fireworks in my pillowcase as to let have those stimulating people about now".
And we're only 30% of the way through to this ode to wallpaper.
At this point, it occurs to me that I should separate this post into several shorter posts, but for now, I'm going to keep going. I may insert headings as signposts for the lazy (I mean, you're reading this 'summary', rather than the real thing, so ...).
Of course, it's the wallpaper's fault that she can't see her family -- its "vicious influence", "impertinence" and "everlastingness", represented in an area where the pieces of wallpaper don't align and one part of the pattern is higher than the other. As an editor, I can appreciate how frustrating it is when things are not done perfectly, so I'm with her, but I don't usually blame misused semicolons for my emotional (in)stability.
But then she gets caught up childhood memories, describing how mini her would lie awake at night, afraid of "blank walls and plain furniture". OK, she doesn't say 'afraid'. She says she would get both "entertainment and terror", which tracks with what we already know about her and, quite honestly, describes her relationship with her husband.
She talks about the furniture for a bit and then we're back at the 'torn' wallpaper. It has a companion in the "scratched and gouged and splintered" floor. What were these boys up to?! "But," she says, "I don't mind a bit -- only the paper."
I'm not buying the excuse that this used to be a children's nursery or a boys' school dormitory. Unless they were feral children who had been captured and imprisoned in the house and had somehow gotten hold of weapons. I can't think of a more logical excuse for the state of the bedroom, but whatever it is, it's not unarmed children.
Luckily, a perfect example of femininity appears to compare our heroine against: the doctor's sister. "She is a perfect, an enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession." I love her already.
Mrs Doc has spied the approach of her sister-in-law through the window, so there's time to wax on about the wallpaper for only another two paragraphs: there's a second pattern that you can only see in certain light, one that's "strange, provoking, formless" and "seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design". That definitely does not describe our heroine -- the sense that there is something else happening beneath the front she presents to her husband and others. I'm reading too much into it, right?
There's a break, during which the Fourth of July takes place, and Mrs Doc sees her family, and she says she's exhausted even though Jennie (the sister-in-law) saw to everything. That'll happen when you're depressed. Hubby seems to be getting frustrated because he threatens to send his wife away for treatment and while Hubby is bad, another doctor is bound to be even worse.
"I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
"Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone."
But there is a silver lining: Doc is away most of the time now, so Mrs Doc gets to spend time walking in the garden and sitting on the porch alone, rather than sitting in the house staring at wallpaper. But of course it's never far from her mind!
I'm getting tired of describing wallpaper -- I don't know how the author kept it up -- so I'm considering a placeholder: [WALLPAPER]. I feel like I'm betraying your trust in me but this is also my blog and I can do what I want so [WALLPAPER].
Nah, I can't handle the sense of betrayal, so I came back just to fill this in. Mrs Doc tries to follow the pattern to "some sort of a conclusion" but finds it's not repeated by "any laws of radiation, or alteration, or repetition, or symmetry", but that it is repeated "by the breadths", you know, as wallpaper is. As a result the "sprawling outlines" create "slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase". Rarely do I meet a metaphor that fully obscures meaning, but this one is a contender. I have absolutely no idea what seaweed chasing more seaweed looks like.
Then Mrs Doc takes a nap (in a bed that is bolted down to the floor) because she is exhausted from describing the pattern of the wallpaper so indescribably.
Our heroine's fatigue is getting worse. She feels a pressure to express herself and a relief when she does, but she says, "the effort is getting to be greater than the relief". Doc's response is "tonics and things", along with "ale and wine and rare meat". That is why doctors get a bad rap: bad doctors.
Perkins published this short story in 1892. Western psychology was only a few decades old and Freud was still obsessed with, well, his nethers, but she knew that the notion of hysteria was ridiculous and that the conventional treatments of the time were counterintuitive. However, it would be many more decades before doctors would come around to her way of thinking -- and how many lives were contaminated in the meantime?
According to one source, "hysterical neurosis" was only removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. But most doctors were no longer diagnosing "hysteria", in favour of more refined and appropriate descriptions of mental illness by then, right? Wrong. As late as the 1970s, two doctors misdiagnosed an outbreak of myalgic encephalomyelitis as hysteria. That's 80 years later.
Anyway, Mrs Doc tries to have a reasonable conversation with her husband about her options (granted she ends up crying) but he treats her like a child, picking her up, putting her to bed and reading to her until she falls asleep.
Then comes a gem: that she is simply not trying hard enough. "He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let my silly fancies run away with me."
At least the baby is safe from the wallpaper! That's not my thought, but hers: At least "the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper". "What a fortunate escape!" She seems to suggest that she is accepting a kind of punishment so that her child doesn't have to -- and this is the saddest part of the short story so far.
But she's only distracted from the wallpaper for a few moments, because only Mrs Doc can see the meaning in the wallpaper, which is becoming clearer every day. "It is only the same shape" despite have no pattern except breadth; "it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern". She forgets her mission here, which is to protect her son from being exposed to this ugliness, and thinks "I wish John would take me away from here".
I am getting whiplash.
Our heroine tries to discuss leaving with her husband, because "he is so wise, and ... loves me so." So she waits for him to fall asleep and then broaches the subject. Well, first, she waits for the moonlight (which she hates sometimes) to make the wallpaper creepier than normal, until "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern" in its desire to get out, so much so that she had to get up and touch it to see if it was moving, and then she asks him if they can leave.
When she wakes him up, he asks her "What is it, little girl?"
I'm leaving a bit of a gap here for my blood pressure to go back to normal. Because if someone asked me that ... middle of the night or no ... even if I was touching the wallpaper to check if there was a woman trying to get out ... well, there would be problems.
Anyway, she asks and he says no, because she is really better, whether she realises it or not. Trust him, because he's a doctor, yadda yadda. She must be getting better because she argues with him.
To which he responds: "Bless her little heart ... she shall be as sick as she pleases!"
She leaves that without touching it and merely asks that he not leave her alone again before the lease on the house ends, which is only another three weeks. He assures her, and once more tries to convince her "Really, dear, you are better!" I'm proud of her as she starts to disagree with him, but then he gives her a "stern, reproachful look" like a father chiding a teenager. He gaslights her for a bit because he's "a physician" and she has "a temperament like yours" and then they sleep.
Well, no, he sleeps and she tries to figure out where the pattern in the wallpaper (which doesn't exist) begins and ends.
And we're at 60%.
When morning comes, Mrs Doc is still trying to figure out the pattern. Except that, "by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law" that is "torturing". Essentially, you try to follow it and it evades you, slapping you in the face and trampling all over you. The outside pattern, in particular, is like "a fungus" -- "a toadstool in joints", whatever that means.
She confides in us that the pattern changes with the light -- but she is the only one who seems to notice, which is "why I watch it always". That's definitely why. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are struggling with mental illness and the only therapeutic advice you are getting is to eat well and spend all your time alone, away from family, doing nothing and this external factor gives you something to fixate on and obsess over.
Luckily, Mrs Doc is being a good girl. She is sleeping a lot -- no, wait, she pretends to sleep. Why would you do that?
She writes, "I am getting a little afraid of John" and his sister, too, because they ... seem to be colluding with the wallpaper. Paranoia? Not our "little girl"!
On the bright side, ensuring that no one knows the secret of the wallpaper (i.e. the woman trapped inside trying to get out) gives our heroine something to focus on. It gives her a purpose. So she eats well and says little and sleeps a lot (or at least, seems to) and laughs at her husband's unfunny jokes, and her doctor-husband is thrilled.
But in reality, she is watching the wallpaper: "There are always new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count ..."
After a week of fog and rain, the wallpaper unleashes another weapon: its smell, which "creeps all over the house". "I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs." Luckily, she doesn't consider any drastic action as part of her final battle against the wallpaper. "I thought seriously of burning the house," she says.
But then she gets used to the smell, so her focus shifts back to the colour of the wallpaper. Because she's noticed a new mark behind the furniture that goes around the room: "round and round and round -- it makes me dizzy!"
Then our heroine makes a horrifying discovery: there are many women trying to escape the wallpaper, but "the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" The discovery wouldn't be so bad, she says, "If those heads were covered or taken off". That's practical, I guess.
But no wait, that's not all. It gets worse: "that woman gets out in the daytime!" Our heroine knows this because she has seen her. She knows it's the same woman because she creeps and "most woman do not creep by daylight". She hasn't seen her in the house, but in the lane she can see from the bedroom window -- the one which her husband said no one used. She understands exactly why the woman creeps and hides, she tells us. "It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight."
And in an instant, we know the creeping woman is her, our heroine. "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight," she tells us. And "I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself."
After that revelation, our heroine goes back to feigning ignorance. Now her obsession is removing the wallpaper. But she doesn't mean to simply pull it from the wall: she means to dissect it, pulling the patterns apart. And there's more to her plan, but her paranoia has now obliterated all sense and she doesn't dare "trust people too much".
She was being a good girl, but her hubby is onto her now and (I hate to be on his side but) she sees him as the enemy now. When he asks questions about her behaviour, where once she have seen that as evidence he loved her, now she states, "As if I couldn't see through him!"
Because obviously the wallpaper has corrupted him.
I almost feel guilty that I've maligned the doctor's character so much to this point. Almost.
The husband and his wife are due to move back home the next day, with the room empty of everything except the bed (bolted to the floor, remember?) so Mrs Doc begins to pull the wallpaper down with the help of the woman inside: "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled".
Her sister-in-law is a bit disconcerted, but ultimately doesn't protest when Mrs Doc says she wants to spend the night in the empty room.
That night, she strikes, locking the door to the bedroom and throwing the key out of the window. She has a rope, which she justifies saying that she will use it to tie up the creeping woman. If you think she has any rational thought left, that leaves when she bites a piece of the bed frame off in frustration because she cannot move it. Then she peels off the remaining wallpaper she can reach ... "and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!"
She is, however, rational enough to know she shouldn't jump out the window because "a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued". At least she still has her priorities straight.
The last few pages are hard to read.
Now she merges with the woman/women in the wallpaper. She sees the women from the window and she wonders, "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?" She fastens the rope around her (though it's not clear if it's by her waist or neck) and circles the room, her shoulder pressed up against the wall, so that no one can take her outside. "I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes at night, and that is hard!" she says.
Her husband finally finds the key and opens the door, but, ironically, faints as soon as he sees her -- so she has to step over him as she continues to pace the circumference of the room, over and over again. The last thing she says to him is, "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can't put me back!"
So our heroine wins, in a sense, by defying her husband, but at what expense? What other outcome was there in a society that denied her agency? She could either take that agency and be mad, or she could be "well" and live under her husband's thumb. But we know that, beyond the story, she's most likely going to institutionalised because of her behaviour, so even this choice is none at all.
Here we have the literal "madwoman in the attic" (coined in 1979 with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gunbar's book, which you can access here for free) -- an unnamed woman suffering post-partum depression, treated with isolation and a lack of stimulation. That's where the taste in my mouth was coming from.
As I said at the beginning, the title might as well be The History of Women's Mental Health in the Western World aka There's Nothing to See Here and Women Be Tripping, but it's a lot less snappy than "The Yellow Wallpaper".
Disclaimer: I know that I have been glib about a very unglib topic, but that's my blog and it signifies my extreme frustration with the lack of sensitivity with which people still view depression today. If you experience depression, please tell me how many times people have told you that you just need to exercise more?! I call it the Virgin Active Cure. If I had to blog my serious reactions, this post would be about two lines long and say pretty much this.
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