Decoding ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: Feminist Critique
Key Insights from the Story
- Jane is isolated from everyone but her husband and nurse, confined to a room where her mental state deteriorates, and the yellow wallpaper begins to take on a life of its own.
- She perceives a trapped woman behind the wallpaper, struggling to escape.
- Driven by her delusion, Jane tears down the wallpaper, believing she is freeing the trapped woman.
- Upon discovering Jane’s complete mental breakdown, her husband faints.
Context and Themes
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a semi-autobiographical short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It vividly describes the oppressive “rest cure” treatment for nervous disorders, prescribed by the famous physician Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. The narrative powerfully illustrates the submissive, childlike obedience expected of women by male authority figures, a societal norm at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Protagonist’s Plight
The unnamed protagonist of the story is rendered helpless, unable to express her own needs. Her physician husband, John, takes her to a country house for recuperation from a nervous condition. The reader immediately recognizes John’s condescending attitude toward his wife. Against her will, she is relegated to a third-floor room, previously a nursery. Symbolically, this room with the yellow wallpaper serves as a prison, restricting her, like a child, from intellectual activities such as reading and writing. Initially, the narrator rebels against these constraints by secretly keeping a diary. However, when John discovers her disobedience, she is chastised, and her diary is cruelly destroyed.
Isolation and Control
Social interactions are also minimized. John, often lecturing in other cities, leaves the narrator without emotional support for days. When he is home, his conversations are patronizing, and he dismisses her concerns about her deteriorating condition. Her perceived role is to comfort him and blindly trust that her own health is improving. John’s self-absorption prevents him from recognizing his wife’s worsening state.
Jennie’s Role: A Reflection of Societal Norms
Jennie, John’s sister and the household manager, exemplifies the restricted role of women during this era. She busies herself with decorating and supervising the kitchen. Unquestioningly, she carries out John’s orders to monitor the narrator’s activities, even when her own observations suggest that the doctor’s prescribed treatment is detrimental to the patient. Nevertheless, she obeys blindly until it is too late to reverse the effects of the narrator’s descent into madness.
Symbolism of the Yellow Wallpaper
The powerful, intricate pattern in the yellow wallpaper resembles bars, confining the protagonist within her world of loneliness, helplessness, and infantilism. Deprived of intellectual stimulation, the narrator’s imagination conjures a world behind the paper where captive women wait helplessly to be freed. Ironically, she herself is one of these women seeking liberation. Destroying the wallpaper becomes her desperate act to dismantle the stifling societal mores that demand female subservience to men, a symbolic attempt to free women from male dominance.