The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Inwood Commons Publishing

The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman Inwood Commons Modern Editions

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

Inwood Commons Modern Editions The Inwood Commons Modern Editions gently update out-of-copyright texts by women and people of color for modern readers. Texts are edited for clarity, ease of reading, social mores, and currency values to help you connect to the writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s message. Correct spellings are used throughout. Best of all, the original texts are included in appendices, so that you may read either or both. Some editions also include essays by scholars to explain context and highlight ideas.

The Yellow Wallpaper CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Inwood Commons Modern Edition

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Published by Inwood Commons Publishing Suite 5D 115 Vermilyea Avenue New York, NY 10034 USA To purchase a paperback or ebook visit: www.inwoodcommons.com ISBN: 978-0-9978187-2-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-9978187-3-4 (ebk) Publisher: Wendy Fuller

Contents The Yellow Wallpaper 1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896 27 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” National Endowment for the Humanities

Trapped and Silenced: Claustrophobic Fear in “The Yellow Wallpaper” 35 WANG Fanghui The Yellow Wallpaper 45 Giovanna Tallone Appendix A The Yellow Wall-paper (Original) 55 Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Appendix B Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896 (Original) 79 Appendix C Why I WroteÂ The Yellow Wallpaper (Original) Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1891)

It’s not often that ordinary people like John and me rent historic homes for the summer. A colonial mansion, an estate, I’d say a haunted house, and reach the limit of poetic license, but that would be asking too much. Still I’ll proudly say that there is something weird about it. Otherwise, why rent it so cheaply? And why has it been uninhabited so long? John laughs at me, of course, but you expect that in a marriage. John is extremely practical. He’s got no patience with faith, an intense annoyance with superstition, and he scoffs at anything not to be felt and seen and put down in numbers.

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John is a doctor, and perhaps (I wouldn’t say it to a living soul, of course, but this is just paper and gives me relief) perhaps that is one reason I’m not getting well faster. You see, he doesn’t believe I’m sick. And what can you do? If a well-respected doctor, and your own husband, assures friends and relatives that there’s really nothing wrong with you but temporary depression—a slight anxiety—what can you do? My brother is also a doctor, and also well-respected, and he says the same thing. So I take meds—whatever they are, and eat organic, and go on wellness retreats, and get outside, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I’m well again. Personally, I disagree with them. Personally, I believe that pleasant work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what can you do? I did write for a while in spite of them; but it is exhausting— having to be so sneaky about it, or else face heavy opposition. I sometimes think that in my mental state if I had less opposition and more company and mental stimulation—but John says the worst thing I can do is to think about my mental state, and I admit it always makes me feel bad. So I’ll leave it alone and talk about the house. The most beautiful place. It’s on its own, standing a ways back from the road, at least three miles from town. It makes me think of English places that you read about, because there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

There is a delicious garden. I’ve never seen such a garden— large and shady, full of box-hedge-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with benches under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they’re all ruined now. There were some legal problems, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyway, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghost story, I’m afraid, but I don’t care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlit evening, but he said what I felt was a draft, and shut the window. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I didn’t used to be so sensitive. I think it’s due to this anxiety. But John says if I feel that way, I’ll lose self-control; so I take pains to control myself—around him, at least, and that makes me very tired. I don’t like our room at all. I wanted one downstairs that opened onto the patio and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz curtains. But John wouldn’t hear of it. He said there was only one window and not enough room for two beds, and no room close enough for him if he slept in another. He’s very careful and loving, and hardly lets me move without directions. I have a schedule prescription for every hour of the day; he takes all worries from me, and so I feel ungrateful not to value it more. He said we came here only for me, that I was to just relax and have all the fresh air I could get. “Your type of exercise depends on your strength, honey,” he said, “and your food somewhat on

The Yellow Wallpaper

your appetite; but fresh air you can absorb all the time.” So we moved into the nursery at the top of the house. It’s a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and fresh air and sunshine galore. It was a nursery first and then a playroom and a gymnasium, I can see; because the windows are barred for little kids, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and wallpaper look as if rowdy kids had abused it. It’s stripped off—the wallpaper—in big patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a big place on the other side of the room low down. I’ve never seen a worse wallpaper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It’s boring enough to confuse your eye in following it, bold enough to constantly irritate and provoke you to study it, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little way they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is gross, almost revolting; a smouldering filthy yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It’s a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the kids hated it. I’d hate it, too, if I had to live in this room long. There comes John, and I must put this away—he hates me to write a word. §

We’ve been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing, since that first day.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

I’m sitting by the window now, in this awful nursery, and there’s nothing to keep me from writing as much as I want, except lack of strength. John is away all day, and even some nights when his patients’ cases are serious. I’m glad my case isn’t serious. But these anxiety attacks are really depressing. John doesn’t know how much I really suffer. He knows there’s no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. Of course it’s only anxiety. It does bother on me not to do what’s expected of me in any way. I meant to help John, to let him have a real rest and some comfort, and here I’m a comparative burden already. Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I can—to dress and interact, and order things. It’s lucky Mary is so good with the baby. Such a sweet baby. And yet I can’t be with him, it makes me so nervous. I suppose John has never been anxious in his life. He makes fun of me about this wallpaper. At first he was going to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for an anxiety patient than to give in to fantasies. He said that after the wallpaper was replaced it would be the bedframe, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the top of the stairs, and so on. “You know the place is doing you good,” he said, “and really, hon, I don’t want to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental.” “Then let’s move downstairs,” I said, “there are really pretty rooms there.”

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Then he took me in his arms and called me a silly billy, and said he’d move down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it painted as well. But he’s right about the beds and windows and things. It’s as airy and comfortable a room as anyone could want, and, of course, I wouldn’t be so thoughtless as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim. I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, everything but that terrible wallpaper. Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There’s a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always think I see people walking on the many paths and in the arbors, but John warns me not to give in to fantasy even a little. He says that with my imagination and habit of story-telling, anxiety like mine is bound to lead to all kinds of delusions, and that I should use my will and common sense to prevent that. So I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the pressure of ideas and relax me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try. It’s so discouraging not to have any advice and camaraderie about my work. When I get really well, John says we’ll invite Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he’d rather put fireworks in my pillowcase than let me have that exciting couple around now. I wish I could get well faster. But I shouldn’t think about that. This wallpaper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

There’s a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get really angry with the cheekiness of it and the foreverness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There’s one place where two widths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I’ve never seen so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have. I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store. I remember what a kind wink the knobs of our big, old dresser used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too scary I could always hop into that chair and be safe. The furniture in this room is no worse than mismatched, however, because we had to bring it all up from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery stuff out, and no wonder. I’ve never seen damage like the kids have made here. The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticks closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred. Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster is dug out here and there, and this big heavy bed, which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars. But I don’t mind it a bit—only the wallpaper.

The Yellow Wallpaper

There comes John’s sister. Such a sweet girl she is, and so careful with me. I must not let her find me writing. She’s a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and wants nothing better. I truly believe she thinks it’s the writing that made me sick. But I can write when she’s out. I can see her a long way off from these windows. There’s one that overlooks the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of huge elms and velvet meadows. This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, because you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. There’s his sister on the stairs. §

Well, the Fourth of July is over. The people are gone and I’m worn out. John thought it might do me good to have a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the kids down for a week. Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie does everything now. But it wore me out anyway. John says if I don’t pick up faster he’ll send me to Dr. Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was seeing him, and she says he’s just like John and my brother, only worse.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

Besides, it’s such a hassle to go so far. I don’t feel as if it’s worthwhile to lift my hand for anything, and I’m getting awfully agitated and whiny. 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’m alone. And I’m alone a lot right now. John is often held up in town by patients’ serious conditions, and Jennie is good and leaves me alone when I want her to. So I walk a bit in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal. I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It sticks in my mind. I lie here on this huge immovable bed—it’s nailed down, I think—and follow that pattern by the hour. It’s as good as yoga, I swear. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it hasn’t been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I’ll follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion. I know a little about design, and I know this thing was not arranged by any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I’ve ever heard of. It’s repeated, of course, by the widths, but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each width stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of inanity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in big slanting waves of visual horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems to, and I exhaust myself trying to figure out the order it goes in that direction. They’ve used a horizontal width for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. There’s one end of the room where it’s almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly on it, I can almost see radiation after all—the endless grotesques seem to form around a common center and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I’ll take a nap I guess. I don’t know why I write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it’s absurd. But I need to say what I feel and think in some way—it’s such a relief. But the effort is getting to be bigger than the relief. Half the time now I’m so lazy and lie down a lot. John says I can’t lose my strength, and has me take fish oil and lots of supplements and things, to say nothing of smoothies and juices and white meat. Sweet John. He loves me very much, and hates for me to be sick. I tried to have a real honest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he’d let me go and visit Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to handle it after I got there; and I didn’t make a good case for myself, because I was crying before I had finished. It’s getting to be a huge effort for me to think straight. Just this depression I suppose.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

And sweet John picked me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat with me and read to me until it quieted my mind. He said I was his sweetheart and his joy and all he had, and that I need to take care of myself for his sake, and stay well. He says no one but me can help me out of it, that I need to use my will and self-control and not let any silly fantasies carry me away. There’s one bright spot, the baby is well and happy, and doesn’t have to live in this nursery with the disgusting wallpaper. If we hadn’t moved into it, that happy kid would have. What a close call. Well, I wouldn’t have my child, an impressionable young mind, live in a room like this for anything. I never thought of it before, but it’s lucky that John kept me here after all, I can handle it so much easier than a baby, you know. Of course I never mention it to them anymore—I’m too smart—but I keep watch over it anyway. There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It’s always the same shape, only really abundant. And it’s like a woman stooping down and creeping around behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here. It’s so hard to talk with John about my mental state, because he’s so smart, and because he loves me so much. But I tried it last night. It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

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I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another. John was asleep and I didn’t want to wake him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper until I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, like she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the wallpaper did move, and when I came back John was awake. “What is it, sweet girl?” he said. “Don’t go walking around like that—you’ll get cold.” I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really wasn’t improving here, and that I wished he would take me away. “Well, sweetheart,” he said, “our lease will be up in three weeks, and I don’t see how we can leave before then. “The repairs aren’t done at home, and I can’t possibly leave town right now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, sweetie, whether you can see it or not. I’m a doctor, sweetie, and I know. You’re gaining weight, and your color and appetite are better. I feel really a lot better about you.” “I don’t weigh a bit more,” I said, “not even as much as I did; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you’re here, but it’s worse in the morning when you’re away.” “Bless her little heart,” he said with a big hug, “she’ll be as sick as she wants. But now let’s improve the middle of the night by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning.” “And you won’t leave?” I asked gloomily.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

“Well, how can I, sweetie? It’s only three more weeks and then we’ll take a nice little trip for a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really, sweetie, you are better.” “Better physically perhaps—” I began, and stopped short, because he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I couldn’t say another word. “Sweetheart,” he said, “I beg you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one second let that idea into your head. There’s nothing as dangerous, as fascinating, to a personality like yours. It’s a false and foolish fantasy. Can’t you trust me as a doctor when I say so?” So of course I said nothing else about it, and we went to sleep shortly after. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn’t. I laid there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately. §

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there’s a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that’s a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you’ve mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it flips a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples on you. It’s like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding you of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an endless string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions— well, that’s something like it. That is, sometimes.

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There’s one distinct oddity about this wallpaper, a thing nobody seems to notice but me, and that’s that it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That’s why I watch it all the time. By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t know it was the same wallpaper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars. The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I’m quite sure It’s a woman. By daylight she’s subdued, quiet. I imagine it’s the pattern that keeps her so still. It’s so puzzling. It keeps me quiet for hours. I lie down so much now. John says it’s good for me, and to sleep all I can. Actually he started it by making me lie down for an hour after each meal. It’s a very bad habit I’m convinced, because you see I don’t sleep. And that cultivates deceit, because I don’t tell them I’m awake—Oh no. The fact is I’m getting a little afraid of John. He seems very weird sometimes, and even Jennie has a strange look. It occurs to me occasionally—just as a scientific hypothesis—that perhaps it’s the wallpaper.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

I’ve watched John, when he didn’t know I was looking, come into the room suddenly with innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times looking at the wallpaper. And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once. She didn’t know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a really quiet voice, in as restrained a way possible, what she was doing with the wallpaper—she turned around as if she’d been caught stealing, and looked angry. She asked me why I’d scare her like that. Then she said that the wallpaper stained everything it touched, that she’d found yellow smudges on all my clothes and John’s, and she wished we’d be more careful. Didn’t that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I’m determined that nobody will find it out but me. §

Life is much more exciting now than it used to be. See I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really am eating better, and I’m quieter than I was. John is so glad to see me improve. He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper. I laughed it off. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away. I don’t want to leave now until I’ve figured it out. There’s one more week, and I think that’ll be enough. I’m feeling so much better. I don’t sleep much at night, because it’s so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a lot in the daytime.

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In the daytime it’s tiresome and perplexing. There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I can’t keep track of them, though I’ve tried religiously. It’s the strangest yellow, that wallpaper. It makes me think of all the yellow things I’ve ever seen—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there’s something else about that wallpaper—the smell. I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it wasn’t bad. Now we’ve had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining room, skulking in the living room, hiding in the hallway, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair. Even when I go horseback riding, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there’s that smell. Such an unusual odor, too. I’ve spent hours trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It’s not bad—at first, and very gentle, but definitely the subtlest, most enduring odor I’ve ever smelled. In this damp weather it’s awful, I wake up at night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house down—to reach the smell. But now I’m used to it. The only thing I can think of that it’s like is the color of the wallpaper. A yellow smell. There’s a bizarre mark on this wall, low down, near the baseboard. A streak that runs around the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smudge, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Around and around and around—around and around and around—it makes me dizzy. §

I really have discovered something at last. By watching so much at night, when it changes the most, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move—and no wonder. The woman behind shakes it. Sometimes I think there are many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the really bright spots she keeps still, and in the really shady spots she just grabs the bars and shakes them hard. And the whole time she’s trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles; I think that’s why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white. If those heads were covered or taken off it wouldn’t be half as bad. §

I think that woman gets out in the daytime. And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her. I can see her out of every one of my windows. It’s the same woman, I know, because she’s always creeping, and most women don’t creep in daylight. I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a car comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

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I don’t blame her a bit. It must be humiliating to be caught creeping in daylight. I always lock the door when I creep in daylight. I can’t do it at night, because I know John would suspect something right away. And John is so weird now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he’d move into another room. Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but me. I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once. But, turning as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time. And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn. I’ve watched her sometimes way off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind. If only that top pattern could be removed from the under one. I mean to try it, little by little. I have found out another odd thing, but I won’t tell it this time. It doesn’t make sense to trust people too much. There are only two more days to get this wallpaper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes. And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give. She said I slept a lot in the daytime. John knows I don’t sleep very well at night, despite being so quiet. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

Still, I’m not surprised he’s acting this way, sleeping under this wallpaper for three months. It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it. Hooray! This is the last day, but it’s enough. John will stay in town overnight, and won’t be out until this evening. Jennie wanted to sleep with me—the sneak—but I told her I’d no doubt rest better with a night alone. That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone at all. As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that wallpaper. A strip about as high as my head and halfway around the room. And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I said I’d finish it today. We leave tomorrow, and they’re moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before. Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her cheerfully that I did it out of pure spite toward the vicious thing. She laughed and said she wouldn’t mind doing it herself, but I shouldn’t get tired. How she betrayed herself that time. But I’m here, and nobody touches this wallpaper but me— not alive! She tried to get me out of the room—it was too obvious. But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I’d lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I’d call when I woke.

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So now she’s gone, and the help are gone, and the things are gone, and there’s nothing left but that giant bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it. We’ll sleep downstairs tonight, and take the boat home tomorrow. I really enjoy the room, now it’s bare again. How those kids did run around in here. This bedstead is fairly gnawed. But I must get to work. I’ve locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, until John comes. I want to astonish him. I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie didn’t find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her. But I forgot I couldn’t reach far without anything to stand on. This bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was weak, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the wallpaper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks nastily and the pattern just enjoys it. All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision. I’m getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be worthwhile exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know full well that a step like that is inappropriate and might be misconstrued. I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.

The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman

I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did? But I’m securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don’t get me out in the road there. I suppose I’ll have to get back behind the pattern when it becomes night, and that is hard. It’s so pleasant to be out in this big room and creep around as I please. I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to. Because outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smudge around the wall, so I cannot lose my way. Well there’s John at the door. It’s no use, young man, you can’t open it. How he does yell and pound. Now he’s crying for an axe. It’d be a shame to break down that beautiful door. “John, sweetie,” I said in the gentlest voice, “the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf.” That silenced him for a few moments. Then he said—very quietly, “Open the door, sweetheart.” “I can’t,” I said. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!” And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door. “What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!” I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

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“I’ve got out at last,” I said, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can’t put me back.” Now why did that man faint? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time.

Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1913)

Many readers have asked that. When the story first came out,

in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician protested in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said. It was enough to drive anyone crazy to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and— begging my pardon—had I been there? Now the story of the story is this. For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to depression—and beyond. In the third year I went devoutly and with some hope, to a specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which my still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me.

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He sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have only two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for three months, and came near to total mental ruin. Then, using my remnants of intelligence, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again. Work, the normal life of every human being. Work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a very poor and a parasite. Ultimately I recovered some measure of power. I rejoiced my narrow escape and wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions. I never hallucinated or objected to my wall decorations. My idea was to carry out the ideal. I sent a copy to the physician who nearly drove me insane. He never acknowledged it. The little book is valued by psychiatrists and as a good example of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate—so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the specialist admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896 Statement of Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, of California

Mr.

Chairman and Gentlemen: I wish to speak in favor of suffrage by addressing a point already made, that a majority of women do not want it. That is perfectly true. The great advantage of woman suffrage to the world is that it will improve humanity by improving women. Suffrage is not supposed to benefit humanity because those who vote exercise their superior powers. Instead suffrage develops the class who use it. You are better men because in your country you have the right of suffrage. It has improved the quality of citizenship. As a human function it develops the people who use it.

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We hear a great deal about the superior mothers of great men. What about the inferior mothers of all the little men? We hear a lot about the mothers of [George] Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But we should remember that Charles J. Guiteau [who assassinated President James Garfield] and Jesse Pomeroy [the youngest serial killer convicted in Massachusetts] also had mothers. Mothers are not all superior. I think we would benefit from improving the quality of the human race. You cannot have as good a citizen, as good a class of people, where half the people are not part of the government, not part of the society in which they live. Women stand in the world, but not of it. They do not have any integral role, and that limits their development. It limits the development of the soul and brain and all activities. That is why our men are not better, and why the world is not better. I do not rest this claim on the better quality of women. For unnumbered thousands of years women have suffered from repression. It has hurt them and hindered them, limited them and interfered with their development. In checking the development of the mothers of humanity you restrict the development of the race. There is no better way to improve the quality of the people on earth than to improve the mothers of that people. To my mind, the strongest claim for suffrage, therefore, is that women need it. It matters not whether they know enough to want it. It is for you who do know, or should know, to see to it that they have this right of suffrage. That all other citizens have it, in order that they may become full, intelligent citizens of this country. It will add not only to human affairs, but it is the best thing of all tending to the better work of economy in government and social life. It will give you another set of people, who are now just women. It will be an advantage in every way. Every thoughtful mind of

Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association

this century should look at its effect on the women, the children, and the men of humanity through the development of women. Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it cannot develop in the fullest degree. And to debar any part of humanity from its development is to carry along with society a dead weight, a part of the organism which is not living, organic matter, which is a thing to be carried instead of to help. To give suffrage to this half of humanity will develop it as it never has been developed before. You know how America and England stand in proportion to the freedom and development of their women. This is the argument I wish to present to you, gentlemen. [Applause.] Miss Anthony. I hope our delegates here will not indulge in applause, but give that privilege exclusively to the committee. I want them to clap and cheer as much as they please. Now I shall call Colorado, represented by Anna L. Diggs, who, since Colorado has become a State and we were able to put a second star on the woman’s flag [each star on this flag represented a state which had ratified the 19th Amendment], has moved to Colorado in order that she may be free. Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896. United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Washington, Govt. Print. Off., 1896. Call Number: JK1888 1896, Part Of: National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress), Digital ID: rbnawsa n9903 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbnawsa. n9903

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” National Endowment for the Humanities

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wall-paper” was written during a time of great change. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, “domestic ideology” positioned American middle-class women as the spiritual and moral leaders of their home. Such “separate spheres” ideals suggested that a woman’s place was in the private domain of the home, where she should carry out her prescribed roles of wife and mother. Men, on the other hand, would rule the public domain through work, politics, and economics. By the middle of the century, this way of thinking began to change as the seeds of early women’s rights were planted. Specifically, more than 300 early feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, convened in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 for

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the nation’s first convention to discuss and promote women’s rights and roles. By the end of the 1800s, feminists were gaining momentum in favor of change. The concept of “The New Woman,” for example, began to circulate in the 1890s through 1910s as women pushed for broader roles outside their home— roles that could draw on women’s intelligence and non-domestic skills and talents. This push for change was not without backlash. Adherents of “separate spheres” ideology turned to popular media such as magazines, advertisements, advice literature, and political cartoons to retain the image of women as the queen of the home. Gilman advocated revised roles for women, whom, she believed, should be on much more equal economic, social, and political footing with men. In her famous work of nonfiction Women and Economics (1898), Gilman argued that women should strive—and be able—to work outside the home. She also believed that women should be financially independent from men, and she promoted the then-radical idea that men and women even should share domestic work. First appearing in the New England Magazine in January 1892, “The Yellow Wall-paper,” according to many literary critics, is a narrative study of Gilman’s own depression and “nervousness.” Gilman, sought medical help from the famous neurologist mentioned in the sotry, S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell prescribed his famous “rest cure,” which restricted women from anything that labored and taxed their minds (for example, thinking, reading, writing) and bodies. More than just a psychological study of postpartum depression, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a compelling study of Gilman’s own feminism and of women’s roles in the 1890s and 1910s.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper”

Adapted from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper”—Writing Women, http://edsitement.neh. gov/lesson-plan/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-yellow-wall-paper-writing-women and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper”—The “New Woman,” http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/charlotte-perkins-gilmansyellow-wall-papermdashthe-new-woman

Trapped and Silenced: Claustrophobic Fear in The Yellow Wallpaper WANG Fanghui

University of Macau, China

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by the prominent American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), was published in 1892, when first-wave feminism was in full swing in the United States. Since then, it has been widely anthologized and recognized as a classic and canonical masterpiece. The short story is based on Gilman’s real life experience: her serious bout of post-partum depression after she gave birth to her daughter and the exhausting “rest cure” prescribed by the popular doctor Silas Weir Mitchell. Like Gilman, the narrator Jane suffered from a nervous breakdown and was forced to receive the rest cure treatment prescribed by her physician husband John. Complete rest and isolation thus became her entire life in the rented house

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where she was kept in a nursery room at the top of the house. As there was nothing that engaged her attention (except for her secret writing), she was gradually drawn to the yellow wallpaper, in which she saw a woman trapped inside, and further descended into psychosis. Later in her 1913 article “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman explained that her purpose for writing the story was “to save people from being driven crazy” and to point out the danger of the prevailing rest cure and the advice that she should “‘live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never […] touch pen, brush, or pencil again.’” The short story actually transcends her purpose and stands as one of the early foremost feminist texts, urging people to reflect on women’s roles in the domestic sphere. The story addresses a fear of being controlled and locked up by patriarchal authority. This gothic short story, in which a woman desperately dreamed to climb out of the nursery room, shows the diary of a late Victorian woman suffering from depression and rest cure, who deals with a fear that is still haunting. I am going to examine Jane’s fear of being governed and imprisoned by patriarchal authority, a claustrophobic fear of being cut off and segregated, which is mainly reflected in two aspects: being trapped in the “room,” and having a silenced voice. Her struggle and resistance will be analyzed as well. Confining Room and Space

Jane’s haunting claustrophobic fear is shown in the literal meaning of “room” and space. In the text, Jane is pushed back into the house, locked up and segregated, her life became “a painfully prolonged prison term” in a limited space.1

Trapped and Silenced - Wang

Rooms and domestic space are often charged with political meanings. As British women’s writing expert Wendy Gan remarked, they are “an instrument of power and ideology”; in a Foucaultian sense, they “produce[s] disciplined subjects, in particular, though not exclusively, women.”2 We can first examine the setting, both the house and the room. The house is an ancestral hall, a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate.” It is “quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village […] there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.” The mansion is depicted as the oldest European style castle in America back to colonial time, a heritage of European lineage, a patriarchal mansion. It is situated far away from villages, standing alone with all its guards. On the grounds there are lots of separated little houses scattering here and there, segregating people from one another. Among the rooms, John picked for Jane the most isolated and remote one at the top of the house. Though Jane guessed the room was used as children’s playroom, it makes one feel dubious since “the windows are barred […] and there are rings and things in the walls” on which some patches of wallpaper are stripped off. The floor is “scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through wars.” Besides, outside the door, there is another “gate at the head of the stairs.” Clearly, it is not simply a playroom for children. Every exit is either barred or locked; only a nailed-down bed is in the room with the rings in the wall covered with the hideous wallpaper. This is more like a prison, or mental asylum used to confine people. As Jane described that the room looks as if it had been through wars, the room might once have been used to lock up an array of shut away wives,

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such as Bertha Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Or it could have segregated them from anyone else. Jane became a prisoner, alone in her cell, segregated and cut off. Jane naturally resented this room at first. She hated the room and the wallpaper with “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” in “a smouldering unclean yellow,” and described the room with hostility and horror, which can be read between the lines. After all, it was not her choosing. If she wanted to choose a room, it would be the “one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window,” but John wouldn’t let her, even after she begged him for it. As her obsession with the wallpaper grew, she discovered there was a front pattern and a sub-pattern, in which a woman figure was trapped inside. Gothic and Victorian literature specialist Carol Davison has pointed out that a relationship is forged “between consciousness and physical space,” and “the narrator’s fears and suspicions are inscribed in the ‘torturing’ and ‘pointless’ pattern.”3 Thus, Jane actually projected her discontent and fear of her confinement to the wallpaper and gradually identified the woman trapped inside as her alter ego. No wonder she saw the wallpaper in such a gruesome way: it looked like there were a “broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare[ing] at you upside down […] and those absurd, unblinking eyes [were] everywhere.” And the front pattern “strangle[d] so […] [women] g[o] t through, and the pattern strangle[d] them off and turn[ed] them upside down, and ma[d]e their eyes white.” Clearly, the fear and horror that she couldn’t tell anyone was fully expressed in her treatment of the wallpaper in her diary. Like the woman trapped under the front pattern, she was confined to a limited space and felt suffocated.

Trapped and Silenced - Wang

This can be seen as a metaphor of women’s oppression and death in the limited domestic space. The wall is a projection of women’s fear, fear of being cut off in a prisonlike room and being smothered and persecuted. Jane, nonetheless, did not surrender to her imprisonment that easily. Though there was not much she could do, she examined and explored her limited space closely, hoping to gain a sense of control and to find a way out. In the end, Jane ripped off all the wicked wallpaper and locked herself up in the room. Clearly she saw no hope of getting out of the room, and thus she transformed the room into her own and kept John and his accomplice outside. As Wendy Gan noted, “[c]apturing a room to oneself, be it a study within the home or a rented room, could provide a woman with opportunities to enjoy privacy within the private sphere.” Jane’s locking herself up in the room and throwing the key away is also a defiant act to resist John’s patriarchal power and to fight for her last space. There are different views about the ending concerning this point. For some critics like social and cultural historian Patricia Vertinsky, it’s “a subtle form of growth, a way to health and a rejection of and escape from an insane society.”4 According to scholar Gun Edberg-Caldwell, however, it’s an ominous ending: Jane was “confined in a room of madness […] There is no escape; there is no way out.”5 It is true that Jane explored the room, peeled off the patriarchal wallpaper and even thought about burning the whole colonial mansion down like Bertha did in Jane Eyre. But she still didn’t step outside the room. Even in her triumphant moment over John’s body, she was still creeping, not standing up right. Locking herself up and keeping the room to herself is a brave act, but tainted with a tragic note.

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A Silenced Voice

Jane was kept away from language; her voice was low and couldn’t be heard in the symbolic order. John decreed that his wife shouldn’t do anything, especially write, and he hypocritically added that it was for her own good. Whenever Jane wanted to write, she had to “be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” The man in power tried hard to retain his power over language and speech. John was the one who was always talking and never listened to Jane, occupying the sphere of speech. In the beginning of Gilman’s story, lots of paragraphs start with “he said…he said…,” while Jane’s voice is always interrupted by his and becomes a murmur in her own mind. French feminist Hélène Cixous once summarized that women were “confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing.”6 Jane was surely confined; no room was left for her in the symbolic order since she cannot get in in the first place. She was being brainwashed, being told repetitively what she should believe and being turned into a docile doll. John was always telling Jane what she ought to do — control herself and put her fantasy away. And he would “read to [her] till it tired [her] head.” Here we may wonder, what was he reading to her? The most likely thing would be his set of values, wrapped up in whatever cover, making Jane tired. Under such suffocating conditions, Jane struggled on, fighting to speak out, to enter the sphere of language. She used writing to speak out, “rejecting the colonization of [her mind], talk[ing] back from the peripheries to which society relegated [her].”7 To resist the patriarchal power that desired to cut her off, Jane was trying to reach for readers or audiences. Jane wrote, “I’ll tell

Trapped and Silenced - Wang

you why – privately […] but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.” Clearly she believed there were readers, who listened to her voice attentively; she even gained additional power, holding back information and tempting her readers. She broke the cut-off and segregated state, getting her voice heard. She also used narration to gain power and fight back. She was good at mocking as well. She quipped that “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” This one single sentence pointed out the hypocrisy of John and of patriarchal marriage, in which John assumed he was the superior being who can look down upon and silence his wife. This ironic and mocking voice of Jane’s continued and became louder and harsher as the story evolves. In the former part of the story, the sarcastic tone is found between the lines, more or less avoiding attention; while in the latter part, the narrator tended to be bolder and to speak out. For instance, earlier in the story, Jane would repetitively say “[h]e is very careful and loving” just after John had done something actually quite the opposite. But near the end of the story, she directly spoke out that he “pretended to be very loving and kind. As if [she] couldn’t see through him!.” As the narration develops further, Jane gradually found her own voice (though written on paper), and became more assured, no longer hiding her mocking attitude between the lines. To the very end, she spoke out in front of John and asserted her voice, which “silence[d] him for a few moments” and finally made John faint. Here Jane at last won back some right to assert her own voice. “[W]it and laughter are among the best forms not just of self-protective detachment but of resistance to oppression,” and Jane grasped the opportunity to resist oppression and used it well.8 In a way, she

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jumped out from the limbo where the patriarchal authority imprisoned her and fought back. The ending, however, was not that promising. Writing was a relief for Jane, but gradually she found that she “[got] pretty tired when [she] tr[ied to write]” and “the effort [was] getting to be greater than the relief.” She felt less capable of writing, as if writing had become the most exhausting and demanding work, as if there had been something hindering her in language itself. The opposition planted inside the system of language and discourse was hard to conquer, like a sly enemy, making Jane tired. To fight for her last personal space, Jane chose to lock herself up in the room and let no one in, hoping to transform the confining room to a room of her own. She would find with horror that her voice was still more or less circumvented or muffled. A version of this essay first appeared in Studies in Literature and Language, 5(2), 10–15. Available from: http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/sll/ article/view/j.sll.1923156320120502.635 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j. sll.1923156320120502.635 Notes

1 Amin Malak, “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition,” Canadian Literature, no. 112 (1987): 13. 2 Wendy Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23.

Carol Davison, “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in The Yellow Wallpaper,” Women’s Studies, no. 33 (2004): 60. 3

Patricia Vertinsky, “A Militant Madonna: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Feminism and Physical Culture,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 18, no. 1 (2001): 66. 4

Gun Edberg-Caldwell, “The Voyage out: Amalie Skram’s Professor Hieroniums and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper,” NORANordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 5, no. 2 (1997): 102. 5

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6 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Feminisms Redux, eds. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price-Herndl (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 418. 7 Dunja Mohr, Worlds Apart: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005), 263.

Lee Briscoe Thompson, Scarlet Letters: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto, ON: ECW, 1997), 73. 8

The Yellow Wallpaper Giovanna Tallone

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

The claustrophobic closed spaces in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in 1892, draw attention to the textual space of the story and the elusive text that is being written and read. The protagonist and first-person narrator is engaged in writing an elusive text while confined in a secluded space. Gilman’s story is a narrative account of a case of post-partum depression. She illustrates a case of eccentricity in a character who is literally an ex-centric, off the center, off the norm, mentally disturbed and who seems to belong to a place that is likewise, off the norm. It soon became “an American feminist classic” when it was republished in 1973 reaching a status of “canonization”.1

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The nameless protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an eccentric because her post-partum depression keeps her confined in an attic room, excluded from companionship and work. As a matter of fact, the landmark of feminist literary criticism, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, considers “The Yellow Wallpaper” “a striking story of confinement and escape”.2 The disquieting first-person narrative of a young woman imprisoned by her doctor-husband in an isolated country house, and gradually falling into a pathological state of insanity, can be read as a case history and a subversive text. Obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper of the room at the top of the house her husband has chosen for her, she perceives in its confusing pattern an imprisoned woman she tries to set free by peeling the paper off the wall. The description of the country house in Gilman’s story belongs to the realm of fiction, to the world of the written word: “It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock”.3 The narrator perceives the place as a Gothic prison (“hedges”, “walls”, “gates”). Likewise, it is a place of seclusion whose entrapment is magnified as the story goes on. Her entrapment in the attic nursery is “at the top of the house”, its windows are “barred for little children”. She identifies the room as a place of discipline, “playroom and gymnasium” and yet the presence of “rings and things in the wall” and the “great immovable bed” that is “nailed down” seem to suggest that the nursery “has roomed a madwoman or two before her”.4 Based on Gilman’s autobiographical experience of post-partum depression, the story is a “tale of hysterical confinement” which sheds light

The Yellow Wallpaper - Tallone

on the narrator’s illness as a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”, “a nervous condition”, “nervous weakness”.5 Note that in the nineteenth century a diagnosis of “hysteria”, neurasthenia, or depression was a synonym of a wide range of women’s diseases.6 The narrator’s “rationalist physician-husband”’s stresses selfcontrol, so that he takes on a patronizing attitude that expresses itself in verbal and physical behavior.7 John uses terms of endearment and a prison-like embrace as a form of control: “he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose”; “Dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed”. He calls his wife “his darling”, “little heart”. His infantilizing attitude, and his use of animal imagery is coupled with long absences. He leaves his caged wife alone as he “is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious”, thus implicitly betraying her. This is reiterated later: “John is kept in town very often by serious cases” and his control is replaced by his sister Jeannie, who acts as a “perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper” and whose name shows her as John’s female alter ego. The motif of darkness characterizes “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In fact, the narrator’s close observation of the obsessive wallpaper gradually takes up both her days and nights, and the iterated use of the detail of moonlight—light in darkness, and thus magnifying darkness—draws attention to the strangeness of the house. In fact the house has “something queer”, “there is something strange”. The moonlight belongs to the symptoms of mental disturbance as there is no boundary between day and night: “The moon shines in all around just as the sun does”. It

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is thanks to the moonlight that the wallpaper becomes readable, or less unreadable, and therefore can be decoded or deciphered. Gilman’s use of first-person narration light on the conscious construction of the story as story and as a written text, at the same time undermining its authority. It is set in the form of a diary, made of twelve entries separated by a blank to mark either interruption in the writing or the passing of time between entries.8 Prohibited to “work” – that is to write – in an imposed “rest cure”, the narrator has to do her diary-writing “clandestinely” in order not to raise suspicion.9 Early in the story her diary becomes a protagonist formally and self-referentially in the use of deictic tenets: “this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind”, “Here comes John, and I must put this away”; “I don’t know why I should write this”.10 Doubts arise if “the text the narrator is writing is arguably the very text we are reading”.11 It is interesting to notice that in the self-referentiality of the story Gilman calls the diary “dead paper” as it anticipates the living wallpaper.12 “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk behind that silly and conspicuous front design”, later to be identified as “a woman stooping down and creeping about that pattern”. Still, the pattern remains unreadable and “diary and wallpaper are textual antitheses” in their “resistance to being read”.13 “The narrator is faced with an unreadable text, a text for which none of her interpretative strategies is adequate”.14 The reader of Gilman’s story finds themself in a similar position, as the puzzling relationship between the narrator and the unreadable text of the wallpaper can only be dealt with in another text, the text of the diary. The self-conscious construction of the story is implied in the formal use of the diary form.15 Yet, common features such as time markers, dates, or names of weekdays, generally used

The Yellow Wallpaper - Tallone

in diaries are missing, and entries are marked by blank spaces. Time is a blank, the diary is a blank. Partial “journal-like textual references” support the fiction that the protagonist is keeping a journal, and yet doubts on the diary nature as a text arise.16 “How can the narrator keep a journal when, as she tells us, she is sleeping, creeping, or watching the wallpaper the whole time? In her growing paranoia, would she confide in a journal she could not lock up? How did the journal get into our hands?”.17 The stylistic insistence on the verbs “creep” and “crawl” identifies first the movement of the woman behind the wallpaper and then the nameless narrator herself, who, creeps and crawls.18 Likewise, the narrator remains nameless until the end where “she hints that her name may be Jane”.19 Golden suggests that this could be a misprint for Jennie, the name of the sister-in-law, or a deliberate choice implying that the protagonist has freed herself from both her husband John and sister-in-law Jennie.20 As a matter of fact the question and mystery surrounding her name is in line with the ambiguous ending of the story thus highlighting the secrecy of the text the reader is engaged with. The mutual relationship between secrecy and spatial constriction characterizes “The Yellow Wallpaper” leaving some questions open about the text itself. The choice of a short story form rather than a novel seems to stress the containment and confinement of the text. A secret diary is hidden or imprisoned in the text, it remains elusive. Maybe it remains unwritten. A version of this essay first appeared in Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, no. 3 (2013): 293–305, http://www.fupress.com/bsfm-sijis ISSN 2239-3978 (online), 2013 Firenze University Press, DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-13808

50 Notes

The Yellow Wallpaper

1 Susan S. Lanser, “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies vol. 15, no. 3 (1989): 415. 2 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 3 Emphasis added. 4 Chris Wiesenthal, Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997), 27. 5 Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 229. 6 Paula A. Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature vol. 3, no. 1/2 (1984): 61, 65. 7 Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 230. 8 Julie Bates Dock, Daphne Ryan Allen, Jennifer Palais, and Tracy Kristen, “‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” PMLA vol. III, no. 1 (1996): 52–65. 9 Chris Wiesenthal, Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997), 27. 10 Emphasis added. 11 Catherine J. Golden, Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (Gainesville, Florida: Florida University Press, 2003), 14. 12 Paula A. Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature vol. 3, no. 1/2 (1984): 66. 13 Chris Wiesenthal, Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997), 32. 14 Susan S. Lanser, “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies vol. 15, no. 3 (1989): 420. 15 Paula A. Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature vol. 3, no. 1/2 (1984): 73. 16 Ibid., 72. 17 Ibid. 18 Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 282. 19 Catherine J. Golden, “The Writing of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Double Palimpsest” in The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow

The Yellow Wallpaper - Tallone

Wallpaper,” ed. Catherine Golden (New York: The Feminist Press at the City of New York, 1992), 306. 20 Ibid.

APPENDIX A

The Yellow Wall-paper Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Original, 1891)

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

The Yellow Wallpaper

John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing. So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition. I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house. The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

Appendix A

There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden— large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now. There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don’t care— there is something strange about the house—I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition. But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another. He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear,” said he, “and your food somewhat on

The Yellow Wallpaper

your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time.” So we took the nursery at the top of the house. It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. 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 color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word. We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day.

Appendix A

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength. John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him. Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way! I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already! Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things. It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous. I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper! At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. “You know the place is doing you good,” he said, “and really, dear, I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental.” “Then do let us go downstairs,” I said, “there are such pretty rooms there.”

The Yellow Wallpaper

Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain. But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things. It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper. Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try. It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now. I wish I could get well faster.

Appendix A

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store. I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe. The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here. The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brotherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they must have had perseverance as well as hatred. Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.

The Yellow Wallpaper

But I don’t mind it a bit—only the paper. There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing. She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick! But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows. There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows. This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. There’s sister on the stairs! Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week. Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now. But it tired me all the same. John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so! Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.

Appendix A

I don’t feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous. 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. And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to. So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal. I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper. It dwells in my mind so! I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion. I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess. I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much. John says I musn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat. Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

Appendix A

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head. He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well. He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me. There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper. If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds. I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see. Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here! It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so. But I tried it last night. It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

The Yellow Wallpaper

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another. John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper DID move, and when I came back John was awake. “What is it, little girl?” he said. “Don’t go walking about like that—you’ll get cold.” I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away. “Why darling!” said he, “our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can’t see how to leave before. “The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you.” “I don’t weigh a bit more,” said I, “nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!” “Bless her little heart!” said he with a big hug, “she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!” “And you won’t go away?” I asked gloomily. “Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!”

Appendix A

“Better in body perhaps—” I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word. “My darling,” said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?” So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn’t, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately. On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it. That is, sometimes! There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

The Yellow Wallpaper

When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That is why I watch it always. By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour. I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal. It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don’t sleep. And that cultivates deceit, for I don’t tell them I’m awake—O no! The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look. It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,— that perhaps it is the paper! I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses,

Appendix A

and I’ve caught him several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once. She didn’t know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper—she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry—asked me why I should frighten her so! Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John’s, and she wished we would be more careful! Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself! Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was. John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper. I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away. I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough. I’m feeling ever so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime. In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing. There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.

The Yellow Wallpaper

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It 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. It gets into my hair. Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell. There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even SMOOCH, as if it had been rubbed over and over. I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round—round and round and round— it makes me dizzy! I really have discovered something at last.

Appendix A

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern DOES move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad. I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines. I don’t blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight! I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once. And John is so queer now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.

The Yellow Wallpaper

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once. But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time. And though I always see her, she MAY be able to creep faster than I can turn! I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind. If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little. I have found out another funny thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much. There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes. And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give. She said I slept a good deal in the daytime. John knows I don’t sleep very well at night, for all I’m so quiet! He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him! Still, I don’t wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months. It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it. Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won’t be out until this evening. Jennie wanted to sleep with me—the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

Appendix A

That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper. A strip about as high as my head and half around the room. And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it to-day! We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before. Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing. She laughed and said she wouldn’t mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired. How she betrayed herself that time! But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me—not ALIVE! She tried to get me out of the room—it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I would call when I woke. So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it. We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow. I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again. How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed! But I must get to work.

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I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him. I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her! But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on! This bed will NOT move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision! 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. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued. I don’t like to LOOK out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did? But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope— you don’t get ME out in the road there! I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to.

Appendix A

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way. Why there’s John at the door! It is no use, young man, you can’t open it! How he does call and pound! Now he’s crying for an axe. It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door! “John dear!” said I in the gentlest voice, “the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!” That silenced him for a few moments. Then he said—very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my darling!” “I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!” And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door. “What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!” I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

APPENDIX B

Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896

Statement of Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, of California (Original)

Mr.

Chairman and Gentlemen: I wish to speak a word for suffrage rather on the ground that has been taken, that a majority of women do not want it. That is perfectly true. The great advantage of woman suffrage to the world is that it will improve the race by improving the women. Suffrage is not a function which is supposed to benefit all humanity by the exercise of the superior powers of those who vote, but it is a function which develops the class who use it. You are better men because in your country you have the right of suffrage; it has improved

The Yellow Wallpaper

the quality of citizenship. As a human function it develops the people who use it. We hear a great deal of the superior mothers of great men; how about the inferior mothers of all the little men? We hear much of the mothers of [George] Washington and Abraham Lincoln; but we should remember that Charles J. Guiteau [who assassinated President James Garfield] and Jesse Pomeroy [the youngest serial killer convicted in Massachusetts] also had mothers. Mothers are not all superior. I think a great benefit would come from the improvement in the quality of the human race. You can not have as good a citizen, as good a class of people, where half the people are no part of the Government, no part of the society in which they live. Women stand in the world, but not of it; they do not have any integral part, and that limits their development; it limits the development of the soul and brain and all activities; and that is why our men are not better, and why the world is not better. I do not rest the claim on the better quality of the women. For unnumbered thousands of years women have suffered from repression, and it has hurt them and hindered them, limited them and interfered with their development, and in checking the development of the mothers of the race you restrict the development of the race. There is no better way to improve the quality of the people on earth than to improve the mothers of that people. To my mind, the strongest claim for suffrage, therefore, is that women need it; it matters not whether they know enough to want it. It is for you who do know, or should know, to see to it that they have this right of suffrage, and that all other citizens have it, in order that they may become full, intelligent citizens of this country. It will add not only to human affairs, but it is the best thing of all tending to the better work of economy in government and social life. It will

Appendix B

give you another set of people, who are now just women; it will be an advantage in every way; and every thoughtful mind of this century should look at its effect on the women, the children, and the men of the race through the development of women. Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it can not develop in the fullest degree. And to debar any part of the race from its development is to carry along with society a dead weight, a part of the organism which is not living, organic matter, which is a thing to be carried instead of to help. To give suffrage to this half of the race will develop it as it never has been developed before. You know how America and England stand in proportion to the freedom and development of their women. This is the argument I wish to present to you, gentlemen. [Applause.] Miss Anthony. I hope our delegates here will not indulge in applause, but give that privilege exclusively to the committee. I want them to clap and cheer as much as they please. Now I shall call Colorado, represented by Anna L. Diggs, who, since Colorado has become a State and we were able to put a second star on the woman’s flag [each star on this flag represented a state which had ratified the 19th Amendment], has moved to Colorado in order that she may be free. Hearing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., January 28, 1896. United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Washington, Govt. Print. Off., 1896. Call Number: JK1888 1896, Part Of: National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress), Digital ID: rbnawsa n9903 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbnawsa. n9903

APPENDIX C

Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Original, 1913)

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first

came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and— begging my pardon—had I been there? Now the story of the story is this: For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and

The Yellow Wallpaper

applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite—ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate—so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

About the Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 1860, died 1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. The Yellow Wallpaper is her best-known work.

A woman and her husband rent a summer house, but what should be a restful getaway turns into a suffocating psychological battle. This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband’s controlling behavior in the guise of treatment will leave you breathless.

This Inwood Commons Modern Edition updates Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic so that it’s as easy to read and as relevant as if she had written it today. The book also includes the author’s argument to Congress for women’s voting rights, her reasons for writing The Yellow Wallpaper, two essays from modern scholars, and the original unedited versions in appendices.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 1860, died 1935) was a prominent

American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. The Yellow Wallpaper is her bestknown work. US $9.99 UK £6.99

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