The Yellow Wall-paper

Sing Ruby Siu

English 48B
January 8, 2009
Journal #2 Charlotte Perkins Gilman

QUOTE:

"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" (Gilman 817).

SUMMARY:

The quote above is extracted from Gilman’s most famous story, The Yellow Wall-paper. It was narrated by an anonymous female character, who was diagnosed of some nervous breakdown by doctors and was urged to stay in a bedroom with yellow wall-paper. Since she was forbidden to write a word, she took days and nights observing the features of the wall-paper. One day, she declared to herself that she had finally discovered the secrets of the wall-paper. She believed that the front pattern of the wall-paper actually was moving due to the woman behind, and there should be a crowd of women crawling behind it sometimes. At that time, the character was so disturbed by her illusions that she even could not distinguish between imagination and reality.

RESPONSE:

The Yellow Wall-paper was a story that was obviously not just about the suicidal attempt and craziness of a woman; it was originally a “response to the doctor who had tried to cure her of her depression through a ‘rest cure’” (Wikipedia). Living her life mostly according to conventional gender roles of women in the late 1800s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was very attentive and sensitive to the injustices that were suffered by women. Through her feminist eyes, she was aware of the inequality between two sexes and imprisonment of women’s free wills. Her manifesto of independent women and balanced society has contributed as a pioneer in solving the problem of women’s status. In this story, Gilman tried to depict the details of vicious destructions of the “rest cure” on a woman’s mental and physical ability, in order to remind stereotyped people of the real needs of women.

The story was fascinating because there are a lot of controversial and opaque areas that provide readers spaces for imagination. For example, we may ask: who are those creeping women the character saw? To answer this question, we may also question whether the narrator was sane or insane when she saw the images of the creeping women. We may also doubt whether it was the room that made her even sicker. With a myriad of possibilities, every one may has one’s own interpretation of the story.

Despite all those uncertainties, it is very obvious that the imprisonment that was set up by her husband did not do her any good. She was literally cut off from the nature, socialization, activities and constructive communication. Even she [believes] that congenial work, with excitement and change would do [her] good,” her husband only allows her to lie on the bed the whole day looking at the wall-paper. She represented the typical women who had little power to choose their fates at Gilman’s time.

Confined in an ex cell room, she was just like the woman creeping under wall-paper. Both of them were unable to free themselves from constraints set by men. From the moment she was able to see the creeping women, symbolically she were able to recognize herself as one the victims. She even tried to free the creeping women by helping them to shake off the papers, and this symbolically means the struggles of herself to gain autonomy. At the end she was so disturbed that she even adopted the identity of the creepy woman and went insane. She could no longer see the wall-paper as an inspiration to revolt.