Rupturing with The Yellow Wallpaper

I have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it [the wallpaper} 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. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the novel, John’s wife after having a child suffers from a “temporary nervous depression” which at the time was treated with the “rest cure” which consists of a stay in the country, complete rest, and consumption of phosphates, tonics, and other elixirs. She believes that “congenial work with excitement and change” would do her good. However, her husband the physician totally disagrees, won’t discuss the situation, and mandates the “rest cure” which is based on the knowledge of the time and the authority of Dr. Weir Mitchell, its devisor. Consequently, his wife is sent to an upper room in a large rundown country house. The ghastly wallpaper is pealing and the windows are barred. She has requested convalescence in a downstairs well-lighted room , but John in his dual hierarchical role of husband and physician ignores her requests and protestations, thus preserving the hierarchical structure and her place within that structure.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper and the writing and publishing of it are examples of what Julia Kristeva defines as the new feminism and the use of language against itself to rupture the marginalizing of women. Kristeva identifies discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself as “intertextuality” (The System 29).

John’s wife in her journal vividly depicts the impact society/culture has on women: inscripting and restricting them, “working to place the body (social or individual) under the law of writing.” The body is “itself defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes it” (de Certeau 139).The larger body influences a person and impacts the development of the material body itself. The inscriptions of society’s norms restrict if ruptures to the status quo are not attempted and/or acknowledged, entrenching hierarchical phallocentric culture and limiting rebirth often as the result of the norms being accepted as good or even truth. People are encouraged through speech and action to sustain what is “good and true” and not to challenge the norms, denying evolution and further rebirth.

John uses language to manage the other, to keep his wife in her subordinate role and disavow her ability to know what she needs. Kristeva would suggest that she disrupt the symbolic chain from her marginal position within the order. Kristeva believes that if a woman identifies with the mother, she ensures her exclusion from the marginality in relation to the patriarchal order. If, on the other hand, she identifies with the father--makes herself in his image, then she ends up becoming “him” and supporting the same patriarchal order which excludes and marginalizes her as a woman. Instead, women must work within the Law and accept sexual difference within the framework but refuse to “become one of ‘them.’” From her marginal position she needs to disrupt. If she doesn’t disrupt, the “balancing act” in between becomes too costly, with some women going mad or committing suicide (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Maira Tsvetaeva). The heroine cannot seem to “break the code” which Kristeva insists needs to be accomplished (Bizzell 1259-60). John’s wife near the end of the story has three choices: either to accept her place in the normed society and hope the “rest cure” works to banish her depression (perhaps postpartum depression), or find her own provisional space or go completely insane. Sadly the latter is her outcome.

In writing about a woman’s bout with depression, its attempted cure, and her ultimate escape into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story is a rupturing from within of the patriarchal order. For Gilman to write this story at the time (about 1891) and get it published was no small task. Previous to the writing, Gilman found herself a victim of the same malady as her heroine and victim of a publishing world dominated by men.

Gilman responded to questions of why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner explaining that for several years she had suffered with bouts of depression (Why I Wrote). After the birth of her first child in 1887, she was diagnosed as neurasthenic and sent to Dr. Weir Mitchell who prescribed the “rest cure” (Gilman, Charlotte). Physically the rest was successful and the doctors determined there was nothing much the matter, and she was sent home. She was instructed to live as “domestic a life as possible” and to have “but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as she lived.” She went home and obeyed for three months and went almost totally insane. However, with the help of a friend, she went to work again, to a life of “joy and growth and service, with out which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.” She rejoiced by writing The Yellow Wallpaper and sent a copy to the physician she claimed nearly drove her mad. “He never acknowledged it” (Why I Wrote).

The story was a rupturing of the status quo for Gilman held that man is “being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant, merely essential to the making of people. She has held always the place of a preposition in relation to man...before him, behind him, beside him, a wholly relative existence-- ‘Sydney’s sister,’ ‘Pembroke’s mother’--but never by any chance Sydney or Pembroke herself (qtd. in Jamieson 102). However, she had great difficulty getting her story published. She first sent her manuscript to William Dean Howells, who with some support, sent it to Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a very prestigious magazine at that time. According to Gilman’s account in her autobiography, he sent this note:

“Dear Madam, Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself! Sincerely yours, H.E. Scudder.”

The story with its crawling mad heroine had obviously made an impression on Scudder, but he wasn’t about to let it affect the status quo. To rupture the structure and norms Gilman faced, she needed to get the story published. The New England Magazine finally published the story in 1892.

While some people responded positively to the story many did not. One responded that it was “perilous stuff,” another that it “posed a threat to relatives of such ‘deranged’ persons as the heroine” (Scudders’s). In The Transcript a physician said, “Such a story ought not to be written; it is enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Yet another physician wrote, “It was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and-- begging my pardon--had I been there?” However, the best reaction Gilman claimed she ever got was when she was told years later that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.” In addition, one woman had claimed the story saved her from the same end as John’s wife (Why I Wrote).

Gilman used language in her novel to situate herself within and to the norm. She worked in the margins to rupture the dominant culture, to work to generate social change. Kristeva notes in her description of intertextuality that the novel has the particular “potential for embodying a ‘redistribution’ of several different sign systems” where diverse meanings overlap allowing transpositions of signifying systems (Moi). The official text needs to be broken down and the writing seen as both subjectivity and communication--writing where one reads the other (Desire in Language). Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a model of Julia Kristeva’s theory.