The Yellow Wallpaper Text Biography
The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, telling a story about a woman’s struggles against male-centric thinking and societal ‘norms’. The text may be ambiguous to the reader who is unfamiliar with Gilman’s politics and personal biography, yet, it impresses any reader with the puerile treatment of the main character, who remains nameless in the text. To the casual reader, the story is one of a good-meaning, but oppressive husband who drives his wife mad in an attempt to help her, but it story illustrates how established protocols of behavior could have devastating effects on the women of Gilman’s time, regardless of the intentions of the purveyor. By late 20th century standards, the behavior of John, the husband, seems eerily inappropriate and restrictive, but was considered quite normal in the 19th century.
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in its quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce. (Lauter, 799) Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.
The surface of the text contains clues about Gilman’s perceptions of the treatment and roles of women. Her main character stumbles over technical words like ‘phosphates’, showing that women were overlooked in education. Moreover, she demonstrates a normalcy of women that are non-technical—they should not have to worry about phosphates, which are in the scientific realm assigned to men. The character Gilman sets up in her first few pages is of the proper Victorian woman—dutiful to her husband, simple and non-technical. Gilman goes out of her way to describe the garden of the house as ‘delicious’, this, perhaps, an allusion to a woman’s place in the kitchen. In the world of yellow wallpaper, a woman would naturally be fascinated by a garden. Gilman’s character is a naíve, faithful wife who does as her husband instructs her to. She blames herself for being ‘unreasonably angry’ and is critical of her nervous disorder, as she is pressured to think so by her husband and doctors. Despite her intuitive objections, she agrees to treatment for her depression because her husband wishes her to.
The text is sprinkled with metaphors and allegories concerning the paper; the references are complex and numerous. There is the paper’s stench, which subtly pervades the whole house. This perhaps to give a sense of pervasive and inescapable injustice, much like the unspoken social rules which governed Gilman’s world. The paper’s pattern, which slowly develops from bulbous eyes to a woman shaking bars. It contains many vague images, but acts as a paranoid menagerie of domination. Gilman gives a sense that the wallpaper is ever-present and lurking, like the subtle rejections she faced as a female writer. The paper stains people and things, much like society passing its sense of protocol from person to person, father to son. A constantly changing light which shows new and mutating forms in the paper—symbols of the many ways chauvinism has perpetrated itself. Each one can be read as a different facet of a male-centric society and its effect on women. The images are so numerous that it is not possible to know precisely what Gilman meant for each one—perhaps she was unsure herself—but a reader can personalize them all and gain a sense of them from the context Gilman places around the text.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist text, telling a story about a woman’s struggles against male-centric thinking and societal ‘norms’. The text may be ambiguous to the reader who is unfamiliar with Gilman’s politics and personal biography, yet, it impresses any reader with the puerile treatment of the main character, who remains nameless in the text. To the casual reader, the story is one of a good-meaning, but oppressive husband who drives his wife mad in an attempt to help her, but it story illustrates how established protocols of behavior could have devastating effects on the women of Gilman’s time, regardless of the intentions of the purveyor. By late 20th century standards, the behavior of John, the husband, seems eerily inappropriate and restrictive, but was considered quite normal in the 19th century.
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in its quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce. (Lauter, 799) Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.
The surface of the text contains clues about Gilman’s perceptions of the treatment and roles of women. Her main character stumbles over technical words like ‘phosphates’, showing that women were overlooked in education. Moreover, she demonstrates a normalcy of women that are non-technical—they should not have to worry about phosphates, which are in the scientific realm assigned to men. The character Gilman sets up in her first few pages is of the proper Victorian woman—dutiful to her husband, simple and non-technical. Gilman goes out of her way to describe the garden of the house as ‘delicious’, this, perhaps, an allusion to a woman’s place in the kitchen. In the world of yellow wallpaper, a woman would naturally be fascinated by a garden. Gilman’s character is a naíve, faithful wife who does as her husband instructs her to. She blames herself for being ‘unreasonably angry’ and is critical of her nervous disorder, as she is pressured to think so by her husband and doctors. Despite her intuitive objections, she agrees to treatment for her depression because her husband wishes her to.
The text is sprinkled with metaphors and allegories concerning the paper; the references are complex and numerous. There is the paper’s stench, which subtly pervades the whole house. This perhaps to give a sense of pervasive and inescapable injustice, much like the unspoken social rules which governed Gilman’s world. The paper’s pattern, which slowly develops from bulbous eyes to a woman shaking bars. It contains many vague images, but acts as a paranoid menagerie of domination. Gilman gives a sense that the wallpaper is ever-present and lurking, like the subtle rejections she faced as a female writer. The paper stains people and things, much like society passing its sense of protocol from person to person, father to son. A constantly changing light which shows new and mutating forms in the paper—symbols of the many ways chauvinism has perpetrated itself. Each one can be read as a different facet of a male-centric society and its effect on women. The images are so numerous that it is not possible to know precisely what Gilman meant for each one—perhaps she was unsure herself—but a reader can personalize them all and gain a sense of them from the context Gilman places around the text.
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper Text
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper
Yellow Wallpaper 2011
Yellow Wallpaper 2011
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