Intro
This short story from 1891 is narrated by a woman whose doctor husband has decided that she’s suffering from “a slight hysterical tendency.” Sounds fun already, right? Following this diagnosis, the narrator finds herself confined to one of the rooms in the ancestral manse where she and her hubby are spending the summer. This is supposed to help her get better, because that’s what medical science was like in 1891.
Plus, her husband has the brilliant idea of forbidding her from any “strenuous” mental activity like writing, due to his belief that her “imaginative power and habit of story-making” are likely to aggravate her nerves. Now that’s bedside manner. And this is despite the narrator’s own belief that she would benefit from “congenial work, with excitement and change.” Who’s in the right? Well, going by the results of this “rest cure,” we suspect that being cooped up with only her mind for company isn’t exactly the best remedy—despite being “what the doctor ordered.”
The fact that the narrator’s room used to be a nursery hardly seems coincidental: her husband even refers to her as a “little girl” (how annoying would that be?), and the nursery—complete with barred windows—pretty obviously signifies entrapment and infantilization. The place seems more like a cell than a place of recovery.
So despite her husband’s orders, the narrator writes of her fascination with the room’s wallpaper and a strange figure that she imagines moving around in its pattern. The narrator also interprets the pattern as bars, suggesting that the figure is a prisoner like herself. This connection gets stronger as the story goes on, with identity becoming blurred (we no longer know who “I” signifies) and the narrator coming to see herself as this figure. Ironically, her “recuperation” ends with her having a complete meltdown. So much for a little R & R.
The woman in the wallpaper therefore seems to be a figment of the narrator’s mind, and this highlights one of the story’s main themes. Imagine what it would be like to feel as though your whole personality is being stifled or walled in—wallpapered in, in this case. Well, that’s what’s happening here, and it’s this that brings about the screwy imagery in this story.
We also need to grasp the story’s historical and social context: the Victorian era was a time of strict ideas about “proper” roles for men and women, the most obvious being the association of women with the household and qualities of modesty and self-denial. On top of this, women often felt (or were made to feel) nervous about attempting careers as writers, and hysteria, as a sort of manifestation of nervousness, was seen as a female disease and usually associated with some guilt-tripping about women going outside their traditional roles.
There’s way more historical stuff that we could go into here, but, suffice to say, women sometimes got a raw deal. In the story, the narrator’s isolation and anxiety about writing tap into these issues, with Gilman employing some memorable imagery that invites a semiotic approach:
Quote
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 didn'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 brother—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.
But I don’t mind it a bit—only the paper.
Analysis
Ominous? You tell us. The narrator has become obsessed with tracing the pattern in the wallpaper, which she describes at the start of this passage. It’s not too hard to see that, for her, this pattern isn’t just decorative: even on a surface level she describes it as ugly (wouldn’t be one of Martha Stewart’s picks, it’s safe to say), but she also invests it with deep meaning. Her description of the pattern as a monstrous figure with “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes,” not to mention its “impertinence” makes it seem like a living being rather than a static pattern. And the same goes for it’s seeming as if it “KNEW” about its vicious influence. You’ll never look at a wall as trustingly again, huh?
The narrator acknowledges that the wallpaper is lifeless (even-minded rationale? Just you wait), but she finds herself fascinated nonetheless. This isn’t a one-off thing either: she remembers lying awake as a child and being both scared and entertained by the sight of blank walls and plain furniture, while a chair seemed like “a strong friend.”
The yellow wallpaper isn’t the first time that the narrator has read meaning into inanimate things. So does that mean she was crazy to begin with? Let’s just say the story demonstrates the powers of the imagination and of connotation.
Still. While the narrator sometimes found comfort in her surroundings as a child, the wallpaper is a different story. Plus, she notices that the room looks like it’s been through the wars, with the bed, floors and plaster all being in a shabby state—clearly a job for the Extreme Makeover team.
She’s not really bothered about all this other stuff though: it’s only the wallpaper that gets to her. The question isn’t just of the room being rundown, then—it’s the specifically freaky-looking and insanity-provoking (spoiler alert!) pattern in that wallpaper that gets her down. And when we consider this passage in relation to the story as a whole, the wallpaper emerges as a potent semiotic motif.