Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024
If, like me before last week, you haven’t read Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper‘ (1892), then follow the link to Project Gutenberg, and go no further here until you have. I have the Penguin edition above, and made the mistake of reading Kate Bolick’s Introduction first, which took away all the tension.
So, this is the story, written in the first person present, of a woman suffering from a nervous condition, whose doctor husband takes her away to a rented house –
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house … but that would be asking too much of fate!
and then persuades her to take the large, sunny room on the top (third) floor, a former nursery, and maybe a gym when the house was for a while a school; rather than a smaller, more comfortable room on the ground floor.
All her husband, John’s, persuasions sound like orders. He is the physician. He has only her best interests at heart. He knows best about how to manage her foolish fears, and her doctor brother agrees.
So I take phosphate 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.
The shabby wall-paper in her room, the wall-paper of the title, torn off in large patches by the schoolboys, is “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow”, with one of “those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”
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.
The (unnamed) writer’s “work” is writing. We are reading a journal being kept in secret. Her husband does not want her to think about her illness; his sister, who is keeping house, believes it is writing which has made her sick.
Some weeks in to their three months long lease, we get the first hint of the problem developing:
I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
She’s lonely in the house, her husband away all day and some nights doctoring; lonely and unoccupied, but he will not let her go on a visit to friends, she is not strong enough, and she breaks down in tears and does not make her case very well. He says “I must use my will and self control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”
I know you have all read this, all feminists have, I’m sure, and it’s probably compulsory in American colleges; but I wanted to open up the detail in the order that Gilman does. Here we are on the ninth page of 16 with a text book case of depression, and she is being told to snap out of it. I am sorry that Psyche is not here to discuss it with me.
I am aware that ‘snap out of it’ was a common reaction till quite recently; and also that nineteenth century women were fearful, as the writer is, of being institutionalized. Jess White looked at this with Rosa Praed’s daughter in Hearing Maud. But I also seem to remember, in Australia’s early days, so, much earlier than this story, that the people around him were aware that John Macarthur’s mania and depression were an illness, and were treated as such.
As I say, we’re more than halfway along, when we see, “There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.”
Bolick writes, Gilman’s “symbolic fictionalization of her own postpartum depression, shocked readers when it first appeared in 1892” and also led to the “forgotten masterpiece” being added, 80 years later, “to the then-nascent feminist canon” [which only adds to my belief that Australian women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century was much more overtly feminist than US (or British) women’s].
The baby is only mentioned a couple of more times, and while that might be a clever device, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, there is in fact no evidence the depression began with the birth, or that Gilman herself understands – presumably without the terminology – she might be suffering postpartum depression.
The remainder of the story concerns the writer’s gradual descent into madness, brilliantly described, until in the last page or so she becomes her own worst nightmare, but, luckily for us, still writing.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings, Penguin, 2019. Introduction by Kate Bolick. The Yellow Wall-Paper first pub. 1892.
From the Penguin bio:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) married CW Stetson in 1884 and was almost immediately pregnant with a daughter. After the birth she “sank into a deep depression” which lasted several years. She spent some time in a sanatorium, taking a rest cure; got out; had a nervous breakdown; left her husband in 1888 and went to California “where her recovery was swift”. In the 1890s she began writing and lecturing. In 1894 she relinquished custody of her daughter to Stetson.
The Australian Legend 