Title:Environment As Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'

Title: Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' Author(s): Loralee MacPike Publication Details: American Literary Realism 1870-1910 8.3 (Summer 1975): p286-288. Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 201. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: [(essay date summer 1975) In the following essay, MacPike emphasizes the elements of "literary realism" in "The Yellow Wallpaper," focusing, in particular, on Gilman's use of symbolism in the story to convey her protagonist's state of mind.] Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," first published in 1892, is a study of social degeneration into madness. As such it may seem an unlikely focus of American literary realism; yet it is a very fine illustration of realist symbolism. The furnishings of the narrator's room become a microcosm of the world that squeezes her into the little cell of her own mind, and the wallpaper represents the state of that mind. The story line is deceptively simple. The narrator, a writer, finds herself increasingly depressed and indefinably ill. Her husband John (a physician), her brother, and her doctor all concur that she needs complete rest and a cessation of her work if she is to "recover," by which they mean "appear as a normal female in a world created by and for men." Gilman is not speaking in any militant feminist terms; she merely shows how her narrator needs to work in order to feel at ease with herself and the self's potential. Instead, she is hustled off to the country into a life of enforced idleness of body and mind. Although she would have preferred a room opening on the garden, her husband consigns her to the upstairs room, a former nursery, whose major features are ancient yellow wallpaper, bars on the windows, and a huge bedstead nailed to the floor. The fact that the narrator's prison-room is a nursery indicates her status in society. The woman is legally a child; socially, economically, and philosophically she must be led by an adult--her husband; and therefore the nursery is an appropriate place to house her. The narrator's work threatens to destroy her status as a mere child by gaining her recognition in the adult world; this is reason enough for her husband to forbid her to work. Her work is, as he suggests, dangerous; but its danger is for him, not her, because it removes her from his control. The nursery, then, is an appropriate symbol for the desired state of childlikeness vis-à-vis the adult world that her husband wishes to enforce. The nursery's windows are barred, making the setting not only a retreat into childhood but a prison. The narrator is to be forever imprisoned in childhood, forbidden to "escape" into adulthood. She instinctively feels that, just as only her work can transport her out of the world of childhood, so too can it alone free her from her dependence upon her husband in particular and the male-created world in general. Emergence from the chrysalis of childhood would also free her in the larger sense, making her a responsible member of society rather than merely a cloistered woman. It could provide for her a physical movement out into an active life, but the bars in the unchosen room of her existence effectively prevent such an emergence. The bedstead is the third symbol of the narrator's situation. A representation of her sexuality, it is nailed to the floor, ostensibly to prevent the former youthful occupants of the room from pushing it about. As the nursery imprisons her in a state of childhood, so the bedstead prevents her from moving "off center" sensually--not merely sexually--in any sort of physical contact with another human being. Her inability to care for her own child is but another fixity in her life, and the immovable bedstead symbolizes the static nature of both the expression and the product of her sexuality, thus denying her this outlet for her energies just as the bars deny her physical movement and the nursery her adult abilities. These three items--the nursery, the bars on the windows, and the bedstead--show not only the narrator's mind but the state of the world that formed that mind. Her dilemma is not strictly personal, for the forces that shaped her, cutting off all possibility of personal realization, movement, or sexuality, are the processes that shape many women's lives. Gilman shows, through the normality of the narrator's life, the sources of her frustrations. The apparently unusual circumstances of bars, a nailed-down bed, a nursery for a bedroom are all explained as possible occurrences in a normal household. Although unusual perhaps, they are not extraordinary in the way Hawthorne's settings or Wilkie Collins' plots can be said to be extraordinary. It is not necessary for Gilman to give any background whatever, neither social comment nor history; for her use of the stuff of the narrator's life as symbolic of her state of mind and its causes suffices. The three symbols of the narrator's existence coalesce in the yellow wallpaper, which is the primary symbol of the story which not only represents the narrator's state of mind but becomes that state of mind. As she grows increasingly fond of the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that it may well be the only part of her life she can control. She learns to use it on an intellectual level to replace the adult intellectual activity forbidden her. Seeking a human with whom to interact, she finds heads in the wallpaper, sees them move as if behind undulating, almost-imperceptible bars. At first she becomes angry with the heads' "impertinence" and "everlastingness," not recognizing that these are the two qualities she herself exhibits: the impertinence of trying to achieve humanness against all restrictions and the everlastingness of her own stubborn core of self which can never fully yield to outside expectations. Her refusal to accept the wallpaper as either ugly or meaningless is a representation of the tenacity of her own character, which can yield to such outside constraints as a prison nursery but will never surrender its right to remain outside interpretation, as does the wallpaper. In relation to the "principle of design" imposed by the masculine universe, both the wallpaper and her mind refuse to follow any logic other than their own. Slowly, the wallpaper becomes something more than an object for the narrator. She begins to see in it a movement and a purpose she has been unable to realize in her own life. As her madness develops, she shifts her own desire for escape from the limitations of her husband's expectations onto the figure behind the undulating bars of the wallpaper, the figure of a woman, "stooping down and creeping about" behind the pattern as she herself creeps behind her restricted life. The rescue of that woman becomes her one object, and the wallpaper becomes at once the symbol of her confinement and of her freedom. The disparate symbols of Gilman's story coalesce in the symbol of the wallpaper, itself imprisoned in the nursery, with the humanoid heads, behind their intangible bars, denied the sexuality of bodies. If realism is to be defined, as Wellek has defined it, as "the objective representation of contemporary social reality," Gilman's story is indeed realism; but her realism, like Henry James's, is a representation of what is real to the author. There can be no "objective reality" as such because it is always seen by subjective observers. Gilman was such a subjective observer insofar as she was a member of a group (women) viewed as external to integral (male) society. Her reality she presented not directly, but through the objects comprising the backdrop of her narrator's life--objects which symbolize her assigned status in the world but which, paradoxically, also give her the opportunity to achieve complete freedom. In a world where half the human race must be rendered non-entities in the most radical sense of the word, insanity is the only creative act available to those doomed to be defined as subhuman by submission to society's standards. In this sense Gilman anticipates R. D. Laing, who says that in an insane world only the mad are sane. Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) MacPike, Loralee. "Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'." American Literary Realism 1870-1910 8.3 (Summer 1975): 286-288. Rpt. in Twentieth- Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 201. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE %7CH1420082948&v=2.1&u=per_k12&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420082948