Read the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Read “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/wallpaper.html

Using a dictionary, define the three psychological “coming of age” terms which usually describe a character or element in the Gothic mode: abjection, sublimation, and repression. Consider if any of these three terms are applicable to any of the characters or elements in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Was any person made to be an outcast? Was there any repression of emotion or memories?

Abjection-

Sublimation-

Repression-

“The Yellow Wallpaper”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Topics for Discussion:

1. Point of view

Consider whether or not the first-person narrator is reliable. Not all of the narrator’s conclusions seem accurate. For instance, she says that the home used to be a “colonial mansion” and her room a nursery. Yet there are “walls and gates that lock” and “separate little houses,” and her room has iron window bars, wall rings, a bed permanently attached to the floor, and gnawed bedposts. It sounds more like a former institution for the psychologically ill. Of course, too, we can question the narrator’s certainty about the woman behind the yellow wallpaper and the group of women creeping around the garden. Compare the reliability of the narrator in this story to Nick from The Great Gatsby.

2. Narrator as character The narrator is emotionally unbalanced, but why? That is, what has driven her into a state of neurosis or even psychosis? This question is crucial to understanding the story. When we consider her life, we realize that she has never been permitted to explore her identity and be herself. As a wife in the late nineteenth century, particularly a wife of a physician, she was expected to fulfill certain obligations, which are derived from her husband and his profession. However, these obligations have left her unfulfilled and empty.

The narrator’s life is very much like the yellow wallpaper in her room. The wallpaper, like her life, is deteriorating from a lack of attention. Furthermore, the pattern of her life has been as vague and disconnected as the pattern in the design of the wallpaper. She promises to follow “that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.” The woman she sees behind the wallpaper represents an image of herself. Like the woman, the narrator is trapped behind a pattern or way of life that someone else (a husband, a culture) has designed for her. Her deepest self and individuality yearn for expression and freedom.