Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Title: The Yellow Wallpaper
Genre: Short Story
Year: 1892
Pages: 25
Origin: read on the Kindle
Nod Rating: 4 nods out of 5
‘But what is one to do?’
The Worm first came across the interesting writer that is
Charlotte Perkins Gilman a few years ago in a dusty and musty copy of Herland.
Written and set in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a small
group of men come across a tribe of women who have lived for generations
without the use of males. It is a seminal feminist text, and it blew the Worm
away in its pioneering spirit and refusal to bow down to the gender difference
nonsense of its period (for example, this was written before females had the
right to vote in elections).
All of which is it is a travesty that the Worm has not
returned to Perkins Gilman sooner. Her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, is
also one referenced by feminist thinkers in the previous century. Its narrator
discusses her rest in a bed, and bit by bit she descends into madness with a
running connection to the wallpaper within her bedroom:
‘I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.’
The wallpaper serves a confessional purpose: ‘There are
things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.’ And it serves
another purpose to the reader, as well: an implicit message of the struggle of
women in their male dominated world:
‘The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so…’
Rather than find understanding in her husband, the narrator
is patronised (‘Bless her little heart’). Her desired liberation from insanity
– and Perkins Gilman’s message of the liberation of women from their
enslavement – comes to nothing but a bloody (and confusing) end: ‘Now why
should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall,
so that I had to creep over him every time!’
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a woman who lived life on her
own terms (deciding to ‘chose chloroform over cancer’ in a suicide note in the
1935). She could have found a wider audience in the twenty-first century, yet
works such as The Yellow Wallpaper have found an enduring readership. Not just
for the implicit message, but also in her ability to weave words together. The
Yellow Wallpaper is heartedly recommended read.
