The Yellow Wallpaper E-Book

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Herausgeber: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 93

Beschreibung

Edited with a new introduction by Aimee McLaughlin "The Yellow Wallpaper" by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892, is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. What happens when a woman is pushed too far? Is she able to express her thoughts and feelings, or is she forced towards the expectation of behaving 'normally' again soon? A woman travels with her husband to an old colonial mansion after a nervous breakdown triggered by the birth of their child. Confined to the nursery and allowed only to breathe fresh air, eat well and rest in line with a regimented 'cure', she slowly begins to unravel at the seams. Her only distraction is writing in secret – that, and the woman she begins to see trapped inside the yellow wallpaper of the room itself. Isolated and breaking apart, she sets herself a task: to free the woman, and to become one with her temporary confinement. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' presents a harrowing, disturbing account of mental stress, confinement and female turmoil - within which the only available solace can be found inside four peeling, sickly yellow walls ... Our new edition also features the sequence of poems "Woman" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The gothic genre offers Gilman an effective mode of diagnosing contemporary culture whilst in tandem expressing her ensuing fears and anxieties. Gilman within this novella, gothicises the domestic setting, inverting the pillars of domesticity: family, security and understanding, in turn unveiling the dangers lurking behind the familiarity of gender roles within marital relations. The intimate first-person narration of the narrative serves to enhance Gilman's exposure of the oppressive forces of a male-dominated society, as she deplores her protagonist's inferior position in her domestic arrangement. The female narrator is encumbered by masculine superiority, undoubtedly dwelling in the middle of patriarchy. Embedded within her characterisation is the subjugated role bestowed upon Victorian women. Gilman projects derangement onto a familiar literary figure ― the middle−class wife and mother ― placing the source of this madness in the inviolate sphere for dutiful women ― the home." from the new introduction to The Yellow Wallpaper by Aimee McLaughlin

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroduction by Aimee McLaughlin The Yellow Wallpaper Woman She Walketh Veiled and SleepingTo ManWomen of TodayTo The Young WifeFalse PlayMotherhoodSix Hours a DayAn Old ProverbReassuranceMother To ChildServicesIn Mother-TimeShe Who Is To ComeGirls of TodayWe As WomenIf Mother KnewThe Anti-SuffragistsWomen Do Not Want ItWedded BlissThe Holy StoveThe Mother’s ChargeA Brood MareFeminine VanityThe Modest MaidUnsexedFemalesA Mother’s SoliloquyThey Wandered ForthBaby LoveBibliographyCharlotte Perkins GilmanAlso available from Gothic World Literature EditionsCopyright

Introduction by Aimee McLaughlin

‘I wrote it to preach. […] One girl reads this and takes fire! Her life has changed. She becomes a power− a mover of others− I write for her’.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a pioneering sociologist, feminist, author and lecturer. A writer of innovative pieces that sought to advance woman’s equality at the turn of the twentieth century, her political message signalled an outright rejection of accepted gender biases prevalent throughout American society. Devoting her output predominantly to dissecting, discussing and reshaping the role of women in traditional Victorian structures, Gilman’s work on social criticism is her most representative genre, comprising more than two-thirds of her publications. She employs her fictional work as a vehicle to advance feminist transformation, sowing the seeds of her feminist ideas in fictional gardens in the hope that they will blossom, enlarging the common woman’s sense of what is possible outside codes of Victorian gender ideology. Amongst a myriad of diverse discourse, Gilman’s reputation in literary studies has been skewed by the popularity of a single work of feminist gothic fiction, The Yellow Wall−Paper (1892). Notably, this work has achieved full canonical status in American literature, becoming one of the central texts of American feminism. First published in The New England Magazine, Gilman’s epistolary novella focalises the mental deterioration and ensuing insanity of an unnamed female narrator, consigned to her bedroom under the instruction of her physician husband, John. The text engages with themes of female inferiority, grappling with the power politics of marriage and the home, that were seen prevalent throughout the Victorian era. The political subtext of this novella cannot be overstated; Gilman here cleverly manifests a coded expression of the contemporary patriarchal forces administering women, binding them to the domestic sphere. She aims to debunk coherent ideas surrounding gender roles and femininity, accepted uniformly across America.

The gothic genre offers Gilman an effective mode of diagnosing contemporary culture whilst in tandem expressing her ensuing fears and anxieties. Gilman within this novella, gothicises the domestic setting, inverting the pillars of domesticity: family, security and understanding, in turn unveiling the dangers lurking behind the familiarity of gender roles within marital relations. The intimate first-person narration of the narrative serves to enhance Gilman’s exposure of the oppressive forces of a male-dominated society, as she deplores her protagonist’s inferior position in her domestic arrangement. The female narrator is encumbered by masculine superiority, undoubtedly dwelling in the middle of patriarchy. Embedded within her characterisation is the subjugated role bestowed upon Victorian women. Gilman projects derangement onto a familiar literary figure ― the middle−class wife and mother ― placing the source of this madness in the inviolate sphere for dutiful women ― the home.

Distinctively throughout this piece we see that Gilman is averse to contemporary domestic ideology and is critical of female domestic servitude in America, deeming it to be a symptom of society’s patriarchal framework. This patriarchal structure creates a rigid dichotomy between the sexes, deeming the female to be inferior, in turn relegating her to domestic duties. Gilman here dismantles and erodes the sentimentality that is endemic in marriage and motherhood throughout the Victorian period, in turn unmasking the power relations that imprison women, which are veiled and obscured by this sentimentality. This notion can be seen echoed elsewhere in Gilman’s work. Her critical text, The Home, Its Work and Influence (1903), is a scathing attack on the domesticity of women at the start of the twentieth century. Gilman invokes the ways in which prescribed gender roles within the Victorian familial structure or the ‘home’ act as a prominent source of female oppression. She makes an impassioned declaration that women and men alike possess a ‘human need for meaningful work’ and that the sexual division of labour thwarts the natural instinct of women to seek out stimulating work and contact. Weaved throughout this critical piece are Gilman’s perceptive ruminations surrounding the consequences of the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Within the narrative she asserts that, immured within the home, women inhabit the stultifying position of ‘docile workers for the family’. This spawns a ripple effect, detrimental to the female mind, which becomes buried, enslaved and stultified in the ‘home’s work’. The immutable submission required of a dutiful housewife bred rebellion in Gilman: she frames this predicament within the poem ‘The Housewife’ (1896):

Here is the House to hold me – cradle of all the race;

Here is my lord and my love, here are my children dear–

Here is the House enclosing, the dear-loved dwelling place;

Why should I ever weary for aught that I find not here?

Here for the hours of the day and the hours of the night;

Bound with the bands of Duty, rivetted tight;

Duty older than Adam – Duty that saw

Acceptance utter and hopeless in the eyes of the serving squaw.

Food and the serving of food – that is my daylong care;

What and when we shall eat, what and how we shall wear;

Soiling and cleaning of things – that is my task in the main –

Soil them and clean them and soil them – soil them and clean them again.

To work at my trade by the dozen and never a trade to know;

To plan like a Chinese puzzle – fitting and changing so;

To think of a thousand details, each in a thousand ways;

For my own immediate people and a possible love and praise.

My mind is trodden in circles, tiresome, narrow and hard,

Useful, commonplace, private – simply a small backyard;

And I the Mother of Nations! – Blind their struggle and vain!

I cover the earth with my children – each with a housewife’s brain

(qtd. In Knight and Scharnhorst 21).

The polemic nature of this verse is enhanced by the intimate first-person narration, which creates a vivid image of a Victorian archetype of female domestic servitude. In turn, Gilman’s own subsequent frustration toward the societal position of women is underlined. From the outset the female speaker of the poem declares that she is constrained by social tradition, ‘bound with the bands of Duty, rivetted tight’. The capitalisation of ‘Duty’ serves to emphasise the prominence of a woman’s societal obligation to the home. A tone of vexation is evoked through the heavy employment of plosive alliteration, the ‘tight’ nature of the bands appears stifling, intensified by the aural dimension inferred by this imagery. This tone of vexation is augmented as the narrator maps out the monotonous nature of her ‘Duty’, explaining that it entails, ‘[the] soiling and cleaning of things – that is my task in the main –/ Soil them and clean them and soil them – soil them and clean them again’. The densely punctuated syntax decelerates the pace of the narrative and depicts the tediousness of the housewife’s life, accentuated by the cyclicality of the rhyming couplet, which outlines the narrator’s repetitious cleaning cycle. The cyclical structure of the couplet is preserved perpetually within the poem, mirroring the narrator’s dutiful entrapment and rendering her situation inescapable. This is paradigmatic of the life of a Victorian housewife, as Gilman outlines in Women the Enigma (1908): ‘she works unceasingly; […] no noonings −no evenings−no rainy days! She works harder than the man’. Gilman then characterises the resultant injury inflicted, homing in on the narrator’s intellectual limitations as a result of pertaining to her ‘Duty’ in the poem’s concluding quatrain. Six adjectives declare the subduing of her intelligence, the housewife’s ‘mind’ trodden down to become ‘tiresome, narrow and hard, / Useful, commonplace, private’.

Gilman is ardent in her assertion that the intellectual stifling of women, due to their permanent tie to domesticity imposes cerebral damage. She enhances this belief, explaining that the home affects women in the same manner as ‘one continuous environment upon any living creature’, underscoring the tremendous pressure of ‘live brains against dead conditions’ (The Home 103, 114). This is an issue that is underlined and emphasised within The Yellow Wall−paper. The female narrator, confined to her home and instructed not to write by her husband, experiences great difficulty in attempting to confidently articulate her own beliefs even if expressing them confidentially on ‘dead paper’. She feels obliged to add substance to her opinions, seeking to gain verbal leverage by beginning sentences that express her thoughts with the word ‘personally’, when disagreeing with John’s proposed cure for her temporary nervous depression. She remarks: ‘Personally, I disagree with their ideas’; ‘Personally, I believe that congenial work […] would do me good’ (196). Her apparent reluctance to assert her beliefs exhibits an element of guilt that she harbours about writing her narrative (or straying from John’s command). Her literary endeavours hinder her ability to reside solely in the realm of the domestic. She acknowledges this failure to assimilate herself with the feminine norm: ‘It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way’. Again, Gilman invokes this idea of a woman’s ‘duty’ as her narrator seeks the illusion of sexual consistency according to dominant norms however struggles to conform.

The turbulent condition of the narrator’s inner landscape (torn between striving to align herself with the expectations of her gender role and her desire to write), traces a dualism embedded within her captive body between a dutiful wife and a rebellious author. Confined to her bedroom and unable to immerse herself in her writing the narrator becomes psychologically deprived and her mental state deteriorates. We see the posed place of recuperation for the narrator evolve to become a space of confinement, paralleling the ‘dead conditions’ of the Victorian home that Gilman has warned of. The narrator’s intellectual self is stifled and debased to the extent where she struggles to identify with it. Her diary entries become fragmented as she gets ‘pretty tired’ when attempting to carry out her ‘work’, admittedly not ‘feel[ing] able to [write]’ as it is ‘getting to be a great effort for [her] to think straight’. The narrator therefore seeks stimulus in her ‘unanimated’ surroundings and her obsession with the salient image within the novella, the yellow wallpaper ignites. With the aid of the wallpaper’s ‘vicious influence’ her obsession snowballs and becomes incessant, her meticulous observations of its ‘sprawling flamboyant pattern’ begin to dominate her stream of consciousness. The narrator’s obsessive behaviour fixating on the wallpaper is rationalised within Gilman’s The Home. She hypothesizes that this ‘tendency to monomania’ is a ‘general sweeping consequence of being housebound’.