Cite as: Martin Paul Eve, "An Introduction to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'", https://eve.gd, February 11, 2025, https://doi.org/10.59348/132ez-7wz69.

Among the works of fiction in the feminist canon, few are as celebrated as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This short story, or novella, depending on how you want to define those categories, details the abuse suffered by a woman in the supposed name of mental health, at the whim of her male “carers”. The story is now, as Catherine J. Golden notes, “among the most studied texts in the English-speaking world”. In this piece I aim to give you, firstly, a basic contextual background to Gilman, her life, her work and its interactions with various schools of feminism; secondly, a series of observations about the text that you can take forward for further discussion; and finally, an appreciation of the histories of madness that inform the story’s backdrop.

Context and Mental Illness

The Yellow Wall-Paper was written in 1892 and depicts the sufferings of a woman subjected to a diagnosis of depression in that period. It is set in what is known as the era of the “New Woman”, a key turning point in American and literary history. In this period, the inequalities between men and women increasingly came under attack from those who sought to change the supposedly fixed gender roles that prevailed at the time. The key context for Gilman, however, is the industrial revolution. While, in many senses, the industrial revolution went hand-in-hand with social progress, it also served to re-enforce a false dichotomy between home and the workplace. In other words, by creating a doctrine of “separate spheres”, as it is known, the doctrine of separate spheres, it was posited that women were biologically more suited to the home than to work and that, therefore, each of the sexes had its own, pre-determined areas, spheres, in which to operate. Crucially, for Gilman, as we shall see this was not only untenable on grounds of equality, but was also premised upon totally false economic presuppositions. Gilman was an advocate of equal education, suffrage (that is, the right to vote), careers, dress, and economic recognition for women. She rejected the stereotypical presentation of women at the time, which was based on purity, morality, fragility, dependence and passivity.

Gilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. At an early age, her father left their family home and the family and Gilman’s mother were the subject of gross social stigmatization as a result of this act. During her life, as to Gilman married twice. The first of her marriages was to Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. Gilman entered reluctantly into this marriage, worried that the setup would preclude her from undertaking any kind of meaningful activity, and most particularly her writing. This turned out to be the case. Despite assurances to the contrary, Gilman found it increasingly difficult to write at home and, after the birth of her daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson, found herself plunged into bouts of depression whenever she was at home. Aged just 26, Gilman was sent to Philadelphia for a one-month “rest cure” under the care of Weir Mitchell, who diagnosed her with “neurasthenia”, a term referring, supposedly to “a mechanical weakness of the actual nerves” (ie not as in “getting on my nerves” but rather to denote a problem with the conduction of electrical signals). It is a highly dubious diagnosis that was frequently inflicted upon women who were clearly suffering from depression. The rest cure involved total inactivity and isolation and must have been, for the highly intelligent Gilman, utterly unbearable. In her biography, Gilman describes the advice that she was given at the clinic: to put all her energy into childcare, to curb her academic interests and quote to “never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”.

It is clear, then, that there are strong biographical undertones to the “Yellow Wall-Paper”, but let me once more caution all present, as I did also in our earlier lecture on Emily Dickinson, of the dangers inherent in reducing the output, particularly of female writers, to symptoms of lives. That said, as any reader of the Yellow Wall-Paper can easily see, there are strong resemblances between the life and the text, with the figures of Dr. Mitchell and Stetson merged into a single, antagonist doctor/husband figure. Gilman, likewise, is inscribed in the text as the figure who must hide her journal from the husband upon his return, the figure who “hates to have me write a word”. Indeed, Gilman’s stated intention for the piece was for it to reach Dr. Weir Mitchell and to convince him of not only the total inefficacy, but also the damaging nature, of his rest cure. Indeed, Gilman always believed that writing should have a purpose, and this may be something you want to discuss more thoroughly in your seminar sessions: if writing has a purpose, is it art, or is there a propaganda element to it, regardless of whether one thinks the cause just?

In any case, I want to turn now to a little more on the context of mental illness and the ways in which female neurasthenic disorders were categorised. Let me give you first a more contemporary example of the stance in the Yellow Wall-Paper being parodied in Harold Pinter’s play The Hothouse. This work depicts a mental institution in which it becomes apparent that the bureaucratic overlord of the facility, Roote, has possibly killed one patient and certainly seduced and impregnated another. Like other figures in contemporary plays about madness and sexuality, such as Dr. Rance in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, Roote is steeped in formal vocabularies and his authority is derived from these jargons, while also being a source of parody. As Lush puts it in The Hothouse:

LUSH: I mean, not only are you a scientist, but you have literary ability, musical ability, knowledge of most schools of philosophy, philology, photography, anthropology, cosmology, theology, phytology, phytonomy, phytotomy -

to which Roote responds, with a false modesty:

ROOTE: Oh, no, no, not phytotomy.

In any case, Roote espouses an ethic that is close to the treatment of women and the idea of neurasthenic disorders, at least metaphorically, in the play’s most clearly obscene passage. When he has been told that one of the inmates is pregnant (albeit clearly by him) he remarks:

I don’t mind the men dipping their wicks on occasion. It can’t be avoided. It’s got to go somewhere. Besides that, it’s in the interests of science. If a member of the staff decides that for the good of a female patient some degree of copulation is necessary, then two birds are killed with one stone! It does no harm to either party. At least, that’s how I’ve found it in my experience. (With great emphasis) But we all know the rule! Never ride barebacked. Always take precautions. Otherwise complications set in. Never ride barebacked and always send in a report. After all the reactions of the patient have to be tabulated, compared with others, filed, stamped, and if possible verified!

This passage is instructive for a contemporary re-modelling and parody of exactly the situation that Gilman faced. In the first line, here, Pinter’s character establishes the patriarchal construct that causes misery for both men and women: the notion that men need to have sex and that, if they don’t, societal ill will be the result: “I don’t mind the men dipping their wicks on occasion. It can’t be avoided. It’s got to go somewhere.” The piece then asserts the way in which female sexuality is linked to supposed mental incapacitation and that “If a member of the staff decides that for the good of a female patient some degree of copulation is necessary, then two birds are killed with one stone! It does no harm to either party.” The male staff members decide, for the good of the patient, whether she will be subjected to an abuse of power that may be “good for her”.

This power imbalance between male and female is clear in Gilman’s piece, but what may be missing is the undercurrent of sexuality that also informs the work. To truly appreciate this, the history of neurasthenic conditions has to be brought to the fore, through the work of Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot, who lived from 1825 to 1893 was a French neurologist famed for his work on the condition of “female hysteria”. This diagnosis can be traced back a long way, in fact to Hippocrates in ancient Greece, and was long thought of as an expression of a problematic female “wandering womb”. As Rachel P. Maines notes in her book, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria”, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, however, by the mid-19th century, the term referred to what we now call sexual dysfunction. The treatment that was recommended was genital massage by a physician or, later, by a vibrator. I kid you not.

Therefore, when we see representations of female mental illness, written in the 1890s, hinged upon notions of female weakness, we need to bear this in mind. In The Yellow Wallpaper, however, this is totally explicit: the narrator has a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” Therefore, when you think of the history of female medicalisation that lies behind this story, there are several elements that have to be considered. First, as Paula A. Treichler puts it, we must remember that “Medical diagnosis stands as a prime example of an authorized linguistic process (distilled, respected, high-paying) whose representational claims are strongly supported by social, cultural, and economic practices”. In this case, the formal diagnosis of hysteria is entwined within these strong social, cultural and economic practices and cannot simply be distanced from them. Medical discourse is powerful and entrenched and, by labelling, it actually constitutes the subject; it is in the naming that one can become in medical discourse: the leper, the madman, the hysteric. Indeed, you can see how this perseveres to this day: the Royal National Institute for Blind People used to be the Royal National Institute for the Blind, but the medical categorisation can now be recognised as so powerful that they have adopted the latter formulation in an attempt to focus upon the fact that blindness need not be the overriding identity criteria for people in this group. That was, also, why I introduced Pinter’s play earlier; it focuses upon the power of medical jargon and its socially supported power structures.

Secondly, though, I want to bring to your attention the danger of non-ironically reading the piece as a representation of a figure who is mad. Again, as Treichler¹ puts it:

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was read by nineteenth-century readers as a harrowing case study of neurasthenia. Even recent readings have treated the narrator’s madness as a function of her individual psychological situation. A feminist reading emphasizes the social and economic conditions which drive the narrator – and potentially all women – to madness. In these readings, the yellow wallpaper represents (1) the narrator’s own mind, (2) the narrator’s unconscious, (3) the “pattern” of social and economic dependence which reduces women to domestic slavery. The woman in the wallpaper represents (1) the narrator herself, gone mad, (2) the narrator’s unconscious, (3) all women … The terms “depression” and “hysteria” signal a non-textual as well as a textual conundrum: contemporary readers could (and some did) read the story as a realistic account of madness; for feminist readers (then and now) who bring to the text some comprehension of medical attitudes toward women in the nineteenth century, such a non-ironic reading is not possible.

Indeed, before we move on to other areas, it might be worth quickly pointing out that it took a certain type of social framing for this view to become firmly accepted, and I would argue that the roots of this lie in the anti-psychiatry movement. Much of the intellectual trajectory of the 19th and 20th century lay in a phenomenon of relativism. In short: things that had once seemed absolute were unveiled as actually being historically specific. For instance, Nietzsche’s revelation that morality was culturally relative and shifted over time, as opposed to the more ingrained notion that morals were fixed and a-temporal. Alternatively, consider Karl Marx’s historicization of capitalism. If we believe that capitalism is a natural phenomenon (and much of our cultural heritage works on this assumption – take the Old Testament of the Hebrew bible in which one of the ten commandments reads “Thou Shalt Not Steal”, thereby inscribing private property into theology) – it becomes very difficult to criticize it. Marx’s innovation was to situate capitalism as a only one stage in a historical progression, thereby opening the way to think otherwise. In this case, what we have had (in line with much other work in the social sciences to expose as social constructs those elements that were thought timeless and absolute) is a relativisation of mental illness. It is clear that, in this case, women who were not “mentally ill” were being branded as neurasthenic in order to control and discipline them. This line of argumentation can be extended though to ask whether the very notion of mental illness is a construction; is it just a means of pathologising behaviour that sits beyond the bounds of what is considered normal? In this instance, the medical establishment becomes an extremely powerful (and potentially dangerous) instrument of normalisation. In cases of “mental illness”, the medical establishment has the power to “cure” you of your deviant behaviour. Now, I don’t want to extend this to all cases – it is clear that, in many instances, people require psychiatric treatment for their own safety or the safety of others. However, this problem continues to this day in the controversy around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders. A recent article² in the Wall Street Journal made this clear:

Today the public complains that psychiatrists seem ready to call every state of mental distress an illness. They see that any restless boy can receive a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, that troubled veterans—whether exposed to combat or not—are routinely said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that enormous numbers of discouraged, demoralized people are labeled victims of depression and have medications pressed upon them. The public is not far wrong. A recent nationwide diagnostic census based on DSM claimed that the majority of Americans have or have had a mental disorder.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, we see one of the clearest instances of the ways in which medicine can be complicit in the subjugation of specific groups. All is requires is a diagnosis, based on a deviation from wanted behaviour (the unruly woman who writes) and they have the authority to lock you up.

That, then, gives us some context of the medical conditions of hysteria and sexuality that frame Gilman’s story, but let me also now tell you a little about her other works and the ways in which these might also inflect our readings of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Herland

Aside from The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is most famous for her utopian novel, Herland and for her various feminist tracts that particularly focus upon the economic situation. It is worth also noting that Gilman did not like the term feminist, a word that was first coined in 1891, and instead preferred to be labelled a humanist. Indeed, this type of terminological division is another area ripe for discussion in your seminars, especially with regard to the state of contemporary feminism. I will also point out, in digression, that this has caused some controversy; after all, Gilman’s writings have come under fire for their disregard of class and race and, in such circumstances, can the label of a humanist hold?

Herland is a novel narrated by a character called Vandyk “Van” Jennings, a sociology student who sets out, along with his friends (Terry and Jeff), to explore an area of uncharted land where apparently only women live. There is much speculation among the men speculate as to what this female-only society would be like and each of the males forms a different judgement based on different stereotypes of women: Jeff thinks women should be protected; Terry thinks of them as conquests to be vanquished.

When the explorers arrive they are quickly located by three young women who watch them from the trees. The men try to trick the girls and chase them towards a nearby town. The women easily outpace the males and disappear among the houses; the women here are strong and unafraid. When the men enter the town, they are surrounded by many women who overpower and then anesthetize the men.

When the men come to, they are given comfortable quarters, clean clothes, and food. They are each given a tutor who teaches the men their language. Amid these conversations, many critiques of Gilman’s contemporary environment are made: for example, Van is unable to justify the milking of cows and the keeping of pets.

The men eventually attempt to escape back to their plane but are easily recaptured. Over time they each build relationships with the women; Van with Ellador, Jeff with Celis, and Terry with Alima. As Herland has had no men for 2,000 years, the women have no knowledge of romance or sexual intercourse. This causes some understandable friction. The men eventually all get married to their partners, although the women can’t understand the point of this at all.

Each of the men reacts differently to this. Van is frustrated but nonetheless enjoys his friendship for and love with Ellador. Terry, however, attempts to rape Alima and is anesthetized, forced to stand trial and then exiled back to his homeland. Van , Terry and Ellador leave Herland and promise not to reveal the location of the island.

Herland gives us, once again, an example of how Gilman saw fiction as a tool to alter critical consciousness. As Kathleen Lant notes: “Gilman was aware both of the enormous power of literature to shape consciousness and of the immense difficulty of suiting traditional forms of discourse to her radical, transforming purposes. In her essay “Masculine Literature”, she made clear her faith in the capacity of the novel to alter human consciousness: “Literature is the most powerful and necessary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form…. The art which gives humanity consciousness is the most vital art”.” You might want to consider how this has changed over time; in 1928, when Thomas Hardy died, his coffin was carried by the Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. The place of literature as the most vital art for the transformation of consciousness has surely changed substantially since then. Has it been replaced by television, perhaps? I’m not sure.

Gilman’s focus on fiction as a useful form for social consciousness also carries with it the general problems of populism and the popular form. The problem she laments – that it is difficult to enact radical change within a popular form – is clear. For instance, imagine attempting to effect a Marxist revolution through a reality competition television show. The problems would be clear: the form is suited to an individualistic ethos of supposedly personal success at the expense of others; and the form rests upon the individual’s pursuit of monetary gain and singular fame. However, if this is the predominant space in which the majority of people engage, then it seems that it would be worth trying it. From Gilman’s perspective, the current state of literature when she was writing was masculine dominated and subject to patriarchal constraints. Susan Gubar, for example, has argued that Herland was an attempt to “rename and reclaim” the “heart of female darkness” that Rider Haggard had previously appropriated in his novel She.

This particular constraint aside, Gilman’s espousal of a “use” for literature brings us to thinking about the function of utopian fiction. As is well known, utopia is a term that comes from Thomas Moore’s novel of the same name and is an invented Greek homophone for two terms: u-topia, meaning “the best place”, and oo-topia, meaning “no place” or “the impossible place”. Utopias are, then, often unrealistic perfect places; spaces in which it becomes possible to think about what makes a place “the best”. In so doing, however, they are designed to function critically against the present geographical and temporal location of the writer. It is impossible to think of “the best” without some concept of why and how that places differs from the place in which one writes or thinks. Utopia, therefore, has a critical function. As with many utopian texts, Herland enacts its spatial othering and enables its critique through distance; the reader has to go “somewhere else” for the critical function to work; it is, after all, very difficult to see a critical perspective when one is wholly inside, or immanent to, a situation.

What I’d like to ask, from this first foray into Gilman’s other texts, though, is whether in the light of her utopian fiction, we can also think of The Yellow Wallpaper as a utopian text. Now, to understand what I mean by this, we need to interrogate the concept of dystopia. Dystopia is sometimes thought of as “the opposite of utopia”; it is “the worst place” or “the bad place”. There are many such examples of this: Blade Runner, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker etc. However, as I’m going to briefly argue here is that dystopia actually looks a lot like utopia. After all, both achieve their effects through a critical stance on the present. In utopias, we see what is wrong with our society because it cannot compare to the brilliance of the projected land, which then accentuates our own flaws. In dystopia, the flaws of the present are accentuated through amplification; by increasing the magnitude and scope of the cracks in our own society, dystopia also criticizes. Both utopia and dystopia are the same: they criticize the present through distancing. We can call them both, therefore, utopian.

So, if Herland is explicitly utopian in the more traditional sense, with its geographical distancing, explicit critical dialogue and didactic purpose, then The Yellow Wallpaper might seem somewhat out of place. Except, when we think about the text in the context of a patriarchal society and the feminist movement, then suddenly we can see how it might be a microcosmic utopian space. In the protagonist’s incarceration by her male husband and the medical authorities, we can clearly see an amplification of the cracks in Gilman’s society. And observe an interesting phenomenon here: Gilman’s amplification of the problems occurs by narrowing the space to the room. By making the world of the text a small place, the problems can appear larger – a key aspect of the utopian tradition as exemplified in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels where the two initial worlds that Gulliver visits are primarily marked by a difference in scale: in one, he is a giant (so society looks petty) and in the other, he is a dwarf (so the world’s flaws are exposed and magnified and appear huge). The Yellow Wallpaper also pulls this trick. It has a small space that thereby acts for the entirety of society, but can be seen as magnifying those flaws because they are the text’s entire world. The women that the protagonist sees behind the wallpaper for example seem clear representations of women whom society has trapped and to whom has forbidden both an identity and right of expression. In this light, the utopian frame might be one that can be profitably used to think through Gilman’s short story.

It is interesting, though, that Gilman should think so highly of the fictional form as a potential agent for change when she was also the author of several non-fiction argumentative volumes, most notably Women and Economics, which was translated into seven languages and used in colleges as a textbook in the 1920s. Her other notable books include Concerning Children in 1900 (which I think has amusement value in the way that you can read it as meaning “on the subject of children” or “children who are worrying”), and The Home: Its Work and Influence.

Textual Analysis

Turning to analysis of the text itself, and there are several features, leading from an aesthetic level through to a societal ideological level, that are worthy of consideration. For instance, consider that, as Walter Benn Michaels notes³, it is true that the narrator figure is forbidden by her doctor-husband to write, she does in fact do a lot of writing! In Michael’s reading, this leads to an analysis of the way in which the story itself is concerned with writing and reading and how these map onto production and consumption specifically, thereby showing the body as a site of market exchange. Consider, for example, that the story is told as a kind of diary, the object that is hidden, and the “dead paper” is framed in parallel to the “inanimate thing” of the wallpaper. The wallpaper’s patterns, which seem unreadable when they are passive, become comprehensible, even in madness, through the writings of the narrator: both the writing in her own diary and the writing upon the wall – the “strange mark” that she makes when circling the room that is a mark inscribed by her uncovering. Michaels also points out that the wallpaper “writes back” – potential Star Wars title: the wallpaper writes back – in that it leaves “yellow smooches” on the narrator figure. In this argument, the text becomes profoundly concerned with the act of writing itself. Different entities, such as the wallpaper, the narrator and the diary, constantly write, read and produce out of writing. In fact, in the search of the narrator for self-identity, it is primarily writing, the ability to make a mark that defines her quest. As Michaels says, “the work of writing is the work simultaneously of production and consumption, a work in which woman’s body is rewritten as the utopian body of the market economy, imagined as a scene of circulation so efficient that exchange is instantaneous: products not only exist to be consumed, but coming into existence they already are consumed … In The Yellow Wallpaper, being oneself depends on owning oneself, and owning oneself depends n producing oneself. Producing is thus a kind of buying – it gives you title to yourself – and a kind of selling too – your labor in making yourself is sold for the self you have made … To read the Yellow Wallpaper in this way, then, is to read it as narrating the genesis of the marketplace”.

Meanwhile, others have read the text in more formalist terms, by which we mean an analysis of the stylistic basis on which the text rests. Formalist readings tend to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the literary work. Catherine J. Golden⁴ is especially keen to point out the significance of various aspects of the text’s syntax and grammar. Once more focusing on the ways in which the text is focused on notions of production through writing, Golden notes the prominence of the first-person pronoun and the way in which this grows throughout the text: “The increased use of ‘I’ and her syntactical placement of the nominative case pronoun [that is, using “I” in an active sense; ie “I did X”] within her own sentences demonstrate a positive change in self-presentation precisely at the point when her actions dramatically compromise her sanity and condemn her to madness.” Indeed, writing is once more prominently linked to a “production of the self” in this interpretation: the twelve undated diary entries are clearly separated by space and, therefore, represent “a spatial indication of the narrator’s own sense of self”. However, as Golden notes, “although the narrator may in fact be writing for a fictional self, the way she imagines this self to be changes as the entries continue”. This modification is highest in the final paragraph of the text where the narrator demonstrates her awareness of her state of submission (even if she is supposed to be mad) through the grammatical structure.

Consider the sentence: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage”. John’s cruel abuse is given through an intransitive verb, “to laugh”, thereby isolating the writer syntactically from this – it is separated out by the “at”. In doing so, however, the narrator practically disappears from this sentence; she is inactive and subordinate and, although successfully barricaded on a linguistic level from John’s actions, her subjectivity is substantially decreased and only present at all in the extremely weak gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun “one”. Conversely, at the end of the text, when she is presented in an inverse power position over John, both are present, but the sentence is far more active: “I had to creep over him every time”. In this final modification, the actor is active, gender-determinate and in a clear position of syntactical prominence, even if the same “buffering” of the subject, only referred to by a pronoun instead of his name, via the intransitive verb “to creep” does occur here. This is a phenomenon that Golden notes grows: “The narrator presents herself as ‘I’ six times in the final four paragraphs”.

Female Agency

Not all evaluations of this text have been so positive in terms of female agency. Most notably, there is a school of intersectional critique, based within a postcolonial framework, that sees Gilman’s story as problematically situated within ingrained racial prejudices of the States. (And also historically situated at a moment of particularly heightened racial tension.) Susan Lanser⁵, one of the leading proponents of this mode, notes that there was a cultural fear of the “Yellow Peril” at the time that Gilman was writing. This Yellow Peril is a racist reference to a fear of immigrants of East Asian origin, particularly the Chinese, but also extended to “light-skinned African Americans, Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and even the Irish”, among others. This fear is abundantly clear in America’s history of racist legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which specifically banned Chinese immigration for ten years and was extended until eventually superseded by the Immigration Act of 1924, which included the Asian Exclusion Act. (As a side note, in the current economic circumstances, we’re seeing a mass proliferation of grim anti-immigration rhetoric in this country, most of it implicitly racist – ie. There are often “good” immigrants and “bad” immigrants, with the “bad” immigrants being defined by racial/national origin.)

In any case, as Lanser reads it, the fact that the wallpaper in the text is yellow is no mere coincidence and, while it might not be an overt racism (much racism isn’t overt but is rather structural, pervasive and systemic), there is a representation of “the political unconscious of a culture in which an Aryan woman’s madness, desire, and anger, repressed by the imperatives of “reason,” “duty” and “proper self-control”, are projected onto the “yellow” woman who is, however, also the feared alien”. I am sad to report, however, that, in actuality, Gilman was an explicit racist. Although in several essays, such as “Race Pride” and “My Ancestors”, she criticizes white supremacy and condones inter-racial marriages, she belonged to eugenics organisations (ie organizations that support biological racial purity and systematic human breeding programmes in support of this), nationalist organisations, and she opposed equal and open immigration. In her book, Concerning Children, for example, as Lanser points out, Gilman writes that “a sturdy English baby would be worth more than an equally vigorous young Fuegian [Fuegians are the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America]”. Likewise, in her journal, The Forerunner, Gilman remarks upon “the lazy old orientals”, which seems to provide a solid base of evidence for a critique of The Yellow Wallpaper in this light. In fact, Gilman published an article called “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”. Indeed, Lanser makes a good case for it, pointing out the ways in which the text gives us the “interminable grotesques” of the Yellow Wallpaper – “with their lolling necks and bulbous eyes staring everywhere with their peculiar odor and yellow smell, their colors repellent, almost revolting, smouldering and unclean, sickly and particularly irritating, their new shades of yellow erupting constantly”. There is more on this, actually, in another piece by Marty Roth⁶ who picks up on the fact that the wallpaper is described as “florid Arabesque” and comes with a specific oriental aesthetic that is despised throughout the text; the oriental, unreadable design entraps the female figures, once more lending a more sinister edge to Gilman’s work.

This, of course, brings us full circle back to issues of textual interpretation vs. intentionality, the crux of new critical reading practices, but also opens up various problematic contexts. Firstly, obviously, Gilman herself framed the work within a feminist, liberatory perspective. She might argue that the yellow-ness of the wallpaper could as well have been any other colour and that there are a whole host of arbitrary colour decisions that she could make that might have racial connotations (red, for native Americans for instance, black for African Americans, green for the Irish etc.), but, conversely, there was a climate of racial tension, she was known for explicitly racist commentary and the colour has a particular significance. As always, the author does not have the final say in these matters. What I think might be more interesting, though, rather than rehashing these tired debates on whether we take or ignore the author’s stated intent (although, always remember that words can have effects beyond the author’s intent) is the strong resonance that this type of reading has with current critiques of feminism. There is a school of thought that points out that contemporary occidental feminism often treats “women” as if they are a homogeneous group while, in actuality, different groups of women have different degrees and experiences of discrimination. The study of the ways in which different axes of identity – such as gender, class, race, ability, sexual orientation, or even, in the case of animal rights, speciesism – combine and interact to be used in multiple new and distinct modes of oppression and discrimination is called intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. I mention all this because it provides an interesting counter-point to the argument that because Gilman intimates that her focus is upon feminist liberation it means that her version of feminist liberation necessarily takes account of a universally applicable version of womanhood. It clearly doesn’t. In other words, even if you don’t buy Lanser’s argument that the text is about a subconscious fear of Asian immigration, it is certainly nonetheless true that the feminist rights for which the text (and Gilman’s corpus) advocate are not universally shared and, in all likelihood given Gilman’s personal views, explicitly exclude the experience of Asian women.

In this wide-ranging introduction, I’ve covered a range of approaches to a text that seems, at first glance, as though it might be fairly obvious. Noting Gilman’s background as a radical feminist, we then moved to discuss a history of women’s oppression through the categorisations of mental illness, in which I gave you an example of a contemporary parody of that stance in Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse. We then looked at 19th century readings of the text and the frameworks of neurasthenia within which they situated the story before moving on to consider the ways in which the text might be considered “utopian”, if we apply certain definitions of the term. In this light, I gave some contextual background to Herland, Gilman’s feminist utopian novel, before finally exploring two different interpretational paradigms: an aesthetic formalist reading that involved close analysis of linguistics and a sociological reading that pointed out the specific forms of “feminism” to which Gilman appears to be committed, in this case, one that erases traces of race from its analysis. Over the course of this introduction, I hope that I’ve also given you, through some demonstrations, a range of reading strategies that can be applied to this text. We also had new critical approaches, where we disregarded authorial intention. We had literary genealogical readings, the “utopian tradition” as a way of framing the texts – ie. Take a pre-existing grouping and see how a text fits within it. We had close reading techniques – the linguistic approach and, of course, we had sociological and postcolonial critiques. That some of these readings sat in tension with one another does not matter. At least part of the point of critical thinking in the humanities is to be able to hold these opposing viewpoints and accept them both as true. This, of course, can be troubling – it is also the basis on which Orwell’s “doublethink” in 1984 is premised. However, in the case of literature, that plurality can be an ethical act; it can be an opening of possibilities that are not closed by the desire to solidify and make single. That this text is so polyvocal is a cause for celebration, not one to be shouted down with accusations of madness.

Footnotes

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