Reader Response: The Yellow Wallpaper

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Gilman, Lovecraft, and Plath. Oh my!

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

-Oscar Wilde

I enjoy the works of writers Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft and Sylvia Plath, the Cthulhu mythos (Lovecraft) and The Bell Jar (Plath) in particular, but I can't say for certain that either of them were influenced in any way by this story or its writer, Charlotte Gilman. However, I would not be surprised if that were so. It is entirely possible in the former's case as he was born in 1890, shortly before the first printing of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1891 in New England Magazine.

I enjoyed this story a good deal, as it reminded me quite a bit of the aforementioned writers, Plath in particular, whose 1963 roman à clef The Bell Jar has many similar themes, such as the restricted role of women in America. There are examples of frustration with the limited possibilities available to women, especially creative ones. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the protagonist is not allowed to write due to her perceived illness and her dictatorial and oblivious husband. In The Bell Jar, the protagonist (Esther) is only accepted by her peers when she has a boyfriend, and they give her a hard time when she spends her time studying. In addition, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Bell Jar share the use of a first-person narrative to tell the story of a woman losing her mind.

Something else I liked about “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the contrasts. In particular the fact that this rather sad tale is unfolding in an antique house next to, in the narrator's own words, "a delicious garden[... large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them." Normally, in stories such as this, events are foreshadowed by the season, or by the location, i.e. dark stormy nights, the fall when leaves are falling, houses that are falling apart. Instead here we witness this rather dark event in a nice house (even if it is a bit of a fixer-upper as described in the story), with room "that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!"

In other ways, I was reminded a bit of Lovecraft in the way the wallpaper itself was a character in the story and almost seemed alive. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper — the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." The difference, of course, is that in a Lovecraft story, it's likely the wallpaper would've actually been alive. That would've been an interesting twist, but in my opinion would probably not be well received at the time “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written, as gothic horror was no longer a dominant literary genre by the mid-1800s.

The story is sometimes referred to as a classic example of Gothic literature because of its treatment of insanity and people being powerless (common themes in Lovecraft's work). It has been published in collections of horror fiction, which could lead one to assume that the women in the wallpaper actually were ghosts, hell-bent on driving the narrator insane, and not simply hallucinations brought on by isolation. The author's own words in a 1913 essay titled "Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (.csi. don't support this; however, that didn't stop the creators of a 2006 film inspired by the short story that relies on the gothic/horror interpretation ( this story differs wildly from both Plath and Lovecraft, however, is its sense of humor. Neither of the authors mentioned earlier are exactly known for levity in their work (though Lovecraft's work has certainly inspired some brilliant satire over the years, such as Calls for Cthulhu, Pokethulhu, etc.). Gilman's piece here by contrast, even with its themes of female oppression and insanity, has a satirical feel to it. The Yellow Wallpaper is genuinely funny in places, particularly at the end, when she frustratedly crawls over her fainted husband as though he were little more than a speed bump. "Now why should that man have fainted?" the narrator thought in the piece's final paragraph. "But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!"

A more fitting reversal of roles, the wife trampling over her controlling husband, I cannot imagine.