Now, my question is why is the word DRAUGHT capitalized in this story? It also means a game of checkers, doesn't it? Is this a game? A game of control, planning, strategy and "checkmate" with ole John-boy?

I have to be honest and say I never took a great deal of notice of the technical side of literature study and felt it was sacrilege to dissect someone's baby! I felt I had no right! To me a writer does not deliberately construct a novel or a story using clever techniques. Writing comes from the soul. When we did The seven sisters I thought it was spoilt because of the writer trying to be too clever and get one over her scholarly sister.

There is a connection IMO to that idea and what we see in Gilman's story but actually Kesey's acknowledged inspiration for '...Cuckoo's Nest' was Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether". The Poe story precedes Gilman's and is about labels or naming and how that label sticks irregardless of the behavior of the person. The judgment of a person's words and actions are all colored by the original label, especially when the label takes on authority over time through repeating.

Poe's "The System..." is about an asylum and a person who says someone is a sane doctor so therefore, no matter if the doctor jumps onto a table and starts crowing like a rooster and flapping his arms, he is still sane because that was the original label. And a person who is labeled insane must therefore always bear that label, no matter the behavior. The roles were reversed through labels and people were unable to get out from under their labels, once the labels were repeated and established in the readers'/narrator's mind. The sane were insane; the insane were sane and all was confusion.

This story was Kesey's inspiration. Who knows, but it might have inspired Gilman?

The plays remain unaltered. The words are all still there in their proper places just waiting for the next reader or performance.

She wrote this, didn't she, long after she had suffered from her nervous breakdown. Perhaps she felt that she needed to give us a "birds eye view" of the horrors of her psychosis, by writing this story. Wasn't she incarcerated during that period? Is there ANY mention, anywhere, of her suffering the "yellow" sickness of hallucinations?

It's not for lack of a backbone it's for a lack of insight. Our protoganist, IMO can't see the forest thru the trees. I feel she is non compos mentis! He agitation and nervous state will lead to a worse dilemma- a full blown pyschosis.

Whenever the narrator says she's tired, she's just experienced a repression or restriction of freedom. Examples:

Lanes leading elsewhere attract the narrator. John prefers she get 'air' from a window rather than walking outside of her own volition as she could have done through the downstairs room. So I get the felling of claustrophobia in the story and a need to escape.

I still need to figure out if the narrator's mental health is deteriorating or not. It may well be a deterioration but I'm not sure and I have to rush to catch up with everyone. For now, I'm focusing on the story, how its divisions/parts are put together and why, and what is being said and unsaid.

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The narrator reacts to the wallpaper and compares it to her childhood:

I see a lot of things here. As a child the narrator was free to use her imagination/fancy and could conjure up both terror and delight. There wasn't the sense of claustrophobia then for she had allies (like the chair and the bureau) and freedom of thought and movement.

Something changed from childhood. The wallpaper is an imposed and odious pattern on a blank wall. As a child the narrator had a completely blank wall -- or clean slate -- on which to imagine and move about. The wallpaper is impertinent and everlasting; it is set and I do feel it's claustrophobic.

The story moves us out of the pretty chintz downstairs room with a door leading out to the upper floor bedroom with a view of the outdoors (second hand/removed living) with what was ugly yellow paper to sulfur yellow (sulfur = corrosive, explosive, sickly, devil) to a moving wallpaper that engulfs the narrator.

From this association I'd say that the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator's restricted life as a female. The gradual coming-to-life of the wallpaper, its changing nature of yellow-sickly-sulfur-moving is the narrator coming to conscious awareness of the unfair restriction. Perhaps the narrator even thinks the restrictions of gender is evil (because of the sulfur image).

The blank wall from her childhood was remembered as a life of possibilities.

Just free associating here and my idea of what the wallpaper symbolizes is just that, an idea.

That explains the 'dead' paper which is the wallpaper she's conquered/stripped and is using for her purpose.

Since IMO the wallpaper symbolizes the gendered restrictions of her life, then by writing over the wallpaper she is rebeling and subverting those restrictions through the very thing which 'limits' her. Typical of how women survived when in a limited gendered role, the rebellions and subversions. She can strip the wall back to its blank state with its world of imaginative possibilities.

Loved your thoughts Diane.

I came in to talk about the emphasis of words, gardens, and paths but will do that later.

Does anyone else have a copy of the story with its divisions?

Asked whether the story was based on fact, Gilman replies, "I had been as far as one could go and get back." Gillman [sic. I think I just found an error] based the story on her own experience of depression and treatment. For her first visit to the noted neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, she prepared a detailed case history of her own illness, constructed in part from her journal entries. Mitchell was not impressed: he "only thought it proved conceit." He wanted obedience from patients, not information.

"Wise women," he wrote elsewhere "choose their doctors and trust them. The wisest ask the fewest questions." Gilman reproduced in her journal Mitchell's prescription for her:

Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. (Be it remarked that if I did but dress the baby it left me shaking and crying—certainly far from a healthy companionship for her, to say nothing of the effect on me.) Lie down an hour after every meal. Have but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil, as long as you live.

Gilman spent several months trying to follow Mitchell's prescription, a period of intense suffering for her:

I could not read nor write nor paint nor sew not talk nor listen to talking, nor anything. I lay on that lounge and wept all day. The tears ran down into my ears on either side. I went ot bed crying, woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried—from sheer continuous pain.

At last in a "moment of clear vision," Gilman realized that for her the traditional domestic role was at least in part the cause of her distress. She left her husband and with her baby went to California to be a writer and a feminist activist. Three years later she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." After the story was published, she sent a copy to Mitchell. If it in any influenced his treatment of women in the future, she wrote, "I have not lived in vain." (Taken from The Living.

It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way.

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Modern wallaper adhesive is not the same as the paste used in the 1800's. Someone mentioned a 100-year old wallpaper with the brittle degraded paste. That does sound unwritable but then again the wallpaper in the 'haunted house' wasn't nearly that aged (in the narrator's time; not our time). Usually in that time period people used homemade paste.

GINNY, in post 193 I remarked on the narrator's description of the wallpaper as having the animated characteristics of impertinence and everlastingness. My dictionary defines them as:

I enjoy seeing all the different interpretations of this story. You are all making me think deeper into the story and learning new things.

Just one more element to consider.

Ginny's questions are often multi-layered and sometimes I can only chip at an edge of one but I'll try here.

The very start of the story set the tone for me: "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house . . . there is something queer about it."

Gilman goes about setting the scene and we feel this is a supernatural, gothic tale complete with a haunted house.

Here are links to the Gothic genre which are succinct and quite telling:

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In question 4, Ginny also asks if we see any literary devices. She mentions personification. Others I see:

1 -- Allegory of the restrictions of females in society of rigidly gendered roles and the harm it causes.

2 -- Alliteration, for example the use of the sibilant, hissing, snakelike 'S' in "There's sister on the stairs!"

3 -- Antagonist, use of John as the opposing force

4 -- Aside, I think of this story more as an aside than a dramatic monologue. As the narrator speaks directly to the reader, not to be heard by the other characters to let us know what the narrator is thinking. But then, I also see the literary device of:

5 -- Unreliable Narrator, there are important pieces to the puzzle that are left out in her telling; we can't accept wholecloth what she says

6 -- Repetition, used by writers to emphasize the importance of a word or idea. For example, the narrator describes the wallpaper and uses the word 'hate' in close succession: "No wonder the children hated it [wallpaper]! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. There comes John, and I must put this away, -- he hates to have me write a word."

7 -- Metaphor/symbol, the wallpaper (discussed earlier)

8 -- Motif, the wallpaper is also a recurring image

9 -- Irony, used frequently in this story as a type of rebellion. Example: "John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious!" (Meaning, John would be day and night if her case was serious and she doesn't want that? Irony.)

There are many more literary devices, including hyperbole and the rhetorical question, but this post is long enough and I don't want to be the only one posting answers. Perhaps others care to address Question 4 or another of Ginny's questions?

All stimulations was removed so that her response is deep tiredness and gradually removing herself from all that represents control into what she and no one else can control. Almost like anorexia is control that gets away from you till it controls you. She is slipping into the wallpaper controlling her...

The quote "sticketh like a brother" (full quote and origin given by Maryal) is allusion, another literary device. The friend in Parables 18:24 is Jesus Christ. Makes me wonder WHY it's in the story and in that particular spot. What does it MEAN?

Wallpaper paste was homemade usually of wheat and water or potato and water. I remember making my own paste this way as a child when doing crafts or making paper puppets for shows along with other neighborhood kids.

According to the following link, The first ready-to-use wallpater paste was developed in 1888 and "wallpaper pasting machines first appeared around the turn of the century. (Since the story was written in 1896(?) and the wallpaper is already old in the sotry, it would more than likely been homemade paste.)

The next link talks about how wallpaper, put up with homemade paste, is taken off walls with vinegar and hot water:

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

There are many ways to view the story; also the proverb.

I think Verse 18, with its various two-lined proverbs, in general contrasts the good with the wicked. The wicked would be the first line of 18:24 and the good in the second line? Many friends not wisely chosen can lead you to ruin but a true friend will not leave you when you are in trouble but will stand beside you through it all.

Cicero: "In doubtful times the genuine friend is known."

I'm trying to understand the proverb itself before I try to apply it to the narrator's situation, but there's something heartbreaking here (maybe, dunno, possible, I think). More later ....

I've don't read essays about the story because I agree with Ginny that there are many essays written about "The Yellow Wallpaper" by authors who disagree with one another. Therefore, one can't accept one essay over the other as being "expert." I want to think independently and not be initially influenced by a secondary source.

But then that's pretty much what I do when reading any book or story. I print out reviews or essays, however, if given in a post or heading so I can read them at my leisure following a discussion and see if I agree/disagree and if I find new insights. They build on my knowledge gleaned initially on my own thinking from reading the story. That's when these reviews/essays are invaluable to me and I appreciate seeing them in a discussion.

Other people prefer to study the reviews/essays about a story and then read the story. We each have our ways of reading and that's good I believe because then we bring different perspectives to a discussion.

Ginny, so many questions! I need to print them out and look them over. Will be back . . . .

Two words used in describing the wallpaper are (in quotes in the story) "debased Romanesque." This isn't the same as Romanesque but is a term used for work that is a rather savage, brutal copying of earlier Roman art and architecture. It's strongly stylized with little of naturalism (distorts natural forms) or humanistic warmth and characterized by raw massiveness of scale. So okay what does that mean?

IMO it represents the out-of-nature distorting power of patriarchy on both male and female. The female -- the natural, humanistic -- is overtaken by the patriarchy and the male too is overtaken by their own authority and distorted.

It means in other words that the wallpaper represents patriarchal authority. Then we have this line in the story:

The heartbreak is that the 'sticketh closer than a brother' is the heartbreak that both husband and brother (and other males) have joined together in one accord against her; that she feels doubly bereft and alone. Enough to drive any woman a little loopy; to have been emotionally abandoned and disregarded. Disregarded because up to that point what she felt or wanted or needed wasn't valued by husband or brother.

There's also this part of the quoted line "they must have had perseverance as well as hatred." They could be children but also, considering this story as women's history, they symbolically can be women throughout history who've begun, slowly but surely, to peel away the patriarchal bonds. The narrator is merely continuing that attempt and wants to finish the job.

Now this leads me to attempt a partial answer to:

Question 4: What might be an explanation for John's looking at the wallpaper? Answer: to see, symbolically of course, if the status quo of patriarchy still stands. (The narrator is stripping off the wallpaper, ie patriarchal bonds.) And I don't think Husband John would think in terms of patriarchy but more in terms of 'all's right with the world.' Non-symbolic reason is that John would want to see what fascinates the narrator about the wall-paper but IMO the story is an allegory and was written as such.

Question 4: Why would Jennie start and look as 'if she had been caught stealing?' Answer: Again symbolically, Jennie is a traditional woman of the late 1800's and a good, traditional woman shouldn't concern herself with the affairs of men or with the rule of men; she would accept and submit. To be actively curious and to explore the patriarchal realm would be unacceptable under the gendered roles. So even Jennie is affected by the narrator's gradual rebellion. On the other hand, or other meaning by going with the surface plot, Jennie would be embarassed to be discovered snooping around the narrator's quarters (yet embarassment isn't likely under the circumstances).

Question 4: Why is this passage in the piece, what do you think the author is trying to do with it? In the original magazine format the episode begins 'On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind;' and ends 'Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!'

I think my other answers covers how I feel about what the author is trying to do: to mention the history of female rebellion (perseverence) and the male's uneasiness (John) and the female's potential enlightenment (Jennie). The author also wants to suggest that this change is already underway and spearheaded by women already rebelling, unlike the not-yet-enlightened Jennies.

Palimpsestos is Greek for rescraped or overwritten parchment. Medieval monks frequently washed and scraped off old text from parchment (thin animal hide) to overwrite church prayers. For much of history writing surfaces were scarce and a parchment would be used more than once. The new marks would be horizontal and the older, original marks are vertical. But just as a chalkboard sometimes allows us to see partially erased marks so the palimpsest reflects its history. Modern technology of infrared and ultraviolet lights has made the discovery and reading of palimpsest much more common than ever before.

Archimedes (287 - 212 BCE) was a Greek famous for 'Eureka!' and, myth has it, running naked through the streets to shout his discovery. He was a famous engineer and mathematican. The Archimedes Palimpsest was a tenth century manuscript (overwriting another text) discovered in 1899 but, unable to read must of the subtext, scientists put it aside. It disappeared in 1916 and was only recently re-discovered in 1999. Modern technology has found that under the medieval prayers is the sole extant copy of Archimede's treatsie, the Method which would have advanced math and science ahead by centuries.

A palimpsest may be anything having multiple layers or aspects apparent beneath its surface. When I think what a palimsest is, and when I see an image like the Archimedes', that's what I think the yellow wallpaper and story "The Yellow Wallpaper" are. But we don't have the modern literary equivalent of an infrared light to uncover fully the meanings.

I'd add that nonfiction works also use literary technique. The number and type of techniques, how effective, and how often employed in either fiction or nonfiction depends on the author.

I'm interested in what causes the woman's growing instability, even more than the end result of her mental condition.

The woman/women behind the wallpaper are women in Gilman's society who must submit and be disregarded or treated as subservient to men. This isn't set in the 20th or 21st Century but in the 1800's when women couldn't vote, married women couldn't own property and women were the property of first their father and then their husbands when they married. On and on goes the list of restrictions of gendered roles.

The narrator feels trapped, she hates the wallpaper, and I believe that each of the divisions in the story shows a gradual change in her, a growing awareness, of what that wallpaper personifies. I think that she believes she's getting better because of her awareness of what makes her ill; that it isn't her fault or weakness but is caused by Society and what it does to women.

The oppressive authority is something she can't get away from even in a house which mythically was supposed to be 'woman's domain;' the sulfur smell of authority was in the dining room, the parlor, the hall,the stairs, and the bedroom. Ginny asks "who or what is the real antagonist in this piece?" I'd say Society because of the lopsided gender roles.

Creeping, or crawling like an infant prepratory to walking on one's own -- that could apply to the women she sees creeping in the open or outside. They've achieved some independence (I don't remember them being hindered or accompanied by others) but are still relatively new-born, hence the creeping.

Creeping can also imply snakish or coming up from behind to overpower which could apply not only to the creeping, sulfurish, evil smell emanating from the wallpaper that subtly overtakes the house but also the rules of Society and patriarchal authority which overtake women's lives.

Here's how a dictionary defines creeping -- to move with the body on or close to the ground, as a reptile or an insect or a child on hands and knees; to move slowly, imperceptibly, or stealthily; to sneak up behind someone or without someone's knowledge; to move or behave timidly; to grow along the ground, a wall, etc., as a plant

What I'm beginning to see IMO is the surface plot of a woman giving in to madness, while the allegory turns it all around and what seems mad in the surface plot is the symbolic process of women taking more control and responsibility in their lives. I'll see if that double turning works at the end.

The notion that an author controls all forms of interpretation through his or her stated intentions represents the first shackle from which students must gain freedom. A common misconception holds that comparing the work to the intent of its author remains the best way to determine the value of a story. When "other" interpretations seem to go "too far," some students make statements like, "I don't think the author meant that when she wrote this," or "Gilman couldn't have possibly meant for this story to be read with homosexual undertones."

Students in introductory college literature courses often feel as trapped as the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Some undergraduates have internalized the idea that a text has "one" meaning and that determining authorial intention provides the best method for its discovery. Others realize the problems with authorial intention but leave the "correct" interpretations to critics, scholars and their teachers. Either way, numerous students find themselves surrounded by the idea of others, and forget to look within themselves and …the community [of the group] for possible interpretation.

To free students from this interpretative prison, a teacher must disabuse them of the fallacious notion that stories have only one meaning.

We simply don't know if her stated intentions were truthful or altered. Gilman's' letters and discussions of her story remains as open to interpretation as the story itself. While her stated intentions may offer some insight, they simply cannot work as a vehicle for finding the "one" meaning of the story. Gilman's stated intention also severely limits the text. ..to read it as [only a criticism of a rest cure] is to "efface the story's imaginative power, so that it becomes almost the kind of rational document that the husband himself could commend."

When students strip away the oppressive authority of the author, critic and teacher, they act in the same capacity as the narrator as she tears down the wallpaper. Giving students equal access to a text encourages them to invest more time in reading the story for their own interpretations rather than trying to determine the "correct "reading. …Students [must] understand the value of authorial intentions and published critical opinions but not at the expense of their own ideas. [They] then realize that their own critiques are one of many plausible interpretations. Thus, they must respect the ideas of others just as they expect that same consideration. Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" helps introduce and establish this productive community, especially for those….with little experience with literary theory.

Was John so confident of his method of treatment that it has taken him until too late to realize that it isn't working? Or is he gauging how well it is working? Is he concerned for her mental health or smugly satisfied?

I've printed out both Ginny's and Maryal's posts and underlined bits and pieces including how once the work leaves the author's hands, the author is no longer able to control what he or she meant to do.

I'm learning so much from everyone.

Barbara mentions learning about her thoughts by reading Ginny's distillation of her (Barbara's) posts. Hahahaha, me too Barbara. I always look for Ginny's comments as they help me understand what it is I said/thought! Ginny has a knack for getting to the heart of our posts.

I too noticed, Ginny, that Gilman uses numerous literary devices in her story -- a surprising amount for such a short tale. And I didn't see -- just as you, Ginny, didn't see -- any homosexual element in the story which was mentioned in an essay. Perhaps it's there but I can't see it.

I'm typing this message on my work break and will try to get back soon to ponder the heading questions and all the posts.

“ 'And it is like a woman stopping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder– I begin to think– I wish John would take me away from here!' (Gilman 293). Probably the standard reading of the line, “I don’t like it a bit,” is that the narrator dislikes the woman behind the pattern creeping. However, another interpretation, a queer one, of the line could be that she doesn’t “like it a bit,” but, Crewe suggests, that she likes “it far too much” (280). This is what frightens the narrator, this realization of the homoerotic, and she wishes her husband would take her away from this temptation. Another homoerotic element in the story is when, on her last night in the room, “Jennie wanted to sleep with me– the sly thing!” (Gilman 298). Of course, once again, a heterosexual reading of this line would not imply any homoeroticism in the situation. However, the narrator’s appending of 'the sly thing' indicates to me, as a queer reader, that the narrator believed there to be more than simply Jennie’s sleeping in the same room to comfort her. The narrator, once again, refuses to accept the homoerotic temptation and tells Jennie 'I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone' (Gilman 298), although at this point, we as readers know that the narrator is anything but alone.

“ 'That was clever, for I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her' (Gilman 298). Then the pair of them shake and pull at the wallpaper, alternating who’s doing the shaking and who’s doing the pulling, essentially becoming same-sex partners in a very physical act of destruction which has some undeniable homoerotic elements to it. Crewe writes that 'every denial or ‘clever’ ruse on the part of the narrator thus backfires, the implications betraying themselves in an ‘interior’ scenario of sexual bondage and same-sex object-choice.' ” (281).

Source:

Homosexuality in The Yellow Wallpaper

or As a pdf article

“Reading or writing her self upon the wallpaper allows the narrator to "escape" her husband's "sentence” and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which, virtually all these critics have agreed, constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the in- sanity of male dominance” (Susan S. Lanser, Feminist Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," And the Politics of Color in America, 4, neu.edu, July 26th 2003. Thus, the wallpaper is a source of her psychological disorder as well as a refuge from her husband's rule. In a sense, “the wallpaper becomes the symbol of both Anne's confinement and her liberation” (Trudi Mullerworth, Literary Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper, Columbia.edu, July 26th 2003. The wallpaper as well as the book becomes "the objective representation of contemporary social reality" ”(Author’s name to be listed, Short Story Criticism Vol.13, Loralee MacPike, 122)."

Source:

Article about The Yellow Wallpaper

Question 4 asks: "What is the significance of "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" [Narrator to John]

In the allegory: The I is the woman behind the wallpaper who symbolically has become free and claimed the original narrator Jane. The woman from the wallpaper is an independent narrator; Jane is the submissive (or 'resigned') narrator. Now the woman in the wallpaper has emerged and is the dominant personality.

Question 4: If narrator is anxious not to be put back, who are the women she sees outside and why is she agraid of them and afraid to join them? What does it mean the she "ropes" herself in for fear of going to the road? "But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope - you don't get ME out in the road there!" What can be made of all the images of escape and restraint in these passages? Are they symbolic, and if so, of what? End Question 4

The narrator would be afraid of complete independence and lack of security and social approval; of taking a path away from the house (woman's domain). She ropes herself in voluntarily with matrimony and motherhood, traditional female roles. A rope would be tied around her body like a ring would be around her finger. I've already talked about escape and restraint. The narrator half-willingly accepts the restraints yet chafs at them and wishes to escape. There's a duality here and shows the difficulty that women and men faced.

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Question 8: "The bedstead is fairly gnawed!" (11) "I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner - but it hurt my teeth." What do the references to the condition of the bed mean? End Question 8

The bed symbolizes the marriage bed in the bedroom, ie marriage itself and women's traditional place in it. The narrator tries to rearrange, change those conditions and it didn't work. When she lashed out in frustrated anger she ended by hurting herself. That's pretty standard symbolism and easy to understand.

Question 9: "To jump out of the window might be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to try. Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued." What do these ... sentences reveal about Narrator? End Question 9

The first sentence reveals a desire to jump ship, to escape from the confining gendered role. The latter sentences are what she learned from society about what is proper behavior for a woman and which she partly accepts. Even if the independent woman is now the dominant personality, the internal conflict remains. I think one can still see that conflict today.

"As Oscar Wilde lay dying in 1900, he commented: 'My wallpaper is killing me. [...] One or the other of us will have to go.'

Lady Gregory, Memoirs."


"Yellow wallpaper was a familiar character in realist fiction and was often found to be distasteful. In Honore de Balzac's Old Goriot, 'Charles stood aghast amid his trunks. His glance took in the sloping walls of an attic room hung with the kind of paper, yellow and strewn with bouquets of flowers, favored by country inns' (qtd. in Entwisle 72). George Sand wrote of her room in a Paris convent in 1818 that 'the wallpaper was once yellow, or so I am told. However that may be I find it a source of constant interest for it is scribbled all over with names, mottoes, verses, all sorts of foolishness, reflections and dates, the relics of former occupants'(75); while, in a room in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, 'wallpaper of a canary yellow, relieved along its upper edge by faded swags of flowers, trembled perpetually over its whole extent' (102). There is also a room with 'horrible' yellow wallpaper in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Catteau 409-10). A notable American entry after Gilman is Willa Gather's 'Paul's Case' where the protagonist inhabits an upstairs room with 'horrible yellow wall-paper'"

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"Wallpaper itself came under general attack about the time of Gilman's tale, and this was, partly at least, a reaction to certain unsettling implications of Oriental aesthetics. According to Jan Jennings, wallpaper became an object of contention between two groups who competed for the female consumer: " 'Wallpaper manufacturers perpetuated the ornamental aesthetic that home economists and other progressives attempted to eradicate' (254). Reformers spoke of wallpaper as 'the invention of laziness and filth," concealing "dirt and noisomeness of every description' (256). They objected to wallpaper for its colours and its inappropriate patterns, while Jane Addams opposed it because it tended to harbour vermin (255). Edith Wharton, who shared with Gilman the privilege of undergoing S. Weir Mitchell's rest cure (the biographical experience behind Gilman's tale), also disliked wallpaper: 'It was well for the future of house-decoration when medical science declared itself against the use of wall-papers. These hangings have, in fact, little to recommend them' (Wharton and Codman 44). "

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"Doctors of the period criticized wallpaper as part of their battle against neurasthenia: Jonathan Crewe claims that 'the exasperating effect of pattern wallpaper on invalids was a medical commonplace of Gilman's time' (284). In his book on American nervousness, Tom Lutz quotes Robert W Edis, who wrote in 1883 that the 'endless multiplication and monotony of strongly-marked patterns [...] [is] a source of infinite torture and annoyance in times of sickness and sleeplessness,' after a time having 'a ghastly and nightmarish effect upon the brain' (230); and Susan Carter, in 1893, described how wallpaper, 'to many a nervous invalid[,] renders his hours intolerable, as he counts and combines over and over again the meaningless recurrence of a marked angle or curve, or the ever-repeated big, awkward rose or tiresome convolvulus' (80). George of Steven Crane's George's Mother, for example, is last seen defeated and alone, staring at wall-paper: 'The pattern was clusters of brown roses. He felt them like hideous crab s crawling upon his brain' (90).' "



Source:

Gilman's Arabesque Yellow Wallpaper

Either way -- surface plot or allegory -- it's an unsettling image.

Irony: a literary term referring to how a person, situation, statement, or circumstance is not as it would actually seem. Many times it is the exact opposite of what it appears to be.

*** How many of you have said it's possible that the Narrator is unreliable and things are not as she has depicted?***

There are many types of irony, the three most common being verbal irony, dramatic irony, and cosmic irony.

Verbal irony occurs when either the speaker means something totally different than what he is saying or the audience realizes, because of their knowledge of the particular situation to which the speaker is referring, that the opposite of what a character is saying is true. Dramatic irony occurs when facts are not known to the characters in a work of literature but are known by the audience. Cosmic irony suggests that some unknown force brings about dire and dreadful events.

"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 narrat0r—and potentially all women—to madness. In these reading the yellow wallpaper represents

the narrator's own mind

the narrator's unconscious

the "pattern" of social and economic dependence which reduces women to domestic slavery. The woman in the wallpaper represents

the narrator herself, gone mad

the narrator's unconscious

all women,

women's writing or women's discourse and the woman in the wallpaper to be the representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak. In this reading the yellow wallpaper stands for a new vision of women—one which is constructed differently from the representation of women in patriarchal language. The story is thus in part about the clash between two modes of discourse, one powerful, "ancestral, " and dominant; the other new, "impertinent" and visionary. The wallpaper is also seen as representing

the "pattern" which underlies sexual inequality," and a whole lot more.

Gilman herself studied art and after art school, she taught and designed greeting cards. Her first husband, the one she left, was an artist. Perhaps the art terms and the narrator's defiance of the artistic terminology is another rebellion against the control at that time of men over the arts (writing, art etc).

Thought you might be interested in two references to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Kate Hepburn, the mother, and her sister Edith are discussing methods of child discipline and Edith quotes Gilman defining obedience as follows: "the subordination of the intellect and the abrogation of the will." Mrs. Hepburn was very active in the women's movements - the vote, birth control and the ERA and at one conference she was on the platform with Amelia Earhart and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Ginny, said she didn't see homosexuality in the story. Then someone else posted a link to, or else quoted the essay about homosexuality. (Link or quote, I'm not sure because I didn't read it.) But no one in this discussion has said, so far at least, that they see any connection between the story and homosexuality. Someone says I don't see it, and then another person says 'I don't see it' but no one here has said 'I see it' that I'm aware of.

The surface of the story is clearly about a woman's descent into madness. The literary techniques add depth and enhanced meaning and makes for an interesting read. I believe in respecting an author and the work enough to look closely at what is being said and done. The fact that we all see different things in the story is wonderful.

The allegory of a woman moving from dependence in society to independence is intriguing. Gilman also wrote Herland, about a society of women - run by women - and that story is available online for independent reading.

I remember that we talked about the literary technique of Unreliable Narrator in the discussion of Remains of the Day -- what a UN is and why, and looking closely at the text since we couldn't trust the narrator. I believe we've done that also, taken a close look, in this discussion.

I like these comments: TRAUDE "In the end, reality and symbol hurtle into each other...." and PHYLL says that with the end of the story "there are lots of little unexplained 'sticking points' in my mind..."

Don't know quite where the break is on pages 11 and 12 (question 5) which Ginny recently mentioned. What I see as one break: this section starts in musing and then changes pace in a triumphant "Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough."

One other break which I feel is more significant is the change in identity as the narrator works on the wallpaper and she pulls and the woman behind the wallpaper shakes at the paper and the narrator says she has a rope to tie the woman if she does get out -- and then the break comes with a change in identity when the narrator says

This change in identity is the real break to me, the final break.

Had to mention this as I puzzled over it last night when working at my dining room table and sorting papers.

Thanks again to Ginny and Pat and to everyone.