AUDIO

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Virginia Woolf in her portrait of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister mentions the frustration that must damage any woman of the past with artistic talent, who wanted to express herself in a world dominated by men: “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”

Over 300 years later in the late nineteenth century , we see that although women are freer in their choice of husbands (They were, for the most part, no longer “locked up, beaten and flung about the room” for refusing to marry whoever their fathers picked out for them), and although there had already been famous women novelists, it still was not easy for a woman to receive recognition for writing.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is autobiographical, based on Gilman’s experience of postpartum depression following the birth of her first child, something that happens to many women, even now, after giving birth. At that time because doctors “were not versed about the female hormonal system all nervous disorders were associated with ‘hysteria,’ a reference used for women with emotional problems.” She became a patient of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, “the nationally recognized neurologist who specialized in the nervous diseases of women.” He told her she was suffering from a nervous disorder and after a month of treatment she was told to "live as domestic a life as possible . . . and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” This proved impossible for her, and she wrote the “The Yellow Wallpaper” for Dr. Mitchell and afflicted women to see how wrong his treatment was.

Years later she was told that reading the story caused him to change his treatment of his female patients. She was vindicated, and so was the power of writing to change minds. [Follow this LINK if you want to see source of quotes and information.]

In the story, you are reading what Jane, the fictional narrator, writes down secretly whenever she has the chance, so you witness her gradual “descent into madness.” It is easy to blame her for not being “strong enough” to stand up to her domineering husband. We might put ourselves in her place and say, “That could never happen to me.” Perhaps not. Women then were dominated and robbed of their self-esteem by men. It’s easy to blame them, but perhaps unimaginative and certainly lacking in empathy.

It is also easy to classify someone as sane or insane and feel like we’ve said something. What exactly is insanity? We make a mistake when we say that madness is totally irrational.

Gilman provides some background on Jane. She was an imaginative child: “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store. I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.”

In her childhood world, Jane felt safe; not so now. We have known for a long time that there is a fine line between the imagination of an artist and the delusions of someone who is mentally ill. No one would argue that the woman Jane sees behind the wallpaper exists in the “real world.” Or that there really are many women “creeping” all over the property of the rented “ancestral mansion.” By the end of the story, Jane is delusional. But her delusions make a kind of eerie sense.

Unlike Dr. Flint, John is not an obvious villain, but a doctor who seems to only want the best for his wife. He is a literal-minded man, totally unaware of nuance, of intuition, of the existence of the unconscious mind; he trusts only what can be seen and quantified. As his wife says, “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” To John, the power of the imagination is suspect: “He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies.” With this lack of awareness of a whole dimension of human existence, he does not realize –-consciously — the harm that he is doing to his imaginative, sensitive wife.

If Jane were male, of course, her “nervous fancies” would be the sign of a powerful imagination and a great gift.

But, as in the case of Dr. Flint, John has too much power both legally and emotionally over his wife, who does not think well enough of herself to resist him. She feels instinctively that “congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good,” but she does not trust her instincts. There is nothing in her society, and no one, that would help her trust herself.

Gilman is able to convey the character of John quite separately from Jane’s opinion of him in such descriptions as “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” The more she insists on his superiority, the more we doubt him; we are critical of him for not letting another human being “stir without special direction” and for trying to deny her the outlet of the writing that she loved to do.

Shut up in her room, denied other human society except for John’s confederates, Jane begins to brood upon the wallpaper. It becomes the symbol of her imprisonment, something ugly, and as garish as the endearments John foists upon her. Behind it lurks even more reality: Gradually it seems to her that “it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” At this point she is not delusional, only imaginative. “Likeness” is not the same as identity.

Throughout the story, she distinguishes between light and dark, day and night. Things are better at night – when, paradoxically, she sees more clearly. European and American writers often distinguish between light and dark: light is good and dark, evil. But darkness can also symbolize the richness of the unknown part of the mind; and light can be harsh, as if too much rationality is, in a sense, blinding. (Just ask that ancient paragon of western male rationality, Oedipus the King, who was most “blind” when he thought he “saw.”) At night the pattern of the wallpaper is revealed -- bars, a fitting metaphor for her stifled existence. This perception makes her life more and more exciting – it is the discovery of her reality. Finally she believes that the pattern moves: “The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”

She senses that she is not the only woman to endure this imprisonment: “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind.” She eventually believes that during the day, she sees many women creeping around outside the house, creeping as if oppressed by the daylight, masculine, rational world.

At the same time, Jane’s attitude toward John changes – almost as if access to her own unconscious mind lets her see the unconscious motives of others. Eventually she no longer trusts him: “He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn't see through him!” She spends her nights trying to free the woman behind the wallpaper, in whom she now literally believes. By the end of the story she is totally identified with this woman: “I don't like to look out of the windows even — there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?” She sees that her plight is a wide-spread one, common to women everywhere.

At the end, she is divided from herself, differentiating herself, the woman from behind the wallpaper, from the compliant Jane who helped to imprison herself. John has fainted in horror at her mad creeping, succumbing to the unconsciousness he could not admit into his waking life. She creeps over his inert form, above him at last, in a sense defeating him and free from her prison. She even calls him “young man,” a put down perhaps as condescending as his own epithet, “little girl.”

Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and was able to publish her autobiography, Incidents from the Life of a Slave Girl. Because marriage to a “good” caring doctor doesn’t strike the general public as tantamount to slavery, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is left to creep over the prone form of her unconscious husband. It can be argued that taking refuge in delusion is a defeat, not a triumph. But perhaps in some circumstances it’s the best one can do.

Both these literate women were subject to male power. Jane has only the company of a servant and her husband’s sister, Jennie, who clearly sides with him. Mrs. Flint, who should have pitied Harriet, is almost as powerless as she is, and takes out her feelings of powerlessness by blaming the victim. Harriet is afraid of her grandmother’s stern morality, afraid even to tell her that her master is trying to seduce her, as if she will be blamed for inciting his lust. Neither Jane nor Harriet had any comfort from the women who might have helped them.

“Public Appearances” by Susan Dodd

Almost one hundred years later, things are better for women. They can vote. No one stops them from writing. So Susan Dodd writes a short story she calls “Public Appearances,” a title with several meanings. Perhaps we don’t think very often of the wives of public figures, those demure perfectly groomed blurs in the background, existing only to support their ambitious husbands (There are of course exceptions and society does all it can to shoot such women down.). Here we have a brief glance into the psyche of the governor’s wife. The governor sees his wife as an extension of himself. As a male, he doesn’t want to look too “perfect” or plastic. But his wife must be perfect in her dress and hair –and she fears she is not. “Her husband preferred her hair, unlike his own, to look perfect. It did not.“ Her imperfections obsess her.

She, like Jane, feels the dominance of a powerful male but does not understand what it is doing to her. She is “horrified at her own lifelessness” when she sees herself in newspaper photos. She too reveals an imagination, a belief in magic, an interest in superstition. Although she is wearing the best dress she had, she suspects it isn’t good enough; additionally, perhaps a symbol of herself, it is flawed, marred by a cigarette burn: “It was a shameful secret, the small charred perforation like an evil eye on her lap.”

As in a fairytale, someone comes to help her, a seamstress: “Her throaty voice and thick accent suggested the unassailable authority of a fortune-teller to the Governor's wife, who rather believed in magic. It was a belief her parents had encouraged in her as a child. She had learned in adulthood to call it by other names and, eventually, not to mention it. But the belief itself was intact.” For a while themagic works:

“When the Governor's wife returned for her dress, the burn was gone, like magic. She and the old seamstress had embraced in mutual delight at the fitting. For the first time in a year, the Governor's wife felt like dancing. The older woman considered her own dexterity commonplace. But the Governor's wife was sure there were rhapsodies and gypsy spells in the clever aged fingers.”

And so far this is the first positive woman friend we have seen except for Sarah and Abby in “Two Friends.”

But this will not last. Dressing in her repaired dress she looks for approval from her husband: “He looked up as his wife reentered the room, and she smiled at him hopefully. “ But finds none: “’You're sure I look all right?’ he asked.”

It is at this point that she realizes that she can no longer recover the magic of her youth; it is gone like the opal ring, from her parents, whose presence on her finger she misses as Jane missed the reassuring presence of the furniture in her childhood room: “the dress was not like new. The rustle of silk when she moved was not quite as gay or generous as it once had been. Magic no longer clung to her skirt.”

This idea of loss of magic is repeated: Later, at the start of his speech he turns to her and asks her opinion about a joke he might tell, kisses her for the photographers, and then refers to her in his speech: "I was telling my wife on our way down here this evening. . . ."

At this juncture, her attention turns immediately to the symbolic magic dress: “Under the table her chilled fingers probed the invisible repair in her dress, pressing the seam as if it were a wound, deliberately seeking to confirm its existence. Though she realized her husband was talking about her, the substance made little difference. Nothing he said would ever be quite like new again. But he needed her.” She is momentarily reassured, but then having asked her opinion, the governor tells the world that he will not tell the joke she has suggested:”this is no time for a joke." He has sought her opinion and then publicly discarded it. She focuses again on the dress:

“The folds of her skirt fell gently open as she sat. The Governor's wife could see the tiny hand-sewn seam where the scorched silk had been cut from her once-perfect dress. Nobody else would notice, it was true. But she knew: there was no longer an allowance in the skirt for gypsy magic, for dream-dancing.”

The reality of marriage to a man who disregards her has removed magic from her life. At the end of his speech, her imagination asserts itself once more as she saw “a shower of red blotting out the room and the ocean of hands and mouths.[….] She swallowed hard, a foretaste of disaster on her tongue. It always came at such moments: she would hear the crack of a single shot, see her husband fall.”

The governor is not assassinated. His wife only imagines this briefly. But it is telling sign of her hidden resentment as well as her self-abnegating feeling of dependency. Now the magic power has shifted:

“He possessed magical powers. She knew about magic. She understood what it was that he was giving them, and why. They needed him. Their need was one of those things she had come to accept. And she understood that her premonition of mayhem was simply another of those false directions in which she constantly seemed to be getting lost.”

“The Kind of Woman Who Could Get Away With That,” by Susan Dodd

Here Dodd attempts to distance herself from her creation. She says that she and the governor’s wife are very different. She is more flamboyant in the way she dresses. Unlike the governor’s wife she likes being noticed. But there is an autobiographical link between the two: Dodd also was married to a politician and had her own problems. As she says: “Less apparent a factor than the public life but perhaps more significant in the story's conception, though, was the secret life I was leading in those days: I was trying, slowly, to kill myself by starvation, and I was trying, desperately, to keep myself alive by writing.”

She is probably referring to anorexia nervosa, which we probably all have heard of. It is an eating disorder that seems to afflict mainly women. While it has complex causes, we know that our culture, particularly the visual media, in the preference for extremely thin women tacitly encourages women to starve themselves.

Dodd’s reference to writing as a way to keep herself alive may remind us of Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In spite of the fact that Dodd writes almost a hundred years after Gilman, notice a similar image: Dodd says she was “whittling herself down to nothing so that she might slip through the bars of a cage she'd locked herself in.” Jane notices the bars on the windows of her hideous room as well as the bars in the wallpaper.

Dodd says that writing was her “life raft”:

“What a godsend, then, to have found, at Vermont College, a place to go where I could be nobody's wife. No one in Montpelier knew a thing about me, nor much cared, past what I cared to reveal in black and white on a page.” Like Louise Mallard, she revels in her new-found freedom. Unlike almost every woman we have read of, she has female mentors, women who help her define herself.

Dodd reveals how little control the artist has over her creation: the story once had a different ending. We can see glimpses of it here as the governor winds up his speech and his wife imagines his assassination. Apparently in the original version of the story, Dodd killed the governor off. The relation between art and life is apparent when a male friend reads the story. Dodd overhears the two men discussing it. Her husband and the writer both sound "amused,” and we recall John’s condescending amusement at his wife’s concerns. But the writer also tells Dodd’s husband, "You might want to be careful, though. I'd say she is kind of pissed off.  "At this, “[b]oth men laughed.”

Times have changed. Susan Dodd did not succumb to anorexia or imprisonment inside a marriage that seemed to deny her the opportunity to be taken seriously as an individual.Nor did she have to wait for her husband, Christopher Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut,to be assassinated (he wasn’t), or creep insanely over his unconscious body. The Dodds were divorced in 1982, and Susan Dodd is the author of many successful novels.

Another issue here is the longstanding connection between artistic ability and psychic instability. It has long been thought that art forms– paintings, fiction, poetry—are externalizations of disturbing thoughts; as the artist expresses herself she externalizes the impulses that haunt her, often subject matter she is unconscious of. The art work contains the emotions and impulses, gives them shape and organization, thus channeling energy that might otherwise be damaging. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” we see the consequences for Jane of not having an outlet for her fears and wishes. In “Personal Appearances” and her commentary on it, we see how writing gives Susan Dodd a way out of personal problems.

Deborah Tannen, “Wears Jump Suit. Sensible Shoes. Uses Husband's Last Name”

Deborah Tannen is a highly regarded Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University . She shows us how in grammar and in style men are the unmarked category, the meaning that goes without saying, the “norm,” while women cannot escape “marking.” As she observes conference participants she notes: “Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every style available to us was marked. The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did. Unlike the women, they had the option of being unmarked.”

We think of the Governor’s concern about his hair and note that it is to his wife that he turns for advice. Women know about these things. Throughout the story his wife worried about how her dress is marking her. And it does. We have the thoughts of the people around her, concentrated not on her character or personality but on how she is dressed. There is no way she can escape scrutiny.

Tannen writes: “I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men's. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.“

This is not biological, Tannen shows us, quoting linguist Ralph Fasold: “Biologically the female is the unmarked sex.” It is cultural: men are the norm; women are the aberration, just as in language we often refer to mankind as the name for who we are as a species.

This Week:

The next work we read, Susan Glaspell’s short play “Trifles,” shows us something we have not seen except in “Two Friends” -- how women can help each other.

Kate Millett,  whose 1968 work   Sexual Politics is one of the important books in1970’s feminism, has said: “Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.” You will see evidence of this difference in the play.

I am also including an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Sexual Politics. The connection of Millet’s discussion with the works we have been reading will, I hope, be obvious.