After conducting a close reading it was easier to identify the primary symbols Gilman uses in her story. The first was when the narrator introduces “myself and John,” the narrator identifies her awkward positioning in her sentence and society; she does not see herself as equal with “ordinary people like John.” One of the words the narrator uses repeatedly is “queer.” Gilman uses the word during a time of cultural change from the meaning of “strange” and “peculiar” to the euphemisms associated with homosexuality. Some critics like Jonathan Crewe think she uses the word to make her readers “recognize same-sex desire as repressed, not absent, in normative heterosexuality” (Crewe 279).
Another symbol used is the two physicians. The narrator’s husband and brother represent the power that men possess over women. One of the most stand out symbols is the color yellow. It is often used to symbolize “inferiority, strangeness, cowardice, ugliness, and backwardness” (Hume 481). Her writing can also be seen as a symbol. The undated journal entries “can be seen as a spatial indication of the narrator’s own fragmented sense of self” (Golden 193). Catherine Golden suggests that the writing is not “a place for self-expression or a safe domain” for the narrator’s newly emerging sense of self (Golden 194). Through her writings the narrator “not only reveals her unconscious awareness of her fictive design, but also leads her readers toward an understanding both of the terror and dark amusement she feels as she confronts herself-a prisoner inside the yellow wall-paper an unsavory social text created and sustained not only by men like John, but by women like Jennie, and, most horribly, herself” (Hume 480).
Mary the nanny represents perfection in the eyes of men. The narrator fits nowhere and is appropriately nameless. The wall paper itself can represent the narrators suppressed self. The pattern on the wall paper when compared to gymnastics, it symbolizes her interests as a game and expresses a “contrast between the rigidly mannered and socially acceptable behavior of her husband (and less empathically, of Jennie) and her increasing dissatisfaction with such behavior” (Hume 480).
Daylight and moonlight are also symbols used by Gilman. In moonlight the narrator comes to life at night. In the night not only did the shadow woman first appear while John was sleeping, but the narrator also suspects that she is what John really desires. The daylight depicts order and domestic routine. In the last few lines of the story it becomes very clear that the narrator has lost her mind when she states, “ I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?” The tearing of the paper is an act, the narrator uses to break free from the walls that confine her.
The last symbol with significance is when the narrator states, “I kept on creeping.” Beverly A. Hume describes the ironic transformation in the narrator’s husband as “by fainting, altering his conventional role as a soothing, masculine figure to that of a stereotypically weak nineteenth-century female” (Hume 478). On the other hand Denise D. Knight states, “crawling on one’s hands and knees is emblematic of the crudest form of servility” (290).
Beverly A. Hume article suggests that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story that “offers the detailed and chilling accounts of a woman’s entrapment, defeat, and movement toward madness . . .” (Hume 477). I agree with this but Hume goes on to say that the narrator does not even know the implications of the story at all. This I do not agree with I believe at some points in the story the narrator is fully aware of the implications in the story. Hume believes that the narrator “assumes the grotesque, proportions of the yellow wallpaper, becomes a grotesque figure, and, in doing so, transforms her narrative into a disturbing, startling, and darkly ironic tale about nineteenth-century American womanhood” (Hume 477). I find this statement to be true with my own critique.
Hume says that the narrator’s failure to recognize her complex problem reflect her inability to realize “her regressive psychological state” (Hume 480). I partly agree with this statement but at a point in the story the narrator makes it clear she knows she is not getting better when she tells John she is better in body but not in mind. In the end the narrator “attempts to clarify definitively the meaning of the grotesque, merges into it, and, in effect, becomes it--as the woman in the wallpaper” (Hume 480).
Another literary critic I followed was Catherine Golden. Golden’s essay is a comparison between Mitchell’s and Gilman’s fiction. Golden believes the purpose of putting the doctor in Gilman’s story was to “reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways” (Golden 145). This may be true but the only person who could prove or disprove it is Gilman. Golden points out that Gilman “defied her doctor in 1890 not only by writing 'The Yellow Wallpaper' but also, more specifically, by creating a protagonist who also writes. Her creative life and her fiction reveal that she ultimately overwrote Mitchell’s efforts to make her more like the ideal female patients predominant in his affluent medical practice and his fiction” (Golden 145).
The third critic was Jonathan Crewe. His article explores the form and ‘queerness’ of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Crewe asserts that “beyond her own revolt against the therapy to which she is subjected, the protagonist becomes the exemplary subject of power/knowledge as her ‘madness’ progresses” (Crewe 274). I agree with this statement but further through his article I begin to get confused about what he is trying to depict. Crewe uses “queer” theory to analyze Gilman's text and display “the extravagant, hidden, vital, or numinous even in the domain of good form” (Crewe 278). Crewe says that queering is defined as identifying an absolute “homoerotic subtext or mode of repressed desire . . .” (Crewe 279).
Crewe explains his title in two ways. One is that Gilman uses a homosexual effect with her characters: “however unknown the narrator may in fact be- it would be historically false to suppose that, in 1890, there could be no lesbian implication … ” (Crewe 280). This I do not agree with, I do not believe Gilman was using a homosexual effect with her characters nor was she using lesbian implications. The second meaning to his title is a bit strange: “this irrepressibly queer affect of subjectivity, of which the narrator is the story's agent/bearer, gets attached to the yellow wallpaper" (283). I agree that the narrator was attached to the yellow wallpaper but it is unclear to me in what way she is attached by his definition.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a testament to Gilman's own life experience and in reading it there is a feeling of the tough decisions she made in her life and the impact those decisions had on her emotionally and mentally. Never again did Gilman write anything with such a personal attachment as this story had. Gilman's life was filled with pain, emotionally and psychologically, yet she lived every second to fullest extent. It seemed her only fear was that she would not accomplish her life's work, and because of the lifestyle she lived she never gained recognition for her accomplishments.
Gilman died on August 17, 1935, by huffing chloroform; she had terminal cancer and decided it would be best to take her own life than die a long painful death. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Gilman’s works began to get recognized in ways she would have wanted. She was ahead of her time and her work will forever be remembered as one of the great feminist writers.
Works Cited
Crewe, Jonathan. “Queering ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall 1995): 273-293.
Golden, Catherine. “ ‘Overwriting’ the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell’s Fictionalization of Women.” Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Joanne P. Karpinski. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992. 144-158.
Hume, Beverly A. “Gilman’s ‘Interminable Grotesque’: The Narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Fall 1991): 477-484.
