In this chapter, I will look at the many symbols hidden in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This is important to prove that Gilman hid many hints implying that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not merely a gothic story but a story making a connection between sexual roles put down by men and insanity. First of all, the setting of the story is significant. The house the protagonist and John rented has barred windows, hedges, walls, and gates that lock. (Gilman, “Yellow” 30). These all suggest the wife’s confinement to the home. The nailed-down bed is suggestive of the wife who is also unable to move around freely. Gilbert and Gubar write that the “‘rings and things [in the walls],’although reminiscent of children’s gymnastic equipment, are really the paraphernalia of confinement, like the gate at the head of the stairs” (90). We can imagine a house like a dungeon from the description of the house and it suggests the situation of the main character caged like a bird by her husband.
The main character’s bedroom was a “nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium” (Gilman, “Yellow” 30). The narrator becomes childlike as if she is being taken over by the room’s former occupant. Perhaps that is why Gilman chose an old nursery as the narrator’s bedroom. What the protagonist and infants have in common are that they both can not leave the nursery by their own will, spend hours staring at walls and ceilings, and are kept in one place under the responsible care of a superior authority, which in this case is the husband (Wagner-Martin 54). John calls the narrator “blessed little goose” and his “little girl” (Gilman, “Yellow” 32,36). She cries at nothing all the time, she is fretful, she has John’s sister as a babysitter, she is carried to bed, read to, and she takes naps: all of which are characteristics of a baby. Moreover, in the second half of the story the protagonist starts to “creep”. Wagner-Martin identifies creeping as “an accomplishment that most infants acquire naturally, and by themselves. It is only the first stage of a child’s movement toward desires” (61). The protagonist “creeped” to move toward what she desired, freedom. Gilman made the protagonist childlike to illustrate how the image men had of women as childlike drove women to breakdown.
Next, I will analyze the wallpaper. The pattern of the wallpaper reflects the mixed feelings of the narrator herself; dull, irritating, repellent, unclean, and suicidal (Gilman, “Yellow” 31). The wallpaper is described as follows:
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions (Gilman, “Yellow” 31).
Treichler writes that, “The yellow wallpaper is the ‘pattern’ of social and economic dependence, which reduces women to domestic slavery” (195). However, I believe that the pattern is a metaphor for the narrator herself. The narrator is forced to live a “dull” and “lame” life and living such a life will lead the narrator and many women like herself to “commit suicide” and “destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions”. This description of the wallpaper foreshadows the narrator’s madness.
A later description of the wallpaper is:
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you” (Gilman, “Yellow” 37).
The wallpaper’s pattern represents the position of the female sex as well as the narrator. I interpret the description above as follows: The oppressed woman is a “hideous” creature, women were thought of as “unreliable” since they were mentally unstable, their position in society as the weaker sex was “infuriating” and “torturing” to women. Even if the women’s movement was “well underway,” there was no immediate change in women’s life as yet. Moreover, being involved in such a movement brought much disapproval and reprimand from the Victorian society “trampling” the activists. If this interpretation of the wallpaper is correct, then the social status of women from the view of Gilman was abominable.
Turning to the topic of the color of the wallpaper, why did Gilman choose the color yellow for the wallpaper? The color of the wallpaper is described as, “repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman, “Yellow” 31). Focusing on the color yellow, a psychiatrist writes that the use of yellow in Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings is symbolic, writing that Van Gogh either suffered from schizophrenia25 or from epilepsy26 (Iwai 66). Perhaps there is a connection between yellow and mental disorders? However, we cannot assert that yellow has only a negative meaning because the different shades of yellow have different interpretations. Iwai writes that cream yellow symbolizes tenderness, but on the other hand, olive-yellow similar to sulphur yellow symbolizes vomit, obscurity, distress deep inside oneself, and self-disgust (72). According to Lanser, the word “yellow” came to convey ugliness, uncleanness, and inferiority (429). The protagonist writes in her diary that the wallpaper changes color:
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east window… it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it…. By moonlight — the moon shines in all night when there is a moon — I wouldn’t know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars. (Gilman, “Yellow” 37)
Perhaps Gilman chose yellow to signify the two psycological connotations of yellow in parallel to the different faces women have. Bright yellow is the color of the sun; it gives out the feeling of warm and cheerful motherly tenderness. On the other hand dark yellow represents self-disgust and vomit, which is what woman may have felt when they had to submit to their husbands at night.
The latter of the two psychological connotations of yellow is what I think is expressed as the “yellow smell” in the story (Gilman, “Yellow” 39). The protagonist says that the yellow smell is the “most enduring odor [she has] ever met” and encounters the smell “in the night and find it hanging over [her]” (Gilman, “Yellow” 39). Perhaps the “yellow smell” comes from the foul smell of the mixing of bodily fluids. According to Ehrenreich and English, Gilman believed that middle and upper class marriage was a “‘sexuo-economic relaiton’ in which women performed sexual and reproductive duties for financial support” (Own Good 105). The act of having sex could not be avoided for women to keep on being dependent on their husbands. However, Victorian women were supposed to be horrified of sex and glorify chastity (Berman 215). Berman says that, “the story is suggestive of the wife’s efforts to avoid sexual defilement, beginning with her abortive attempt to sleep in the room downstairs, with its single bed” (235). Later on again, right after the protagonist starts smelling the “yellow smell” she wishes for John to take another room. William Veeder associates the yellow color and the smell with the protagonist’s “inability to hand adult sexuality” (60). Hence, the “yellow smell” could be referring to the protagonist’s disgust of sex that she must endure at night.
Another question is, who is this woman inside the wallpaper? Is the house really haunted as the narrator suggests in the beginning and is the woman a ghost? No, the woman inside the wallpaper is the narrator’s Doppelgänger28. Solomon identifies a symbolic parallel between the woman trapped in the wallpaper and the situation of the wife who is trapped by her mental illness and household, which she has no control over (xix). There is also a parallel between Gilman and the woman trapped in the wallpaper. Gilman talks of her Doppelgänger in a letter to Stetson on March 29, 1883: “I give myself to you and honorably fulfill all my duties at whatever cost: subduing my deep-rooted desires and crushing out this Doppelgänger of mine whenever it appears” (Hill 153). There was the Charlotte who wanted to marry Stetson and the Doppelganger of hers who wanted to be free from wifehood that would block her self-fulfillment. Treichler deciphers the woman in the wallpaper as the representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to talk back to their husbands (195). The Doppelgänger is the stronger one in Gilman’s case and in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Doppelgänger breaks out from the body of the humble housewife and takes over the protagonist, not being able to succumb to the husband any longer. Meyering writes:
Getting into harmony with the ‘woman’ within her required the repression of its double — the monstrously unnatural nonwoman. Liberating the former meant confining the latter, the Doppelgänger who eventually appeared behind the bars of the yellow wallpaper in her famous story (5).
At the end of the story, Gilman has the Doppelgänger say to John, “I’ve got out at last… in spite of you and Jane!”(“Yellow” 42). There has been no previous reference to a “Jane” in the story, and so one must assume that Gilman is referring here to the narrator herself (Hedges 136n). The Doppelgänger has gotten free from both her husband and her submissive self.
Lastly, although the ending of the story is very ambiguous it is also symbolic. John comes into the room and faints, finding the narrator “creeping.” The very last sentence of the story is, “But he did [faint], and did right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (Gilman, “Yellow” 42). John may have been given female characteristics by fainting since women faint at the slightest shock. Nevertheless, there is much debate whether the narrator is the winner or the loser. Gilman wrote in her autobiography that, “I would crawl into remote closets and under beds — to hide from the grinding pressure of that profound distress [the rest cure therapy]” (Living 96). Similarly, the main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” crawls and creeps behind the wallpaper. Creeping could be seen as defeat for she was only left with animal characteristics. Elaine Hedges concludes that the protagonist is defeated because she has gone totally mad (131). She is unable to retain her sanity and her individuality therefore she is a failure. Treichler also argues that the narrator’s escape is temporary and compromised because her husband has only fainted, and will no doubt move swiftly and severely to deal with her as soon as he recovers conscience (199). On the other hand, other critics interpret the ending as the protagonist being the winner because she has won her freedom through her madness as a higher form of sanity (Kennard 82). Kennard argues that the protagonist’s triumph is represented by the overcoming of John, who is last seen fainting on the floor as his wife creeps over him as she goes in and out of the wall (83). The act of creeping over, being on top of John, indicates her power over John. She is free to do whatever she wants and John cannot stop her because he is unconscious.
The house, the childish way she is treated, the wallpaper’s pattern and color, the Doppelgänger, and the ending all emphasize how subjugation leads the protagonist into total insanity. Therefore, a fundamental alliance between “woman”, “social situation” and “madness” existed in the story.