ASSIGNMENT 14:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

"Molly Donahue have up an' become a new woman!" So exclaims "Mr. Dooley," the satirical voice in Chicago writer Finley Peter Dunne's 1898 sketch entitled "The New Woman." What are Molly's recent excesses? She has tested her husband by learning to ride a bicycle, "wearin' clothes that no lady shud wear" (pant-suits and mens' shirts), and demanding votes for women. If things go on, Mr. Dooley complains, Molly and women like her will be demanding to "wear what clothes" they want and asking to "earn her own livin'," and thus no longer be "dipindint" on men.

Dunne had given voice to a popular concern of the 1890s. During that decade discussions of expanded social roles for women occupied newspaper columns right next to those discussing labor unrest, new Populist Party politics, military intervention in Cuba, and American imperialism in the Pacific--the Philippines in particular. In Dunne's sketch, Mr. Dooley calls for a return to "terdishinal" family values, so that women like Molly will "stay at home an' dredge in the house wurruk." Molly, evidently, wasn't having any more of that, and women writers of the period were making clear that the terms of her struggle for women's rights would involve basic aspects of gender roles, the marriage relation, work, and artistic production.

The "New Woman" proposed to seek personal fulfillment through work instead of marriage. In The Country Doctor (1884), Sarah Orne Jewett's female protagonist has "been trained as boys are, to the work of their lives!," yet her profession of medicine has been only the first step, as she begins at the novel's end to contemplate being "a reformer, a radical, and even like a political agitator" for women's rights. Central to her concerns, and those of many women of the period, were calls for women's sexual freedom, including the right to abstain, or to choose one's partners in or out of marriage, or to control one's reproductive life. By the time Margaret Sanger opened the nation's first birth-control clinic in New York City, women writers like Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman had been addressing issues of gender for about 25 years.

From about 1890, the "New Woman" had a recognizable identity in both verbal and visual media. She was widely lampooned in satirical essays, and newspaper cartoons. Women writers thus confronted a conservative male literary establishment bent on challenging their representations. Kate Chopin's The Awakening was vehemently attacked, on its 1899 publication, as an example of "sex fiction." Other conservative critics, women included, called for the "New Woman" to redirect her demands for physical freedoms into intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Dr. Mary Melendy's 1901 guide is an exemplary case. In it Melendy called on American women to "direct her efforts toward success in society, literature, science, politics," but never to "lose sight of her most divine and sublime mission in life--womanhood and motherhood." Another conservative woman writer, Lillian Whiting, asked, in The World Beautiful (1897), "Why should women renounce the higher and finer prerogative to descend into strife and demands?"

Faced with such conservative opposition and with the prospect of attacks on their work, women writers needed to plot a careful course, as the critics' rejection of The Awakening demonstrated. Opponents of the "New Woman" argued that she should return to "the sacred traditions of hearth and home." In response, women writers often focused on women's domestic life as the key battleground for women's expanded role. Edna Pontellier's rejection of a domestic contract laid down according to, and a household of furnishings selected by, her husband Leonce, is typical. Edna's financial success as a painter, such that she can make an independent household, are crucial representations in Chopin's novel.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a story published seven years before Chopin's novel, Gilman illustrates the plight of the woman writer. Overmastered by her husband, a powerful physician who represents a rationalist approach to "women's problems," the speaker of Gilman's story has evidently resisted and carried on her writing in secret, until the husband, John, rents an elegant summer mansion--on the pretense of it being a summer retreat-and incarcerates the woman in an upstairs room with yellow wallpaper. There, she begins to identify with and even project herself into the walls. Gilman thus represents the split consciousness of the woman whose creativity is repressed: outwardly submissive, seeking to please her husband and be rewarded with the return of her children, she is inwardly rebellious, physically desiring (of freedom in nature, chiefly), and emotionally connected with her art. But art, writing, is precisely what John would repress in her. Gilman's character thus slides irrevocably into madness, perhaps the only expressive mode left to her, in the same sense that Edna's fatal swim is perhaps the only mode available to her. What does Gilman's story, in comparison, tell us about the ways that women's roles were hemmed-in? What does it indicate to us about the complicity of, for example, the medical profession in their submission to male authority? What does it say about the role of women's art, in this gender conflict?

Reading Assignment

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (pp. 657-669).

Writing Assignment

1. Judging from the dialogue of his recorded by our narrator, what does John think is wrong with his wife? What does he say she must do to recover?
2. What is the role of writing in the circumstances of this story: the narrator's supposed "illness," and the "cure" that John seeks to manage? Discuss how each sees its importance.
3. How does the narrator's response to the wallpaper change, in the course of her story? Could you describe her changing response in terms of stages or steps in a process? What, in your view, is the logic or driving force of that process?
4. What physical changes overtake the narrator's body in the course of this story? How can those bodily changes be said to parallel as well as contrast with her changing responses to the wallpaper? Summarize the main aspects.
5. What significance is there in the pattern, or tracing of a pattern, that the narrator claims to have discovered in the wallpaper? How does her obsession with that pattern, then with the potential for getting behind the wallpaper pattern, become symbolically important in Gilman's story? Discuss in several paragraphs.
6. In about 200-300 words, discuss the main features of Gilman's style in this narrative, for example in the length of sentences and paragraphs arranged, and the images used, to depict the narrator's slide towards madness.

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