The yellow wallpaper

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The yellow wallpaper is an autobiographical short story by the American writer and suffragette Charlotte Perkins Gilman , which was first published in January 1892 in New England Magazine . The short story is considered an important work of early American feminism ; it is about a young woman who is not cured by the treatment of her depression but goes mad. In the course of the story, the increasingly confused and delusional observations that the protagonist makes about the pattern of the yellow wallpaper in her hospital room become a reflection of her deteriorating psychological condition.

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A young woman and mother reported in diary entries about the treatment of their “slightly hysterical tendency” after the birth of their first child. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, has prescribed her a "rest cure", a treatment in which physical or psychological exertion is prohibited. The family has rented a summer house for the duration of the treatment; the protagonist is given a room on the top floor by her husband. The protagonist assumes that this room was once a children's room because the window is barred, the wallpaper hangs away from the wall in some places, the bed is nailed to the floor and the floor is scratched. Right from the start, the protagonist finds the house and, above all, her room “strange”, the yellow wallpaper “repulsive”. Since the yellow wallpaper is the only thing that gives women new charm apart from their diary entries, many diary entries deal with wallpaper. Mention of the wallpaper increases in the course of the story, at the beginning it also shares thoughts with the reader about her family or her desire to write, but this subsides as the story progresses and the wallpaper takes the main role in the diary entries. The protagonist initially deals with the pattern, the color and the "yellow" smell of the wallpaper, but soon goes on to describe how the pattern of the wallpaper changes, especially when moonlight falls on it. After a while, the protagonist is convinced that a woman is locked behind the pattern of the wallpaper, who moves crawling behind the pattern. Convinced that she has to help the woman to escape from the wallpaper, the protagonist begins to tear the wallpaper off the wall. To avoid her family stopping her, she locks herself in her room for this. She even refuses to let her husband in when he comes home. After John has obtained the key to the room and unlocked the door, he sees his wife crawling on all fours on the floor along the wall of the room through the torn wallpaper. She tells him that she has now been released and that John cannot bring her back behind the wallpaper either. John then faints and the protagonist crawls round after round along the wall, crawling over her passed out husband.

Autobiographical background

Charlotte Perkins Gilman around 1900

The short story shows strong parallels to the life of the author. Charlotte Perkins Gilman married the artist Charles Walter Stetson (1858–1911) in 1884 and became pregnant shortly after the wedding. After the birth of their daughter Katherine, Gilman suffered from depression, although retrospectively it is not clear whether it was postpartum depression or some other type of mental illness. Gilman's mental health problems did not improve and after three years of illness, Gilman decided to seek medical treatment. For this purpose she looked for Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell , who was a renowned doctor for nervous diseases . He prescribed Gilman his "rest cure", a treatment that included a lot of bed rest and prohibited physical or intellectual stimulation. Since Gilman responded well to the cure, she was soon discharged, but was instructed not to be active for more than two hours a day and "never to pick up a pen, brush or pencil in her life". Gilman complied with these instructions, but according to her own statement in her article "Why I wrote the yellow wallpaper ", which was published in her magazine The Forerunner in October 1913 , "came close to the limit of extreme spiritual ruin". Gilman then ignored the doctor's advice and went back to work, which significantly improved her condition.

Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to protest the oppression of women by medical professionals and prevailing medical opinion. Her goal was to introduce her doctor, Dr. Encourage Mitchell to change his treatments so that he would not drive other women "almost insane" too. Women were portrayed as “weak” and less productive than men; their complaints were often not taken seriously, but rather attributed to the “female spirit”. Against this protested Gilman, who believed that there was no difference between the male and female spirit. Gilman was delighted to later hear from her doctor's acquaintances that he had changed his treatment methods, and wrote: “It [the story] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being in getting driven mad and it worked ”.

reception

At first it was difficult for Gilman to find a publisher for the short story. In response, Gilman received a negative letter from publisher Horace Elisha Scudder, in which he wrote to Gilman: “I could not forgive myself for making others feel as pathetic as I did [by reading the story] feel myself [after reading the story] ”. After New England Magazine finally published the short story in 1892, the reactions to The Yellow Wallpaper were mixed. As Gilman shares in her Why I wrote the yellow wallpaper , she was accused by a Boston doctor in The Transcript of "not writing such a story as to drive any reader insane." Another doctor wrote to Gilman to express his respect, saying the short story was "the best description of incipient madness" he had ever read. The short story was then initially forgotten for over 50 years. It was not until 1973 that the short story became known again through a new edition by The Feminist Press and the subsequent critical, primarily feminist discussions.

In Germany, Katie Mitchell's adapted version of the short story, which was performed at the Schaubühne Berlin in 2013 , received mostly positive reviews from critics.

Analysis and interpretation

Feminist interpretation

From the feminist point of view, the short story is primarily interpreted as an example of the patriarchal society and medical research in the late 19th century, which was mainly focused on the treatment of men. In the original version of the story, the protagonist has no name, her husband John and his sister Mary have names as examples and are portrayed in the story as flat stereotypes . The situation of the protagonist is therefore not an individual fate, but can also be transferred to other women within the patriarchal society. The end of the story is also of particular interest for a feminist view of history. While some interpretations see the protagonist as liberated from social constraints in the end, other interpretations, such as that of Paula A. Treichler in her article Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper", point out that the protagonist is only "temporarily free" and has only "diagnosed the conditions that need to change for you and other women to be free". In the feminist secondary literature, there are also often interpretations of the following symbols in the short story:

The yellow wallpaper

The yellow wallpaper is seen on the one hand as a symbol for the mental state of the protagonist, on the other hand as a symbol for sexual oppression and as a symbol for the situation of women in the patriarchal society of 19th century America. The protagonist is not allowed to read or write, so she begins to “read” the wallpaper and finally deciphers a woman behind bars in the pattern. She recognizes herself in the woman and realizes that she is “trapped” in her marriage. Paula A. Treichler also mentions in Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper" that the wallpaper with its pattern could also stand for the male discourse, which dominates the female discourse and uses language, the "women opposite is oppressive ". Treichler then goes beyond the feminist point of view by seeing the wallpaper as a female discourse and the woman behind the wallpaper as a “representation of women”, “which is only possible when women have been given the right to express themselves”. Therefore, the new contrast in history is no longer the male versus the female discourse, but between “an old, traditional” and “a new, exciting” female way of writing.

The nursery

The room in which the protagonist is accommodated and through which she herself determines that it was “first a children's room and then a playroom” reflects the protagonist's status in society. The protagonist is trapped in a child-like state, this applies to the legal level as well as to the social and economic status. As a wife, she is dependent on her husband, who in the short story assigns her the nursery and refuses her request for another room. The bed in the child's room, which is nailed to the floor, is associated with the protagonist's suppressed sexuality.

The barred windows

In connection with the children's room, the barred windows represent the prison, to which not only the room itself, but also the child-like, disempowered condition have become. The protagonist can neither free herself from the room nor from her other position.

Further interpretations

Furthermore, the yellow wallpaper is sometimes used as an example for horror literature , since the story describes the development and treatment of madness and the helplessness of the protagonist. Alan Ryan introduced the story by writing, “Regardless of where it came from, [the story] is one of the choicest and most powerful horror stories ever written. It could be a ghost story. Much worse: It couldn't be ". Also HP Lovecraft sees the yellow wallpaper in the tradition of the horror story of the 18th and 19th centuries. In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , he cites the yellow wallpaper as an example of a good horror story, which in his opinion must have “a certain atmosphere of breathless and inexplicable horror” that he sees in the short story.

Media adaptations

Film adaptations

  • The Yellow Wallpaper , a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) production for the Masterpiece Theater. USA, 1989. Directed by John Clive, adapted by Maggie Wadey.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper . USA, 2012. Director: Logan Thomas. It is a retelling based on the short story, not a direct adaptation.

theatre

  • The yellow wallpaper . Schaubühne Berlin, 2013. Director: Katie Mitchell.

literature

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: The Yellow Wallpaper , translated by Alfred Goubran), Edition Selene, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85266-270-2 ; Braumüller, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-9920004-0-1 .
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: The Yellow Wallpaper , translated by Christian Detoux), English-German, Dörlemann-Verlag, Zurich 2018.
  • Stetson, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. A story. In: New England Magazine 11.5, 1892. pp. 647-657.
  • Ford, Karen. "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Women's Discourse . In: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4.2, 1985. pp. 309-314.
  • Hochman, Barbara. The Reading Habit and "The Yellow Wallpaper" . Duke University Press, 2002. pp. 89-110.
  • Lanser, Susan. Feminist Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics of Color in America . In: Feminist Studies 15.3, 1989. pp. 415-441.
  • Lovecraft, HP Supernatural Horror in Literature . In: The Recluse . The Recluse Press, 1927.
  • MacPike, Loralee. Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper" . In: American Literary Realism 8.3, 1975. pp. 286-288.
  • Schöpp-Schilling, Beate. "The Yellow Wallpaper": A Rediscovered "Realistic" Story . In: American Literary Realism 8.3, 1975. pp. 284-286.
  • Treichler, Paula A. Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper" . In: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3.1, 1984. pp. 61-77.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lanser, Susan. Feminist Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics of Color in America . In: Feminist Studies 15.3, 1989. pp. 415-441.
  2. ↑ Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” & the “New Woman” . National Endowment for the Humanities website. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
  3. ↑ Biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman . Website www.fembio.org. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
  4. ↑ Bassuk, Ellen L. The Rest Cure: Repetition or resolution of Victorian Women's Conflicts? In: Poetics Today . Volume 6, No. 1, 1985. p. 245.
  5. ↑ a b c d Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper? . US National Library of Medicine website. (PDF; 331 kB) Accessed August 27, 2019.
  6. ↑ Borst, Charlotte G. and Kathleen W. Jones. As Patients and Healers: The History of Women and Medicine . In: OAH Magazine of History 19.5, 2005. p. 24.
  7. ↑ Jane Thrailkill: Doctoring "The Yellow Wallpaper" . In: ELH . Volume 69, No. 2, 2002. P. 528.
  8. ↑ Catherine J. Golden: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall Paper . Routledge, 2013, ISBN 0-415-26357-3 , pp. 71 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ↑ Matthias Heine : A change of scenery can be fatal . In: Die Welt on February 18, 2013. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
  10. ↑ Andrea Gerk: History of a psychological crisis. "The yellow wallpaper" at the Schaubühne Berlin . Deutschlandfunk Kultur , February 15, 2013. Accessed August 27, 2019.
  11. ^ Ford, Karen. "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Women's discourse . In: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4.2, 1985. p. 309
  12. ^ A b c Treichler, Paula A. Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper" . In: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3.1, 1984. pp. 61-77
  13. ↑ Hochman, Barbara. The Reading Habit and "The Yellow Wallpaper" . Duke University Press, 2002. pp. 89-110.
  14. ↑ a b MacPike, Loralee. Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper" . In: American Literary Realism 8.3, 1975. p. 287.

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