Short & Sweet Treats discussion

Let's read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman together.

☞ What would "The Yellow Wallpaper" look like as a full-length novel? Why do you think it’s presented in the short story form instead?
☞ To what extent is the narrator reliable?
☞ How is the story broken down into different sections? Do you think there are other effective divisions within the story?
☞ How do you know the narrator is a woman?
☞ Is the narrator’s name "Jane"?
☞ What are some of the problems with reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a feminist text? For instance, does the narrator speak for all women? Could the men in the story also be understood as repressed individuals?
☞ Does the story belong more to the Gothic horror genre or the feminist literary fiction genre?
☞ Does the ending of the story suggest progress (a woman tears down the shackles that are binding her) or pessimism (this woman has become completely unstable)? Or is it delivering a different type of message? How should we read this story? (from shmoop.com)

Spoilers may be present.

There is a free copy available on Kindle, for anyone interested.

I read that the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman went through a depression prior to writing this short story. Her doctor encouraged her to simply take it easy and not do any work which only made her depression worse. I believe the narrator is the author in this work.
Fortunately for Gilman, however, she disobeyed doctor's orders and recovered.

I always wondered, just how yellow was this wallpaper? The book doesn't say.

LaLaLa Laura wrote: "I read that the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman went through a depression prior to writing this short story. Her doctor encouraged her to simply take it easy and not do any work whi..."

I believe it started as what we now call postpartum depression (after she had her baby). A doctor prescribed the now notorious
"rest cure" and furthermore told her to never touch another pen, pencil, or charcoal for the rest of her life. Needless to say, this did not go well.

Here is a link on what the full rest cure entailed. I think more than 12 hours on that "cure" would send me to the looney bin for sure.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broug...

Greg wrote: "LaLaLa Laura wrote: "I read that the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman went through a depression prior to writing this short story. Her doctor encouraged her to simply take it easy a..."

In other words, it's ideal for women's mental health if we do nothing but wife and mother, and should never doing anything else for any reason.

@Heather, the rest cure does sound downright horrifying! The details in the science article give me shivers.

"I bet if we force her to stay completely still and have everything brought to and done for her, whether she likes it or not, with absolutely no input from her at all, she'll recover and definitely not go stir-crazy with an insane fixation on the only thing in the room, wallpaper."

The details she puts in, like the bars on the windows, and metal attachments for shackles, appear to refer to a "disappointments room," which I've heard may not have actually been a thing.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...

The rest cure sounds awful!!! I read this story in college. Loved it then! Love it now!

Free copy:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1...

I read this a couple of years ago and loved it.

Greg wrote: "Here is a link on what the full rest cure entailed. I think more than 12 hours on that "cure" would send me to the looney bin for sure..."

Me too! I had no idea. I had always assumed a "rest cur" was just being confined to a sanatorium but none of the rest!

THis particular sentence from the article caught my eye: "Later feminist scholars argued the rest cure reinforced an archaic and oppressive notion that women should submit unquestioningly to male authority because it was good for their health. "

I just finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for another group read and some of the ideas struck me as very similar - just misogynistic rather than feminist. In One Flew Over... you have the opposite genders but same situation - where the men were supposed to submit unquestioningly to female authorities who were (from the viewpoint of the men) seeking to emasculate them.

The two stories really do seem very similar to me - John and Nurse both seem to have a knack for doing the worst possible thing for their patients' health - but where the men in somewhat successfully rebel and some escape, the nameless woman in the room can't rebel directly - the best she seems to be able to do is the equivalent of "So there! I told you I am sick!"

Melanti wrote: "where the men in somewhat successfully rebel and some escape, the nameless woman in the room can't rebel directly"

That's an interesting point Melanti - both books are basically the authors' fantasies of rebellion against the mental health authorities that hold the power, but Gilman's "heroine" shows the wrongness of what's done to her by succumbing to madness while Kesey's "hero" strikes back.

Perhaps that just shows how deeply society ingrained attitudes of self-abnegation into women back in Gilman's era. In another classic book of rebellion also written by a woman author in the late 1800's, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the main character rebels (view spoiler)[by committing suicide (hide spoiler)].

I'm currently reading a series of essays/blog posts by Catherynne Valente (Indistinguishable from Magic) and in one of them she quotes a Dorothy Sayers essay (from Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society) about homemaking in the classical period versus homemaking in the 1940s.

The whole thing is too long to quote here, but the gist of it was that once upon a time "homemaking" involved a lot of creative outlets. Spinning, weaving, catering, brewing, managing the home when the men were away on business/war, etc. Such a wide variety of work that surely a woman would find at least one part of that interesting /stimulating. But with the industrial revolution, more and more of those creative outlets became mechanized - and thus moved outside the home and the wives are left with less and less they could do and might enjoy doing.

It is perfectly idiotic to take away women's traditional occupations and then complain because she looks for new ones. Every woman is a human being - one cannot repeat that too often - and a human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

I never really thought of it in that perspective - that the industrial revolution could have exacerbated the unhappiness of bored middle class housewives by leaving them less and less to do.

I can see that, and it sounds nightmarish. All acceptable pursuits are solved at the push of a button, and yet society keeps saying not to try anything new and stick to "womanly" pursuits, which no longer exists.

Copied from my author page:


“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

I appreciate now more than I did when I first read it, that this story was so ahead of its time.

I had wanted to read this for the longest, but never got around to it... Until now :)

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Even with the very limited length, I found that I grew closer to this women and was, in a way, rooting for her "escape".

I loved the ending, too. Leaves room for imagination.

Would this be good as a full length book? I'd be the first in line to read it, but I think the shorter page count helps to get the message across.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Found this snip-it about the author.More information is provided regarding the author's experience with depression.

In 1886, early in her first marriage and not long after the birth of her daughter, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (as she was then known) was stricken with a severe case of depression. In her 1935 autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she describes her “utter prostration” by “unbearable inner misery” and “ceaseless tears,” a condition only made worse by the presence of her husband and her baby. She was referred to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, then the country’s leading specialist in nervous disorders, whose treatment in such cases was a “rest cure” of forced inactivity. Especially in the case of his female patients, Mitchell believed that depression was brought on by too much mental activity and not enough attention to domestic affairs. For Gilman, this course of treatment was a disaster. Prevented from working, she soon had a nervous breakdown. At her worst, she was reduced to crawling into closets and under beds, clutching a rag doll.

Once she abandoned Mitchell’s rest cure, Gilman’s condition improved, though she claimed to feel the effects of the ordeal for the rest of her life. Leaving behind her husband and child, a scandalous decision, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (she took the name Gilman after a second marriage, to her cousin) embarked on a successful career as a journalist, lecturer, and publisher. She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” soon after her move to California, and in it she uses her personal experience to create a tale that is both a chilling description of one woman’s fall into madness and a potent symbolic narrative of the fate of creative women stifled by a paternalistic culture.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/yelloww...

I think that is why this story is now a classic. It was from the heart and it resonates with the readers.

Warning: Spoilers!

Over the course of the story, the husband's refusal to listen was extremely frustrating, and all of that time, he was so condescendingly sure of his wife's treatment - I think that the satisfaction at the end comes from seeing that smugness broken .. his fainting, losing control over even his own body. And there's something metaphorical about her stepping over him again and again, utterly disregarding him the way he disregarded her.

I guess it's all really cold comfort given that she's insane by that point, but it still has the satisfaction of a well placed "told you so."

Given that Gilman's depression occurred after pregnancy (post-partum), it's interesting that the worst room with the yellow wallpaper used to be a nursery.

Overall a well written, engaging story. I think it works best at this length, better than it would have been book length. If it had been longer, it would have needed a longer plot arc and much more character development over time; that might have distracted attention from its main points of focus: the husband's refusal to regard her perspective (or take her seriously) combined with the pernicious effect of the rest cure.

I agree Greg. I like the shorter length of the story. The whole story was very creepy to me. I could picture this being a short film. I pictured her movements being very staccato, if that makes sense. Like in the movie The Ring, very choppy movements.

I like that comparison with the Ring Ashley! There's a lot more social commentary behind the Yellow Wallpaper of course, but the "other woman" that the narrator sees behind the wallpaper is a lot like the creepy woman coming out of the TV static in the Ring. Have you seen the Japanese film, Ringu (as opposed to the American one)? The Japanese one was even more creepy for me. I had a hard time sitting still as I watched it!

No...but I will definitely check it out. I love the horror genre. I need to expand to Japanese films. I've heard they are the masters of horror. I did watch Battle Royal, which The Hunger Games was based.

Greg wrote: "Warning: Spoilers!

Over the course of the story, the husband's refusal to listen was extremely frustrating, and all of that time, he was so condescendingly sure of his wife's treatment - I think t..."

It was to my understanding that it wasn't a nursery, it was a "disappointments room," which I've heard might not have actually been a thing. I linked a TVTropes article on the subject a few posts back.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...

First example under "Real Life." I don't recall where I read it, but somewhere someone questioned how often this was actually used.

But think about the way she describes the room. Bars on the windows? Was it really to keep kids from climbing out a window? Chain attachments? Was it really for exorcise equipment?

Melanti, I think you're saying that although the narrator says it's a former nursery more than once in the story, she's giving the reader the wrong information about what the room was (and you're basing that on the bars, etc). I guess that's possible since she's an unreliable narrator. I still find it interesting that she claims it was formerly a nursery, regardless. That would somehow mean that she mentally associates a nursery with the bars, etc.

That was Heather, but yes - I agree.

Bars on the windows, rings on the walls, bed bolted down, the general damage to the room. It really doesn't seem logical it was recently used as a nursery.

The narrator says it's a nursery, but we don't have any supporting evidence for that at all. Why does she think so?

Perhaps the husband told her that? Maybe he didn't want to alarm her with the story of its previous use.

Oops, sorry Heather and Melanti. I guess I shouldn't be posting so late at night :)

Just read this story yesterday. I didn't realize it was a short story, but was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to read. As for the content, reading about mental illness always disturbs me. With this story, it made me more and more uncomfortable as the story progressed. At first, I could understand her post-partum depression and her husband's reaction as it was a less understood condition at the time. As the story progressed, I felt her mental deterioration and related it to my mother-in-law's paranoia as dementia set in. But, by the end, when she was obviously suicidal, that I had a difficult time reading. The thought of it literally made me nauseous.

oh I'm sorry it had such an effect on you like that, Holly. I know that feeling when a story can really have such an impact.

I really enjoyed reading this story. It was incredibly short and worked at that length. It meant that I was able to read it at one sitting, so the intensity built without interruption.
I'd never heard of the 'rest cure'. But having learnt about that (thanks Greg), I can now see the novella as strongly personal and feminist Lit.

Agreed Katie. Rest cure sounds so innocuous, but when you understand what it truly is, it sounds like a living hell.

I just finished this. Weird, awful and beautiful story. Interesting to read all your comments...!

And sadly, so MANY women around the world still live in that trap. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban is an example of that terrible repression.

Not sure what you mean, Jamie--I see a 1989 film. Do you have the link to what you found?

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Love this story. I have lived with that wallpaper! Like all good books it leaves you wanting more but in this case I really feel cheated. I want to know the history of that room. What caused the marks above the skirting board? Why were patches of the paper peeled off? Why did the narrator not spend more time in the pleasant room downstairs? The list goes on and on.

Your right. She was a prisoner. Wasn't there even the mention of a gate on the stairs? I wonder was that the reason her husband insisted on the upstairs bedroom - so that she couldn't wander undetected at night!

One of my favorite short stories/novella!

"This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do." Oscar Wilde's famous last words.

Mary wrote: "Greg wrote: ""This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do." Oscar Wilde's famous last words."

One of my favorite quotes! Wilde had so many great lines!"

His life was tragic in the end.

Mary wrote: "Yes it was. He was born a century too early."

Certainly, but I would have him no other way than how he was.

Kurt Cobain was arrested as a teenager for writing "God is gay" on a wall, perhaps it was too accurate.

Mary wrote: "God is assexual."

God doesn't exist.

Mary wrote: "I believe that God exists."

You seem remarkably tolerant, and tolerance is a big theme of the book in question

Mary wrote: "I couldn't tolerate the husband in this book."

That's understandable.

Mary wrote: "God is assexual."

Mary, I think I know what you mean - From what I understand of the Christian Bible, God is something larger, something beyond the ability of human beings to fully comprehend. I love the long list of poetic descriptions in Job that try to demonstrate how far God is beyond human understanding.

But it's somewhat perplexing because in Genesis, the Bible says human beings were created in God's "image." I'm not sure exactly what that means but it seems to apply to both men and women. If that's true, it seems God must comprise both genders in some way, or perhaps more likely, there's things much deeper than gender in all of us that are patterned after God .. "image" is meant metaphorically, that we're patterned after him in other deeper ways.

I've read most of the Bible, but I'm very far from an expert - there are a great many things in the Bible that perplex me more the more I study them. But perhaps that's OK - there is much in there that's a Mystery with a capital M, much that properly belongs to feelings of wonder and awe.

All of this doesn't have too much to do with "The Yellow Wallpaper," but it's an interesting topic.

Greg, I wonder what Cobain meant by that comment? Maybe he was just trying to be shocking? Or maybe he was just trying to drive home the fact that God might not be the old white guy in the sky many people picture?

Greg wrote: "Mary wrote: "God is assexual."

Mary, I think I know what you mean - From what I understand of the Christian Bible, God is something larger, something beyond the ability of human beings to fully co..."

Kurt Cobain was a provocateur.

Greg wrote: "Kurt Cobain was a provocateur."

Very true Greg, and provocateurs can find soft spots in the common ways of seeing the world that are well worth exploring.

I know the "godmother of punk" Patti Smith sometimes gives me chills on her recordings, even 40 years after she recorded them. I wasn't even born when she recorded some of them.