How would you compare the voice and the situation of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to the voice and situation of the obsessed narrators in the Poe stories we read? How, if at all, does the introduction of medical professionals affect your reading when compared to other stories we’ve read?
7 thoughts on ““The Yellow Wallpaper””
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I would agree with many of the other posts that the voice of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is significantly different than the voice in Poe’s stories due to the fact that it is a female voice. To me the voice is much more endearing than Poe’s voice. Gilman’s voice seems to want to connect with the reader and reach out on more of an emotional level, whereas Poe is very matter-of-fact.
Additionally, the setting within “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a departure from Poe’s dark and gloomy world. In describing the room where the narrator is set, Gilman, obviously, writes about the yellow wallpaper, but also describes how the room has “sunshine galore.” Poe’s setting is dark, and as a reader I was much more uncomfortable than I was reading about Gilman’s bright and sunny room. Gilman’s use of yellow wallpaper and a sunny room makes it very easy for the reader to place themselves in the setting whereas in Poe the darkness makes it difficult for the reader to insert themselves into the story. Moreover, the bright setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” gave more more hope that the narrator would be “cured.” On the other hand, Poe’s darkness made me feel as if there was no way out of the monomania the narrator was experiencing. The motif of color is used very differently by Gilman and Poe and impacts how the reader perceives the story.
I’m struck by Layla’s analysis of Poe’s male protagonists as ones who have made “unexplained choices” that have caused or exacerbated a descent into madness. In comparison, Layla noted that the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is not granted status or control with which to make any choices, explained or not. I think this observation is exactly right, and speaks to our discussion last class about the aestheticizing impulse Poe has towards mental illness. In Poe’s stories, the narrators ‘choose’ (at least in from our perception) to be confined, isolated, and often greatly disturbed in dark castles and gloomy hereditary estates. Like in the Yellow Wallpaper, these settings are perfectly attuned to a monomanical spiral, but they are carefully chosen–even curated–by the narrator. The chaos and darkness of Poe’s world is frightening, but it also romanticized and meant to carry something weirdly compelling. In comparison, The Yellow Wallpaper’s protagonist is forcibly confined to her attic room, and though she does fixate on the wallpaper, she is much less inclined to romanticize its presence. Rather, she associates with it as a literal and figurative covering for her prison. She asks to leave and is denied by her husband. She is, unlike Poe’s leads, resistant to her madness and its conditions.
In comparing my reading of the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to the protagonists we encounter in Poe, I find myself wanting to characterise the former as a voice of self-deprecation and the latter as a voice of self-aggrandisement. This seems a distinction that is due to the difference in gender: Meredith mentions in her comment how Gilman’s character’s identity as a female is an important distinction, which is a statement I agree with. The woman’s mental disorder is regarded as a disruption to and deviance from a social fabric in which women are supposed to be uniform, quiet and ‘normal’ — an approach vastly different from the glorified esoteric wonder that distinguishes the mental illness in Poe’s male figures. Consequently, the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is effectively removed from society and relocated to a place that is “quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village”. Furthermore, her mental state is seen as something best treated by wilful suppression and silencing; why else is the narrative presented in a diary form for which a reader is not supposed or allocated? This differs structurally from Poe’s narrative in which a reader is expected and demanded — the internal world of the male Poe protagonist is worthy of being acknowledged whereas that of the female Gilman protagonist is hushed and as Caroline puts it, ‘papered over’.
In comparison to Poe’s work, I think “The Yellow Wallpaper” established a greater sense of intimacy with the reader. The first person narration is directed in an entirely way different. Poe’s stories emphasized a certain desirability/exclusivity with monomania that seems to be linked with intelligence and class. Early on in both of his pieces, the protagonists are established as distant figures (even as we seem to be in their heads with first person POV). Gilman’s piece reads almost like a letter to a friend, which makes sense considering she wrote it to “save people from being driven crazy”. The “human” quality in the writing creates empathy towards the protagonist. I agree with Meredith; it was interesting to see a female perspective. In many ways using a female voice seems to encapsulate the idea of confinement in a way our previous stories haven’t . The stories from the last few weeks have introduced male characters that are either well acquainted/situated with their own monomania or have made unexplained choices that have seemingly plunged them into an evidently manic state. As a female, Gilman’s protagonist has neither agency nor social standing. The progression of her illness seems entirely forced upon her and the Reader is able to better understand her deteriorating state.
I think Janka said it well that, “”The Yellow Wall-paper” really shows how misunderstood mental illnesses are.” The addition of medical professionals serves to provide an outside perspective that isn’t seen in the Poe stories and lends a helpless feeling to the story and to the plight of the narrator. At the end of the piece, the narrator begins speaking of herself as the woman behind the wall-paper. This points out how the narrator is the woman trying to get out, not just from behind the wall-paper but from behind her mental illness. Her husband, however, refuses to help her just as he refuses to help her remove the wall-paper from the wall. Rather than acknowledge that the narrator is struggling with mental illness, the husband and brother would rather ignore reality and ‘paper her over’, so to speak. In this way, the narrator remains trapped behind the wall-paper, trapped behind a culture that tries to ignore her struggles by hiding her away from the world and telling her that she isn’t really sick.
I think the introduction of a medical professional in “The Yellow Wallpaper” really shows how misunderstood mental illnesses are. The narrator said she was ill and feels isolated in her home and while she wishes to see relatives and be social, her ‘lovely’ physician husband prescribes solitary. In reading the story, the reader can sense that her obsession with the wallpaper grows as she frequently revisits the topic, yet her husband is doing nothing effective to help cure her. Her spiraling downwards demonstrates just how little some people understand mental illness.
A thought occurred to me while reading: the mind is a scary place and when left to just think, people can be led down dark paths. While being left alone in physical isolation, the narrator’s mind becomes more fixated on the wallpaper. Is the freeing of the body from physical activity really a cure at all or is it more detrimental to the mental health of an individual with a mental illness? It is almost like leaving a person in a room with the flu and telling them to get better, when in reality, it can only make the patient worse.
The first thing that stuck out to me about “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the female voice of the story. The stories from Poe came from the male perspective, only using women as the focus of the men’s thoughts. I would say that the monomania experienced by the three men in the Poe stories we read ultimately was focused on the women in the stories. The voice in Gilman’s story is specifically female, retelling the narrator’s decent into madness after her husband essentially imprisons her in their home. While the reader is unsure if the narrator was truly mentally unwell before the piece begins, she truly falls into breakdown throughout the story because of her isolation to bedrest. Her husband, John, does not allow her to work or do physical activity. The lack of socialization or mental use causes the woman to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her house, until she falls into complete madness. The presence of medical professionals did not affect my view of the story greatly, but instead the use of gender. Both the woman’s husband and brother are physicians, who control her actions. Her husband warns her not to use her imagination or she will become hysterical. I feel there are many gender barriers at the time that affect the story, that focus on the isolation and control of women.