Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

  modern imagery follows an “aesthetic of an evolutionary or disruptive tradi-

  tion” and participates “in the migration of innovatory techniques and their

  76 / Chapter 3

  associated ideas. In this period, concepts like ‘intuition’ and ‘expression,’ or

  ‘subjectivity’ and ‘inner division,’ or ‘harmony’ and ‘rhythm,’ are parts of a changing framework of ideas which inspired stylistic change in Modernist

  work in all the arts.”7

  “The Yellow Wall- Paper” disturbs the traditional interplay of language and

  narrative to pioneer new ways in which fiction can portray action in static

  space. Modern artists—both writers and painters—reflect perceptual process

  and psychological states that cannot be captured through standard artistic

  modes. Gilman employed both conventional and eccentric sensory references

  to deepen plot and define her main character, whose descriptions of the spaces in the story “give an exterior density to the interior being.”8 Her consciousness fluctuates according to the number of stimuli: external, pro vid ing a sense of pleasure originating in the free dom to perceive, recognize, act, and react; and internal, enclosing the protagonist and relegating her to a fixed, constric-tive space.

  From the beginning to the end, the narrative rests on two visual frames:

  (1) the windows out of which the woman can enjoy the pastoral spaces be-

  yond the house, and (2) the wall, an antinature, two- dimensional “canvas”

  on which she ends up “painting” with emotion, anxiety, and obsession. Seek-

  ing ways to narrate a mind that vacillates among active, creative, and disso-

  ciative modes of observation, Gilman composed “The Yellow Wall- Paper” by

  maneuvering verbal- visual constructs that simulate techniques of impression-

  ism, cubism, and abstract expressionism—three modernist programs that arose

  during Gilman’s lifetime. She brought her familiarity with visual art, chromatics, and design to the pen and page to convey one woman’s new way of see-

  ing by means of optical fusion, juxtaposition, collage, color fields, and “ready-mades”—modernist modes of engaging place and space.

  I wish to emphasize here that Gilman’s method in composing in “The Yel-

  low Wall- Paper” has affinities with the work of other modernists; I do not mean to argue that Gilman influenced, or was influenced by, the visual artists of

  her lifetime. Rather, my assertion is that Gilman’s story discloses a mind that produces images that participate in a modernist mode of perceiving and executing. The writing of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” in the early 1890s is a nascent expression of the modernist argument, a work that contributes a number of

  images that fit into the modernist catalog.

  Forty percent of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” consists of reactions to visual

  stimuli: the windows of the wife’s bedroom provide pleasant scenes and vis-

  tas, and the wall provides a field for free play, confabulations, and, ultimately, bizarre apprehensions. The rising action of the narrative follows the process of wider perspectives becoming closed off, accompanying the woman’s increasingly frustrated attempts to excavate meaning from the wallpaper. The middle

  Snyder / 77

  and end of the story force the reader- perceiver to deal with smaller subsections of her terrible space, and as the protagonist gets closer to the paper, it pushes her deeper into her anxieties by overwhelming her visually, the way that viewers might feel when sitting too close to a movie screen. Rational forms are

  camouflaged because they are viewed too intimately.

  The first section of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” suggests methods of percep-

  tion found in impressionist painting, which was gaining renown when Gil-

  man was an art student. The features of impressionism—the emphasis on the

  impermanence of a scene, the effects of lighting, the interplay of color, and the materiality of atmosphere—are evident until the mention of Weir Mitchell. These techniques, apparent in French artists in clud ing Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, announced a break from traditional modes

  of visual representation.

  Gilman’s story starts with positive descriptions of the new space of the man-

  sion. Her journal entries, made in a hasty manner, are a series of impressions of objects that are standard imagery in impressionist views: flowers, gardens, lanes, trees, water, pathways, shade, and light. A particular delight provided by impressionist canvases is optical fusion: a process in which the eye (and

  the mind) merge components, fragments, and segments to create a compre-

  hensible scene. Because the image is not fully given to the viewer as an ob-

  ject, active perception is required to provide recognition, which emphasizes

  an imaginative mediation that initiates pleasure. Although many impression-

  ist paintings rely on optical fusion, like Monet’s Antibes Seen from La Salis (see fig ure 3.1), Gilman’s 1884 botanical painting (see fig ure 3.2) reveals the same artistic approach of integrating independent optical components that depend

  on one another to define an object or to convey a certain atmosphere, almost

  always a pleasing one.

  This way of seeing—involving an act of creation by the viewer—offers a

  layer of pleasure that complements the delightful subjects that typically oc-

  cupy impressionist scenes. In the story, impressionist references occur between the wife’s initial attempt to describe the house and the passing of the Fourth of July. Gilman spends nearly eight hundred words setting the story and conveying the wife’s initial state of mind, her optimism and felicity, through her ability to perceive and imagine. The narrator’s first reaction to her new space, the large old mansion with expansive grounds, is an enthusiastic report that

  conveys a marked sense of delight at the home’s site and attributes:

  The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from

  the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of En-

  glish places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates

  that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

  78 / Chapter 3

  Figure 3.1. Claude Monet, Antibes Seen from La Salis, 1888 (Toledo Museum of Art) Figure 3.2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

  botanical painting, 1884 (Gilman Papers,

  1846–ca.1975, Series 6, 323a–323c, seq. 88)

  Snyder / 79

  There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden large and shady, full of box- bordered paths, and lined with long grape- covered arbors

  with seats under them.

  There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.9

  This excerpt interrupts concerns about her husband John’s opinion of her

  condition and the legal status of the house; the report is the first place in the story where the artist is able to separate from the wife. The interlude is a celebration of the senses. The rest cure, designed to numb the mind, is thwarted

  by metaphors and synesthesia: the phrases “delicious garden,” “box- bordered paths,” and “grape- covered arbors” confirm the efficacy of the viewer’s senses and avow an active pleasure principle. But the passage is hardly an exposition, a full and measured illustration: the narrator’s lines are akin to the author’s California journal—a glance, an impression. In addition, the phrase “standing well back from the road” establishes depth of field; the hedges, walls, and

  “separate little houses for the gardeners and people” provide leading lines to the house, as in a painting.

  Each grammatical component, each phrasal brushstroke, moves to a new

  object, accompanied by transitory judgments; ob
jects are “beautiful” and “de-

  licious,” blending sight with taste as the fusion of her senses evokes a pleasure that yields exclamation. However, the narrator also points out “broken” greenhouses, conjuring a picturesque scene inviting completion by readers: we par-

  ticipate and we integrate, invited to imagine metal skeletons holding up shattered calcified windows, weeds growing out of fallen pots, perhaps, and rusted pumps. The broken glass and frames of the greenhouses signify the breaking

  of the perception, as delicate as it is momentary.

  This scene through the window, infused with enjoyment, fits Robert Hughes’s

  definition of impressionism as a “landscape of pleasure” whose view “repre-

  sented one thing at a given moment in time, an effect of light and colour

  that was by definition fugitive.” Not only are the narrator’s attentions on the same elements habitually found in impressionist works—trees, arbors, paths,

  people—they are rendered with a mixture of excitement and elation, with

  details only sketched, as in a typical impressionist scene, “which should have taken only as long to paint as it took to see.”10

  The sec ond visual bracket is antithetical to the window. When the wife

  first sets eyes on the wallpaper, her aesthetic sense is immediately violated. She claims that she “never saw a worse paper in [her] life,” describing the space not through sense references but through negative subjective judgments: “lame,”

  “uncertain,” “outrageous,” “unclean,” “dull,” “sickly.” The “artistic sins” of the wallpaper are in its “flamboyant patterns,” which stifle her from the pleasures of recognition so nimbly evoked by her perceptions of the world outside. The

  passage is laden with imagery of rejection: “contradiction,” “repellant,” and “re-

  80 / Chapter 3

  volting” show that she detests and resents the wall. The two spaces, window

  and wall, form a contradiction that will initiate a key tension: faraway scenes captivate her; spaces near repulse her.11

  The story’s sec ond impressionist- like composition is a follow- up to the wife’s first encounter with the wallpaper. After rationalizing John’s absences and her separation from her child, and after undertaking a survey of the interior space, the protagonist moves her eye across the room. The new perception prompts

  another drastic mood shift:

  Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded

  arbors, the riotous old fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

  Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf

  belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down

  there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these nu-

  merous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way

  to fancy in the least.12

  The shapes that the protagonist describes here still derive from the store-

  house of impressionist painting; she moves quickly from garden to bay to land.

  But the arbors—now “deepshaded”—are “mysterious,” the flowers “rio tous,”

  and the trees “gnarly.” Within this perception we detect the wife’s struggle

  between sense and sensibility, for the delights of the views are darkened by

  John’s distrust of imagining, of “giv[ing] way to fancy.” While these window

  frames open the narrator to the joys of the outside world, they are also de-

  limiting structures, visually, psychologically, and corporeally: the gardens and countryside that supply her contentment and bliss are on the other side of

  the frame—spaces beyond, outward and other.

  The word gnarly in reference to the trees has visual, narrative, and subtex-tual significance. Gilman is probably referring to a coast live oak (see fig ure 3.3), whose branches can curve like a corkscrew.13 The adjective introduces

  a new kind of shape, indicating a modulation in the feelings of the woman

  as she discovers that the world of nature includes striking asymmetry. In ad-

  dition, the term denotes a shift in the narrator’s point of view, foreshadow-

  ing the irregular and fantastic shapes that emerge later in the story. It is at this point that the wife begins to recognize the deep- shadedness of the human mind, the riotousness of a strained marriage, and the gnarled emotions

  caused by these forces.

  The leitmotif of duress, however, does not affect the protagonist’s aware-

  ness of design and composition. There is a discernible line of perspective—

  the lane running from the wharf to the house—and her “fancy[ing]” seeing

  “people walking in these numerous paths and arbors.” Her faculties intact, she

  Snyder / 81

  Figure 3.3. Coast live oak, Descanso Gardens, Pasadena, CA

  is in touch with herself as a person and as a perceiver, circumstances that Gilman conveys through her own ability to see as a painter would: in fugitive accounts that associate the summer landscape with fig ures of joy, harmony, and satisfaction. The difference between the author and the protagonist is articulated by the difference in the spaces each occupies. Gilman’s biography cele-

  brates the ability to spend time in the piazza—to walk in the lanes, breathe

  the scent of roses, and watch a daughter frolic. That the story’s narrator cannot experience these connections with nature suggests that “The Yellow Wall-

  Paper” represents Gilman’s imagining of the fate that awaited her if not for

  her twenty- one- month stay at the Channings.14

  The mention of John terminates the composition before it is complete,

  and her creative effort fades into resignation as the woman goes back to his

  advice to use her “will and good sense.” As the thought of her husband infil-

  trates her mind, the wall again catches her eye; from this point, John and the paper are linked for the rest of the story. After recognizing the “vicious” influence of the paper, she grows angry at its “impertinence,” as John’s sister, the housekeeper, seems to be approaching. The caregiver’s complicity in the oppression is acknowledged: “I must not let her find me writing,” for “she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!” However, knowing her sister- in- law’s routine allows the narrator the free dom to think, to view, and to compose:

  But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from

  these windows.

  82 / Chapter 3

  There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road,

  and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full

  of great elms and velvet meadows.15

  This report is the last time in the story that the protagonist’s attention is drawn outside. The three views out the windows—her three quick impressions of life outside the room—move from near to far, from the piazza below

  to the roads and houses to the horizon. The window overlooking the “lovely

  shaded winding road” supplies the notion that the woman longs to escape and

  be among the bright things in nature. The window that “just looks off over

  the country” reminds her that the “great elms” and “velvet meadows” cannot

  be part of her direct experience. The diversions of sunny landscapes and al-

  luring colors fade and cease to be part of the story. After this last panorama, she recognizes that the room is a barrier between her and the prospects she

  loves to look upon. The narrator realizes that her remaining companion of

  any consequence is the wallpaper. After this passage, the narrative line of development moves from the light, airy, and transitory effects of impressionism to a less rational and less representational series of images.

  As impressioni
st painters were probing the interfusion of light and object

  and were recording the process as sensuous pleasure, Paul Cézanne, in the

  1880s, was changing the relationship between color and structure, reprioritizing ways of seeing: from a fixed vantage point he could create manifold views, within the same canvas or in a succession of canvases. He wrote, “The same

  subject seen from a different angle gives a motif of the highest interest, and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my

  place—simply bending a little more to the right or left.”16 Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte- Victoire (see fig ure 3.4), done in a series in the 1880s and 1890s, emphasize the role of geometric shapes occupying a panoramic natural space.

  The mountain and its environs (trees, buildings, roads, and an aqueduct)

  insinuate basic geometric forms (rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals, and cubes), steering later painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso toward cubism. Cézanne’s view of Mont Sainte- Victoire from 1885 shows how a canvas

  with vari ous colors and myriad objects creates an inviting depth of field that accentuates the pleasure of a natural landscape: we see familiar shapes in proportion, but the particular vision of the artist emphasizes underlying forms. This technique emerges in the story where Gilman mentions an “outside pattern,”

  a “top pattern,” and a “sub- pattern,” of ten noting the structures suggested by them, such as a front design, columns, bars, and a frieze (see fig ure 3.5).17

  In a later (1887) view of the mountain, Cézanne illustrates how a more

  monochromatic execution can force a flatter, and less obliging, viewing expe-

  rience when the canvas is less of a scene and more of a screen (see fig ure 3.6).

  Figure 3.4. Paul Cézanne , Mont Sainte- Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley, 1882–1885 (Phillips Collection, Wash ing ton, DC)

  Figure 3.5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, detail from lake watercolor, 1884 (Gilman Papers, 1846–ca.1975, Series 6, 323a–323c, seq. 124, detail)

  84 / Chapter 3

  Figure 3.6. Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte- Victoire from near Gardanne, 1887 (National Gallery of Art, Wash ing ton, DC)