Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

by Jill Bergman

One tactic within modern art is to limit the use of color, with the goal

  of featuring other visual elements such as action, superstructure, or the ef-

  fects of color temperature. Since yellow is the dominant color of the space in

  “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” the narrator is constrained to seeing and creating

  in two dimensions; the minimal palette forces attention to contours and en-

  tropy over images. There is no depth of field, no correlation among objects.

  At this advanced point in the story, the wife can only integrate shades of the color and a fascination with amorphousness and broken pattern. Her projection of emotions onto the wall, or the pulling of emotions from it, allows us to read an erratic, and eventually frenetic, transaction between perceiver and perceived. Confronted by a hostile space, the woman forgets the satisfying

  curvilinear outdoor world.

  The protagonist’s interior landscape—her most immediate surroundings

  (the room, her bed, and the wallpaper), alien to nature and pleasure—compel

  verbal descriptions from visual encounters. When she looks out the window,

  her eye is free and her perceptions are gratified. Inside the room, her eye is forced to see and to play within limitations, so she reports juxtapositions,

  color shifts, free associations, and dynamic interplay of virulent shapes. At this point Gilman is providing a narrative- based study on the evolution of a

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  Figure 3.7. Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red,

  1954 (Phillips Collection, Wash ing ton, DC)

  perceiving subject whose mind becomes less and less dependent on external

  or objective reference points. The author is integrating text and image to depict neurasthenia.

  For part of the story the wall acts as a color field, a minimalist space in

  which the principal value is communicated through blank space, which an-

  nounces itself exclusively through tone and tint. The featuring of a large, two-dimensional space with a dominant color brings to mind the color- field paintings of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Helen Frankenthaler, who sacrificed

  form in favor of hue and experimented with the vibration of color on a larger than usual scale. The method won such painters the label of abstract expressionists, and they were noted for revealing a visual experience beyond the recognition, or even the suggestion, of objects.

  Rothko declared, “We no longer look at a painting as we did in the nine-

  teenth century; we are meant to enter it, to sink into its atmosphere of mist and light or draw it around us like a coat—or a skin. . . . These silent paintings with their enormous, beautiful, opaque surfaces are mirrors, reflecting

  what the viewer brings with him. In this sense, they can even be said to deal directly with human emotions, desires, relationships, for they are mirrors of our fantasy and serve as echoes of our experience.”18 Rothko’s battle with his own demons gave rise to a series of bi- or tri- colored canvases, typically about ninety by seventy inches (see fig ure 3.7). Although his color fields are contemplative, the quality of the viewer’s reception can shift from work to work, led by choice of hue, which may provide pleasure or passion, tension or peace.

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  Although Rothko insisted that his canvases did contain images, the expansive

  space of a color field always remains open to the imaginative and emotional

  condition of the perceiver.

  The narrator of the story remembers that she “used to lie awake as a child

  and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture

  than most children could find in a toy- store.”19 Faced with the field of yellow presented by the wall, the woman encounters a minimalist surface; with objects wiped away, emotions can play, unfiltered by conscience. Although she

  will spend the final part of the story describing chimeras and patterns that

  emerge from the paper, we discover through her that a spectrum of emotions

  can be elicited from vacant space. She spends time “trying to decide whether

  that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

  . . . On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defi-ance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.”20 As her mental

  state becomes more and more dominated by anxiety, the woman surveys the

  room and is disposed to uncover metaphors in the “wallscape.” Shortly after

  the mention of Weir Mitchell, the minimalist wall takes on a new life, as she starts to project ideas onto the plane, or draw emotions from it, yoking abstractions into an uneasy hyperbolic existence. The apparitions lurking in the wall behave differently from the forms outside the windows, causing frustration, the inverse of delight.

  Once the narrator’s anxieties overtake the perceptual momentum, repre-

  sentation is not possible. What she sees in the wall is rendered to us in free-associated juxtaposition, irregular lines and shapes contesting one another.

  In this part of the story the narrative gains greater psychological weight. The woman cannot write in her journal, yet her creative impulses begin to come

  at a frequency that she cannot manage. She feels “a steady brain- ache that

  fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress.”21 As a wife she de-spises the paper as a symbol of her confinement, but as an artist she is trans-fixed by its visual potentialities:

  I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was

  not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or

  symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.

  It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

  Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves

  and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—

  go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

  But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling

  outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wal-

  lowing seaweeds in full chase.

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  The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I ex-

  haust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that di-

  rection.

  They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds won-

  derfully to the confusion.22

  Her comments accentuate the difference from the scenes outside: the wall-

  paper, and her oppression, are rudely unnatural. On the wall, all principles of design are violated; all connections haphazard—“waddling,” “sprawling,” and

  “slanting.” The “optic horror” challenges her; the disorder “exhaust[s]” her.

  In shifting, sometimes radically, from representational to nonrepresenta-

  tional imagery, modern painters jumbled the roles of perceiver and perceived.

  The single- perspective painting was explored as new subject matter, and in-

  tense emotions were applied to the canvas. Picasso declared, “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.”23 As the narrator feels less and less control over her body and thus her fate, her relation to the familiar world is snapped: finding so many points of observation, she attempts to handle multiple spaces at the same time, changing point of view suddenly—coming at the reader from

  the bed and then from the paper, then dashing across the room to repeat the

  confusion: “There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around

  a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.”24

  As t
he wife’s psychological condition becomes more precarious, the read-

  ers rely on a visual sense, employing modernist perspectives in constructing

  the perception, and thus intimately experience the writer’s development of the protagonist through tropes of psychic change. In an analy sis of “neuroaesthet-ics,” Barbara Maria Stafford describes an “echo object” as a perceived entity whose “meshlike styles challenge the viewer to fit them together,” producing

  “genres where it is impossible to separate thought from object.”25

  The wallpaper, therefore, becomes more a part of the woman even as her

  mind struggles to resist it. The narrator divulges her feeling that the spaces in her room are interesting enough to “provoke study.” She is startled by the ability of the wall to “confuse the eye” with “unheard- of contradictions” and

  “uncertain curves”—characteristics that suggest works of cubism, which teases logic by presenting different planes of visual objects simultaneously, using lines that “plunge off at outrageous angles” and force the viewer to understand the subject as wayward geometry, where layers of “sub- patterns” scuffle for attention and lead to a new stratum of presences. Just after her last view from the window, the narrator starts to synthesize the angles and patterns to introduce a startling new character into the story: “But in the places where it isn’t faded and

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  Figure 3.8. Georges Braque, Woman with a

  Guitar, 1913 (Musée National d’Art Moderne,

  Paris)

  where the sun is just so I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of fig ure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.”26

  This amorphous being, this echo object born of angled sunlight, assumes

  greater definition as the text moves forward: “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim

  shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

  And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pat-

  tern. I don’t like it a bit.” The woman inside the paper is an echo of the wife, a concealed personification of immurement. The visitor keeps appearing as a

  “sub- pattern,” “shaking” the paper by crawling within the space, grabbing the

  “bars” like an incarcerated person, and unsettling the narrator, who wishes

  to “astonish” John by “getting out.” But the bars on the windows are too

  strong, and the wallpaper is the only “escape”—from John, and from the many

  “women” outside (representing, perhaps, all the females enshrouded by Mitch-

  ell’s theory), and from the bedroom.27

  Georges Braque’s Woman with a Guitar (see fig ure 3.8) presents a human form drawn underneath, a puzzle to be stared at and discovered, the gender

  of the person not readily recognizable. Her identity is subjected to an arrangement of disheveled quadrangles, “dim shapes” amid a selection of colors that

  might be sensed as “lame.” Her life is behind the surface of the canvas, and

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  Figure 3.9. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid) her chief identifier is her art: her guitar. Yet she moves and appears to be smiling and strumming; the image approximates a musical measure, denoting an

  asymmetrical sequence of staff and ledger lines—a modernist rhythm.

  After we are introduced to the fig ure on the wallpaper, the narrator describes a number of compositions indicating modern vision and technique that take

  us to the end of the story. The most important of these bears a strong affinity to a motif that appears in the greatest modernist mural of the twentieth century: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (see fig ure 3.9).

  Presenting a series of panels conveying a narrative about the suffering of

  war, Picasso registers a protest through images of innocents reacting to the

  disintegration of their bodies. The narrator of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” is an early fig ure of such a use of artistic space to articulate distress. The wife increasingly perceives parts of others, and herself, in the wall. In the final phase of the story, her identity is constructed by conflict, and her status as the perceiver is overturned to reveal another role: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” To escape the surveillance, she resorts to tearing off the wallpaper, and thus takes an active hand in creating new shapes: “Then I peeled off all the

  paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!”28

  Picasso’s mural is filled with “strangled heads and bulbous eyes,” some of

  them “upside down” with their open mouths ostensibly “shriek[ing].” The

  modernist type of the disembodied human being may be rooted in European

  wars, but the concept can be read back to encompass T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock

  or Emily Dickinson’s recluse—souls fragmented by a failure to connect with

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  traditional and institutional values and ideals, creative minds wrestling with alien spheres of existence. Here the wife’s unsheathing of the eyes allows her to expose her real nemesis: the watchful other. While the eyes in Guernica are dead and cannot see, they are still open, can still make a statement, and can still make the perceiving subject feel like the perceived object—and disturbingly so. Although the visual arts have routinely produced fig ures who gaze

  back, before 1900 the images rarely conveyed a modern anxiety—triggered by

  rude surveillance, the watched space turning inside out to watch the watcher.

  The eyes on the wallpaper are the wife’s and the author’s translation of the

  eyes of John, Jennie (John’s sister), and Weir Mitchell. They are ever pres-

  ent, vexing, and infuriating: “Up and down and sideways they crawl, and

  those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two

  breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.”29

  The protagonist, certain that she is seen in a distorted way, paints the dis-

  tortion onto the wall to tell the readers that her caregivers, like the eyes and the fungus, are dead wrong: “upside down,” lolling, “waddling,” “bulbous,”

  and derisive. This recognition is the woman’s most infuriating circumstance.

  The absurdity of the entire process—the convoluted switching from gazer to

  gazed- upon—prevents the narrator’s consciousness from pursuing any line,

  or developing any momentum, of rational perception of physical space. The

  story shifts into a radical modernist mode when gaze becomes scrutiny, when

  the masks and signs take on a life of their own, holding power over the person perceiving them. The final section of the story is filled with surprise, declara-tion, and frenzy, as nearly every sentence ends with an exclamation point, disclosing her anger, pleasure, frustration, and “triumph” over John and Jennie.

  For minds that found romanticism, realism, and Victorian idealism obsolete

  and mute, new lexicons for artistic expression were overdue. By 1890, shifts in ideas about sexuality, class, and gender were imminent. Gilman’s adulthood

  was witness to the tectonic shocks delivered by the forces that urged moder-

  nity: photography, electricity, evolution, suffrage, psychoanaly sis, and existen-tialism. Artists were experimenting with ways of seeing that were emancipated from institution and academy. Inner space, complete with angst and phobias,

  became a new field for aesthetic inquiry. Modern visual artists revealed a startling yet compelling nature through a new perceptual pro
cess; modern writ-

  ers illustrated the behavior of creative powers turning back upon an isolated self rather than launched into a receptive and rational world.

  The modernist encounters a stimulus, and instead of urging it toward rec-

  ognition by employing the cultural consciousness, allows the secret or sup-

  pressed impulses of the in di vidual mind to come to light, through viewings

  and fig ures that of ten challenge and agitate us. The power and longevity of

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  “The Yellow Wall- Paper” reside in Gilman’s genius to make us see and feel

  a two- dimensional space through the imaginative fusion, randomness, dis-

  association, optical anarchy, and angst that characterize so much modern art.

  NOTES

  1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972), 68, 69, 70.

  2. Ibid., 71; Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 6.

  3. Gilman, Living, 89. Because Gilman’s writing became so intermittent during her illness and rest- cure treatment, details about the Humboldt Street house are sparse. But we can infer that this home in Providence provided the atmosphere and feelings that occur in the nursery described in the story and that the Channing house in Pasadena was the basis for the positive scenes of the fictional mansion.

  4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009), 58.

  5. The piazza at the Channing house is a featured space in the California letters. Always associated with beauty and delight, the spot was clearly Gilman’s favorite, where she could enjoy the aroma of flowers, stroll, write, and watch her daughter romp.

  6. In a March 16, 1889, letter to Martha Luther, Gilman reported, “I am run-

  ning a ‘literature class.’ Some ten or twelve ladies, at five dollars a head, ten lessons. I deal with modern literature, its causes and effects. Very successful so far.”

  Gilman, Selected Letters, 51. Although she may have been using the term modern to mean “contemporary,” it is possible to infer not only that Gilman investigated literature’s experimental causes and effects in some depth but also that she was exposed to some early modern literary techniques preceding the period in which she penned “The Yellow Wall- Paper.”