Lisa's Reviews > The Yellow Wallpaper

“He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.”

Read in conjunction with Ibsen’s A Doll's House, this short story takes a darker turn than the play, refusing to offer a way out of a dilemma in 19th century traditional society.

The story of a young married woman with an infant, who is patronised and controlled by her husband to the point of losing her sanity, is creepy, relevant, and not dated at all.

Two mindsets and worldviews clash.

On one side, there is the “rational husband”, a physician, who calls his wife “little girl” and forces her to passivity, as he claims agitation and stimulation are feeding her imagination in a detrimental way. He keeps her under surveillance, and she is asked to sleep and rest as much as possible, avoiding any kind of activity that can spark independent thoughts.

On the other hand, there is the young woman herself, with a strong wish to express herself creatively in writing, opposing the so-called benevolent dictatorship in secret, hiding her true feelings and thoughts in front of the husband, who is “very caring and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction”. And he “hates to have me write a word”.

The yellow wallpaper in her room becomes an obsessive symbol for the intellectual oppression the young woman experiences. It increasingly chokes her, until she lets go of her resistance and loses her sanity along with her hope to ever be able to live up to the limited version of life her prison guard is willing to grant her.

Her description of the yellow wallpaper is a mirror of her internal suffering, the contraction she feels and cannot solve. And it is an ominous sign of the only way she sees out of her hopeless dependency on a man who does not see her as a thinking human being, but rather as a decorative piece of furniture in his possession:

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

The fight she puts up against the symbolical wallpaper makes one remember Oscar Wilde’s alleged last words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Behind the irony and wit, there is a sense of deadly pain in the face of lost beauty and aesthetic value. Whether or not Oscar Wilde spoke those words, he died just a couple of years after the publication of this short story, a broken man after years in prison which destroyed his spirit and will to create. He too was a victim of a dominant heterosexual, male society, which could accept no exceptions to their preferred way of living: in full control of all aspects of community, especially creative and sexual practices.

A Room of One's Own, so necessary to creative processes according to Virginia Woolf’s idea, turns into a prison if there is no freedom of thought and movement to feed imagination, and no financial independence to be able to make a choice. The room, supervised by "benevolent" authority, turns into a dystopian scenario in the spirit of Orwell.

Thoughtcrime and doublethink were well-known to intelligent, captive women long before "1984" named them properly.

Still readable, enjoyable, and thought-provoking! Recommended!