Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 289community and cherished as the most important collective resource. Like her
nonfiction, it resists any division of labor based on gender, or any definitions of
behavior founded on a distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” traits. And
it works actively against any map of being that charts its territory in terms of
gender – that portrays any area of life as determinately female or male.
From 1910 until 1916, Gilman edited a magazine, The Forerunner, consisting
entirely of her own fiction and articles on women’s issues. Over her lifetime, she also
wrote more than two hundred stories, most of them for her magazine. Of these,
easily the most famous is “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892). Gilman based the story
on her own experience of a “rest cure”: a regimen of bed rest and confinement that
almost drove her, she said later, to “utter mental ruin.” In it, an unnamed woman
records her strange experiences when she and her husband John go to live in
“ancestral halls” for the summer. Her husband is a physician, she tells us, so is her
brother; and so, although she does not believe she is sick, when they tell her she has
“a slight hysterical tendency,” she feels helpless to refute them. “What is one to do?”
she asks. At their new house for the summer, John chooses their room, where she is
to stay to deal with her “nervous condition.” She would have preferred another
room, “but John would not hear of it.” And the room where she is to spend most of
her time she soon begins to dislike, because it is covered with a wallpaper the color
of which is “repellent, almost revolting, a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely
faded by the slow-turning sunlight.” John, who is, his wife says, “practical in the
extreme,” does not take her complaints about the wallpaper seriously. Alone in her
room, though, discouraged from writing or any other labor, she becomes obsessed
with it. She first sees eyes staring from the wallpaper. Then she begins to see a “shape”
behind the pattern. There is a “front pattern” and a “back pattern,” she believes; the
front pattern is like bars, and the shape is that of “a woman stooping down and
creeping about behind.” As her obsession with the paper grows, she can see the front
pattern move as, she believes, “the woman behind shakes it!” “I think that woman
gets out in daytime!” the narrator confesses; “I can see her ... creeping all around the
garden,” “when I creep by daylight.”
The narrator, it is clear, is starting to see the shape in the paper as a double, a secret
sharer in her own imprisonment. And as that intensifies, she tears at the yellow
wallpaper that constitutes her jail as well as that of her doppelganger in a desperate
effort to liberate herself and her reflection, the pair of them. In her own eyes, that
effort meets with success. The story ends with the narrator declaring to her husband –
who has had to break down the door with an axe to get into the room – “I’ve pulled
off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” She has broken down and broken
out. Under the coercive pressure of her husband, and other physicians, she has
become what they prescribed her to be. They have resisted taking her and her needs
seriously; unsympathetic and unimaginative, their best intentions have made her a
prisoner. She has taken the only way out she sees or senses: through the “bars” of the
wallpaper and into insanity. The power of this story stems from its mix of the surreal
and the simple, the Gothic and the realistic. The narrator records her extraordinary
experiences in an ordinary style, the style of a journal, because each strange eventGGray_c03.indd 289ray_c 03 .indd 289 8 8/1/2011 7:54:24 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 24 AM