486 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
marriage.” The attitude John has toward the narrator
reflects the general attitude of men toward women
at this time. More important, at the beginning of
the story, the narrator agrees with and accepts this
attitude as “natural.”
At the start of the story, we see that this attitude
leads the narrator to be treated as if she were a child.
She is put in an attic room even though she wanted
a room that opened onto the garden. She believes
that this attic room was used as a nursery in the
past, which reflects her suspicion that she is being
treated as a child. In addition, the narrator is never
named by the author. The story is written in the
first person, being made up of her journal entries.
However, her husband never refers to her by her
name, always referring to her by a pet name, such
as “blessed goose” or “little girl,” which reduces her
to a child.
Throughout the first half of the story, the narra-
tor compares herself to her sister-in-law Jenny and
the housekeeper Mary. She feels very badly that she
cannot perform her “duties” as a wife and mother:
“It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any
way!” We find out that the reason they have hired
Mary and that the narrator is considered “sick” is
that the narrator is unable to take care of her child:
“It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such
a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes
me so nervous.” For the narrator, her sister-in-law
comes to represent the ideal wife and mother, the
woman who finds fulfillment in putting her husband
and children’s well-being and desires above her own:
“She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and
hopes for no better profession.” Part of the narrator’s
“problem” is that she doesn’t want to put her “duties”
as a mother and wife above her own desire to write,
a choice her husband is not forced to make. When
she tells her husband that she feels better when he
is at home and asks him to stay with her, he answers,
“Why, how can I, dear?” meaning his responsibility
to his profession and patients comes before his wife’s
needs. As a woman, the narrator could never put her
professional responsibilities above the needs of her
husband or child.
In the second half of the story, the narrator
begins to see women trapped behind the wallpaper
that covers the walls of her attic room. These women
can be read as psychological projections of the nar-
rator’s predicament: As they are trapped behind the
wallpaper, she is trapped in this attic room. They can
also be read as a metaphor for the position of women
in the United States in the 19th century. The
women trapped behind the wallpaper represent the
lack of power and freedom women had at this time.
After encountering these women, the narrator
notices that they “creep,” saying “And it is like a
woman stooping down and creeping about behind
the pattern.” Creeping becomes a metaphor for any
unacceptable behavior by women, “It must be very
humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight! I
always lock the door when I creep by daylight.” It
is at this point that the narrator decides to free the
women by tearing down all the wallpaper in the
room. In tearing down the wallpaper, the narrator
not only frees the women in the wallpaper but also
starts the process of her own questioning of the
“naturalness” of gender roles.
This questioning leads to the reversals in gender
roles that signal the shift in power at the end of the
story. While in the first half of the story, the narrator
was treated as a child, silenced by her husband, and
locked in her attic room, at the end of the story, she
turns her husband into a child by calling him “young
man,” she locks everyone out of her room by tossing
the key out the window, and silences her husband
when she informs him, “ ‘the key is down by the front
steps, under a plantain leaf !’ ”
The final reversal of power takes place in the
last two lines of the story, “Now why should that
man have fainted? But he did, and right across my
path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him
every time!”At the time this story was written,
melodrama was very popular, and in traditional
melodrama, women faint. John’s fainting at the end
of the story signals to us a reversal in gender roles.
And the narrator’s continuing to “creep,” even after
her husband has “blocked” her path, signals to us a
reversal of power. The narrator is no longer “under”
her husband, but “over him.”
Carmine EspositoillneSS in The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper is an autobiographical short
story based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own