The Yellow Wallpaper

Every time I reread Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story I find it all the more disturbing. The first person narrator becomes an other, to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud's famous dictum. She, for the narrator is a woman, assumes the identity of a character whose existence is the product of her own hallucinations. This said, her entire ordeal, which Gilman so skilfully expresses, may also represent the fate of legions of women who were misunderstood, oppressed, and confined to lives of mediocrity and failure by jealous, doting husbands blinded by empiricism and convention. These women, as the female narrator demonstrates, were imprisoned in their own imaginations by the mores of male society which treated them like cherished but rather disobedient children. The narrator lives in a gilded-cage entirely made up of "yellow wallpaper." Her material needs being met, she is left to languish; and any attempt on her part to assert her will is met with 'loving' reproof on the part of her husband. He denies that there is anything physically wrong with her, yet her "malady" persists and even worsens, to the point where his concern for her health turns to anxiety. But her malady is in large measure a psychic reaction to the dehumanizing life she was forced to endure at the hands of a dominant patriarchal social order.