Symbolism in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper outlines a story about a young woman who is diagnosed with a “temporary nervous depression” which is described as a slight hysterical tendency. She is told this by her husband and her brother who are both highly regarded as physicians and were very closely connected with her. She is truly cared for by her husband and others around her, however, their response only sped up and exacerbated her condition. I interpreted this story through the psychological and historical lenses. There are a multitude of different factors that contributed to her spiral into madness that can be understood much easier if you understand whats going on in her mind and if you take into consideration the knowledge that was available to them at the time compared to now. I would also argue that some of the problems expressed in this poem are not just relegated to this time in history, but are eternal problems that are part of the human experience.

From a historical analysis of the story, we can see that they don’t quite understand the brain as well as we do yet obviously. They generally don’t know what, if anything, is wrong with her and finding a solution to that is a whole new level of complexity. We can tell from the dialogue she paraphrases for us to the way she is expressing that she feels that the people around her deeply care for her and we can tell that she has a very deep trust in them despite her suspicions. Puerperal Insanity was a common diagnose in the day for women who had recently given birth. Today this is more commonly known as postpartum depression, or worse, postpartum psychosis and she seems to suffer from the latter. It is a serious mental illness that plagued many mothers of the time and even some to this day but with their little understanding of psychology and the brain that is so easily accessible to us now, they had very little resources to try and help. Physicians at the time analyzed many factors that could lead to the onset of insanity in mothers ranging from stress and environmental factors such as poverty, family circumstances, poor nutrition, fear, depression, anxiety as well as challenges related to becoming a mother. Symptoms of postpartum psychosis include, delusions, paranoia, disrupted sleep, hyperactivity, mood swings, agitation, difficulty communicating and hallucinations. We see all of these symptoms scattered throughout the book in small details here and there, suggesting she had an understanding perhaps after the fact that, all of her symptoms are closely related to each other and that many women would have been having these symptoms as well. This disorder could help explain part of her original problem and taking her child away from her seems to have not helped and perhaps even accelerated her condition, I would argue.

Another way to look at this story is through a psychological lense. I believe a major contributing factor for her deteriorating mental health is the removal of meaning from her life almost entirely. Meaning is a deep instinct of ours that is much more important than they perhaps thought at the time. Meaning is much more than an arbitrary consequence of conscious thought. It is deeply important for our survival evolutionarily so it makes sense that it is built in to our very existence. You can feel this when you are dancing on the edge between comfortability and uncertainty. For example, when you are teaching a young child something, you want the challenge to be enough so that they have to work for it but it also has to be in their reach. We do this naturally and it is also the zone in which we learn the most and grow the most as a person. This zone is also known as the zone of proximal development and teachers refer to this as a strategy called scaffolding. This line between comfortability and uncertainty or chaos versus order and this is precisely where they went wrong in the treatment of her overall “condition”. When chaos goes to its extreme, it is characterized by the savageness, selfishness and the unknown. However order at its extreme is too restricting and can suffocate any individualism, freedom or adaptability. Either of these tropes taken to their extremes are evil and the only true way forward is a mix of the two such as depicted in the yin and yang symbol.

Her treatment is characterized by going overboard on the order side of things. She had all responsibilities taken from her, she had no problems to worry about and was taken from her child. Responsibilities are what give many people this sense of meaning. When you have responsibilities you have a constant outward force pushing on you to make sure that you do whatever it is you’re responsible for. For this very early mother, this was of course inextricably linked to the raising and caring of her child. Taking all of this away from her did grant more order in her life but in an all to restricting way that was very detrimental to her already fragile mental state. On top of this, she starts seeing the room, as well as her mental condition as a prison. This is made clear early on as she explains that the windows are barred off, the bed is nailed down, and she doesn’t leave the room very often. She sees the outside more and more as a refuge from this prison she is locked in and relates it and the garden to happiness and freedom and even starts seeing the “woman” outside, free. Another mistake in the way they treated her, is that instead of heeding her warnings and suspicions that she wasn’t getting better and that she would be better to just get out of there entirely. They saw the mere presence of these thoughts as part of the reason she wasn’t getting better. And that any doubt that she held in them would only grow her problem and make her paranoid by slowly making her believe that she’s insane until she really was. Not to mention her having to keep her writing in secret. This further reinforced the idea that she was being imprisoned, and the “me vs them” mentality that maybe was the only sense of antagonism or resistance that she felt towards the end. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and got herself out of the mental prison that they were locking her up in by getting the woman, who she more and more related to, out from behind the wallpaper.

The overwhelming bulk of analysis of this story comes from the feminist lense. While I don’t condone the way that she was being treated, which would be seen as egregious practices by today’s standards, I don’t quite see this as the most important analytical lense to interpret it from. While she was ignored and put into poor living conditions, this was less so the “oppression of women by men” which some people may see it as. I see this text as more proof of just how ignorant humans have been and how much worse off people had it in the past. The average person before 1895 in the west lived on less than a dollar a day, in today’s money. Misconceptions of the brain, physical health and the poor treatment of mental health patients in general in the past is what characterizes this story to me personally and none of those problems are gender exclusive. This plus the fact that even through the narrators telling of the story, I got a sense of just how cared for she was by those around her and how trusting she was of these individuals, even if their misconceptions were doing her more harm than good.

As with almost everything, there is no one size fits all solution for looking at and interpreting this historical story, and complex problems such as mental health and psychology. And the solution is no more simple to find when trying to analyze some of the problems put forth by the story. A mix of feminist, historical and arguably most importantly of all, psychology are all very important topics brought to the forefront by the author. A little more background understanding of those subjects relating to The Yellow Wallpaper are very helpful when trying to interpret the meaning of this story. Somewhere in the middle of all these stances is a solid position on the problems displayed as well as their potential solutions.

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