The Yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Its a short book but there's a certain impact that comes from reading it. When I say short I mean that its only around 30 pages and it can easily be read in just an hour or two. It was originally published in 1892.
This review post is a brief interpretation and it contains spoilers. So be warned!
Synopsis
The book is about a woman's slow decent into madness brought on by her physician husband.
The woman suffers from postpartum depression and she and her husband, rent an upstate cottage to spend the summer with a plan to return home after next three months. The idea is to give her rest and peace. She is confined to the house and mostly to one particular room, a nursery with yellow wallpaper. She is encouraged by her husband to not see anyone else or to write or engage in anything that might excite her or create anxiety. But without having any simulation she becomes focused on the intricate yellow wallpaper in the room and eventually begins to see its intricate floral design as bars to a prison. Overtime she starts to see a woman creeping behind the pattern, trapped by the design, shaking the bars of her prison, trying to escape.
The book reaches its climax on the day that the couple is meant to leave the cottage and return home. The woman locking herself in the room and tears down the wallpaper. She then begins creeping along the walls.
The husband ends up breaking down the door with an axe and is so shocked by his wife's maddness that he passes out in the threshold. The woman doesn't even notice her husband lying on the ground and simply steps over his body again and again and she continues to circle about in the room, creeping along the walls.
Interpretation
The hallucination of the woman trapped behind the wallpaper seems to me to symbolize the woman herself who is trapped in the room. This is pretty obvious I think.
When I first read the description of the book before reading it myself, I got the impression that the husband had intentionally locked his wife up in the room and or intentionally manipulated her in a way that would make her go insane. In reading the story myself though, I didn't actually get that impression. I think that the husband actually loves his wife and genuinely wants her to get better, which is portrayed throughout the story and which is also why he is so shocked in the end by her madness. Where the husband goes wrong is that he repeatedly fails to listen to his wife, who clearly knows herself and her body better than he or anyone else. For instance, the wife wants to be social and see others, but he encourages her to remain alone as seeing others would be too taxing and stressful for her. He encourages her to just rest and to not tire herself by entertaining others. The woman wants to write and be creative as well but the husband again discourages her for those things for similar reasons. He ultimately believes that he knows best and believes that she needs peace and rest. He is very wrong though and she repeadely tells him that she needs to be social and needs intellectual and creative stimulation. In the end her isolation worsens her condition and she eventually decends into madness.
To me I think that this is a commentary about how male physicians often do not listen to their female patients and think that they know what is best for their female patients. The book was written in the late 1800's when the standard cure for woman was bed rest, isolation and for wealthier woman these retreat like isolated spas.
Though I think that things have likely improved (somewhat) since the time that this book was written I still think that this idea is probably very relevant today. I'm sure that a lot of women do not feel heard, or recognized by their male physicians or their husbands and there are still many known biases in the medical field that favor male patients over female ones.
Dam 😆, that dam wallpaper, like a prison huh. Cool story, thanks for the description. Keep rockin leaky.
Yeah it was a quick read but a good one.
Have a good one man!
It sounds ahead of its time on even talking about such issues. If love to read it.. I've never heard of it. It wouldn't have named it as post partum depression, right? Women suffered terribly from physicians misdiagnosing them or not listening to them or recognising what we now know to be legitimate mental health issues, often related to hormonal health.
Yes you're right, it didn't name it in the book as the woman experiencing post partum depression. It just hints at these new feelings/emotions begining shortly after she gives birth to her child.
Ahead of its time or maybe we are still just so very slow to progress in some key aspects of life?