October Nightmares IV #5: The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Writing's on the Wall

On paper The Yellow Wallpaper is a difficult sell. A short story in which the protagonist, an unnamed woman, spends the entire text locked in her bedroom describing the room’s gaudy wallpaper? All aboard the HMS Riveting Express. But then again, Dracula begins with its antagonist buying a property in England and ironing out the legal details with the story’s protagonist. Frankenstein’s no better: the main character recounts his boring academic days at university and skips past all the girls he shagged during freshers'.

But of course there’s more to those stories, just as there is more at work within The Yellow Wallpaper. It can best be described as a proto-feminist text – wait, don’t go back to the incel retreat. Because whilst there is a progressive message behind The Yellow Wallpaper, it was written at a time when the treatment of women was a priory fairly low down in the ordo cognoscendi – well below beards and dusty tomes. So the message is far more palpable than some 15 year-old girl raging on Tumblr about how oppressed she is because some bloke on the bus spread his legs to a degree he found comfortable.

The story follows a married couple who rent a colonial mansion for the summer, in order that the wife can get rest and recuperate. The wife is ill, you see, with an unspecified condition but which is implied to be some neurological disorder. Her husband, John, who is a physician, believes she is suffering from ‘female hysteria’ – a condition which used to be diagnosed in women who showed the slightest deviation from rigid social norms, nervousness, or who simply wanted to get their freak on. Men are hard you see; immune to inexplicable outbursts of negative emotions – unless they are watching any sports game ever. Or watching the ending of Terminator 2.

So, John brings his wife to this spooky Gothic mansion - having clearly never read any ghost story ever. This is as Gothic a house as you can get, especially as it has been abandoned for years. We’re even told that there is something ‘queer about it’. The woman is quite enchanted with this old house, however, particularly the sprawling garden. I suppose you think this garden is hiding some amazing terrible secret, eh? Well, we don't get to fucking find out. Doctor Husband says that the rest cure is in order and that's that.

Whilst relaxing it up in a mansion may sound well and good, the rest cure is a particularly draconian treatment in which the woman is forbidden from doing anything which may interfere with her ‘delicate’ temperament. No reading, writing, exercise, or even thinking about her condition. Just endless rest, locked in a room with bars on the windows with nothing to look at but the stained yellow wallpaper. I know what the crafty bastard is up to: he just wants her out the way so he can play on FIFA uninterrupted.

Left alone with her madness, it isn't long until the woman spies another woman crawling behind the patterns on the wallpaper. Given that she's a Victorian era wife and can rely on her husband only for a round of emotionless copulation once every couple of years (when the ingrained Puritan repulsion ebbs), the captive woman is unable to convince John of this strange occurrence. Initially repulsed by the wallpaper she slowly becomes obsessed with this one artefact of mental escape and agency in her life. She's off her rocker, like a bunch of cats on a school trip to the catnip factory.

The Yellow Wallpaper is difficult to pin down. It's told from the perspective of the woman's diary - a woman who is already well into the throes madness. But is it as simple as a tale of a mad woman undergoing severe delusions?  She certainly uses the language of the insane, describing the wallpaper  as having 'a yellow smell', or reminding her of 'bad yellow things' or its patterns 'plunging off at outrageous angles, destroying themselves in unheard-of contradictions.' Christ - just think how much this wallpaper would cost to buy.  

Regardless of whether the woman is actually insane, there's an uneasiness to proceedings evocative of the works of Robert W. Chambers and H.P. Lovecraft. There are allusions to the unnatural, the non-euclidean, and the unknowable. And whilst it is debatable if we are supposed to take it the story at face value - as simply a protest against inhuman practices - or as a ghost story, or even as a cosmic horror story, there's no denying that the story more than earns its place on this list. Just read this line: "Nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside-down, and makes their eyes white!"

And I thought the wood chip walls in my childhood home were bad enough.

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