Women In Horror Month: The Ideology of Spheres

In honor of Women in Horror Month, I thought I'd re-post my essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. Gilman was more than merely a remarkable writer, she was a remarkable woman living in a day and age when remarkable women were frowned upon...


American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” first appeared in the January, 1892 edition of the New England Magazine.   It is widely regarded as Gilman’s best work of short fiction.  The story details a young mother’s mental deterioration and is based on the author’s personal experiences with postpartum depression.  In 1884, following the birth of her daughter, Gilman suffered a severe depression.  Noted neurologist S. Weir Mitchell prescribed complete bed rest and limited intellectual activity.   This rest-cure served as the basis for “The Yellow Wallpaper”.  It was a commonly held nineteenth century belief that intellectual activity was detrimental to women’s mental health.   Like Gilman, the story’s narrator is advised to abstain from any and all physical activity and intellectual stimulation.  She cannot read, write, or attend to her newborn baby.  Her husband John, a physician, takes her to a country house where she is confined to the attic nursery for the duration of their stay.   Given her personal experience with Mitchell’s rest cure, Gilman felt moved to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” in order to convince him of the error of his ways.  New historicists deliberately blur the line between history and literature, believing that literature and its historical context are the same.  They argue that literature, like all forms of social discourse, can shape and is shaped by the wider world.   According to new historicists, “one of the most important elements in textual analysis is discovering how a text was formed” (Bressler 223) by the historical and societal forces at work around it.  Given Gilman’s admission about the story’s purpose, it is evident “The Yellow Wallpaper” can and should be viewed as an accurate and authoritative account of nineteenth-century feminist concerns.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates the role of women in nineteenth-century American society, focusing on the relationship between husbands and wives.  The Victorian era had a significant effect on social values in the United States, encouraging the belief that women were to behave demurely and remain within the domestic sphere.   According to S. Weir Mitchell, the American woman was “too often physically unfit for her duties as woman” (141).  Gilman adamantly fought to dispel this myth by editing feminist publications, assisting in the planning of the California Women’s Congress of 1894 and 1895, and helping to found the Women’s Peace Party.  She toured the United States and England lecturing on the rights of women and labour reform, and in 1898 she published a study on the economic relationship between men and women as a factor in social evolution.   Literature, like all forms of discourse, is shaped by and can help shape social forces.   Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman articulates the sense of helplessness that first fuelled her feminist fire. Soon after the birth of her daughter, Gilman experienced “a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” (Gilman, Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper).  Like Gilman, the narrator in the short story suffers from what her husband calls a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 115).  While Gilman sought the advice of the well-known physician, S. Weir Mitchell, the narrator is advised to get complete bed rest by her husband who, much like Mitchell, is a prominent physician.  Gilman wove Mitchell’s belief that American women were  not “qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man” (141) into the character of John in order to represent the prevailing view Victorian society held that woman were “not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother” (Mitchell 141).  Gilman left her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, in part because she felt the confines of their marriage had contributed to her depression. She portrayed this same stifling view of marriage in “The Yellow Wallpaper”.   Stripped of self-determination, Gilman’s narrator represents the powerlessness and repression of women during the nineteenth-century. By doing so, Gilman openly challenged the sexual politics at play in nineteenth-century marriage.

The nineteenth-century saw the birth of an ideology of spheres in gender analysis.   This philosophy held that “men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self-interest” (Kent 30) while “women inhabited a separate, private sphere” (Kent 30) more suitable for the “inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness derived, it was claimed insistently, from women’s sexual and reproductive organization” (Kent 30).   The reproductive process required all the energy a woman could summon.  For a woman to exert herself in any other manner would weaken the very nature of her being.  Gilman portrays this ideology of spheres well in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, using each supporting character as a symbolic representation of the Victorian ideal.   John is the reasonable one. Free to work, “John is kept in town very often by serious cases” (Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 119) while his sister Jennie “is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession” (Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 118).  Both John and Jennie blame the narrator’s illness on her chosen career as a writer, clearly articulating Mitchell’s question: “How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which nowadays she is eager to share with the man?” (Mitchell 141).  Gilman suffered from “a severe and continuous nervous breakdown” (Gilman, Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper) for several years, during which she went “in devout faith and some faint stir of hope” (Gilman, Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper) to Mitchell, then a noted specialist in nervous diseases.  Mitchell quickly decided there was nothing wrong with Gilman.  He applied the rest-cure and advised her “to live as domestic a life as far as possible, to have but two hours’ intellectual life a day, and never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” (Gilman, Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper) for the remainder of her life.  Like Gilman, her narrator is “absolutely forbidden to work” (Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 115) until she is well again, and like Gilman she disagrees with this idea.  Gilman attributes Mitchell’s rest-cure to the proliferation of her melancholia, stating that she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin” (Gilman, Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper) that she could see beyond it. 

The term feminism originated at the First International Women’s Conference in Paris the same year the New England Magazine published “The Yellow Wallpaper”.   The term was used to signify a belief in the advocacy of equal rights based upon the idea of equality of the sexes.   An ardent supporter of equal rights, Gilman was heavily influenced by three strong-minded and fiercely independent great aunts: abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; Catherine Beecher, an important advocate of domestic feminism; and Isabella Beecher Hooker, an adamant suffragist.  Their influence aided in the development of Gilman’s feminist convictions and her strong desire to effect social reform.   In her 1935 autobiography, Gilman claimed that “the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways” (Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 121).  Gilman insisted the secondary status of women in society and their economic dependence on men had nothing to do with biological inferiority, as Mitchell suggested, but was instead the result of culturally enforced behaviour.   Literature shapes and is shaped by the social forces at work in the world around it.   “The Yellow Wallpaper” both articulated and opposed the oppression of women so prevalent during the nineteenth-century. In 1926 Gilman wrote, “One girl reads this, and takes fire! Her life is changed.  She becomes a power – a mover of others – I write for her” (Warhol and Herndl 641).

Works Cited

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th Edition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. William L Andrews. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Harbrace Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Jon C Scott, Raymond E Jones and Rick Bowers. 4th Edition. Nelson Education, 2006. 115-127.

—. Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Catherine Lavender. 8 June 1999. 12 June 2011 .

Kent, Susan. Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860-1914. Princeton University Press, 1990.

Mitchell, S. Weir. "Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked." Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Belford Books, 1998. 134-141.

Warhol, Robyn R and Diane Price Herndl. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism.Revised Edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.