This paper that has caused me so much anxiety is finally complete. Fuck you midterms!!!! Gimmi an A PLUS!

Rose Arellano
Bula Maddison
Introduction to Literary Studies
October 6, 2010

The Repression of the Creative Impulse in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

A writer, as an artist, paints the picture for the reader with words. They often touch upon subjects that are mysterious while creating great tales of fantasy and taboo. Writers often times write exaggerated depictions of reality and thus are labeled as crazy. In retrospect, Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposes an intriguing question about this; do the minds and hearts of artists inherently possess a strange quality that can be described as mad, or are artists driven to madness as a result of their conformity to societal pressures? “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that takes place in the nineteenth century about a writer who is driven to madness by animate and inanimate factors in her external environment; her husband's extreme behavior, the wallpaper in the isolation room and the pressure to hide her creative expression.

One of the animate factors in her external environment that drove the narrator mad as a hatter was her husband’s extremely controlling behavior. Although, the husband treats her well she remains an unequal amongst him and society. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir with special direction” (514). He sees her as a child who needs to be monitored and watched over. She doesn’t get to direct herself in any way. She has no opinion in how to live her life. She has to be obedient to her husband as a child to her father. The narrator needs to ask her husband permission to sleep in another room (514). She needs to ask permission to see her friends (516). He can shape her in any direction he wants. His kindness is there to make her feel guilty and therefore justifying his controlling behavior over her. This was the social norm in the nineteenth century. Feeling the pressure of her husband’s extreme behavior, she restricted herself from being openly expressive with her writing resulting in her symptoms of mental illness becoming worse. The physical state follows the emotional state. She is opposed to her husband’s controlling behavior and believes that if she could “write a little, it would relieve the press of ideas and rest” her (515). She feels the desire to express herself through a creative outlet. She suppresses her desire to write, hence she becomes sicker. Her symptoms worsen, yet again! Her perception of reality becomes more warped. The narrator struggles against the oppressive nature of her husband’s behavior.

One of the inanimate factors in her external environment that drove the narrator bonkers was the wallpaper in the isolation room. The narrator becomes obsessed with the withering wallpaper because of its “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (514). The wallpaper can commit sins that she cannot. It can have patterns within patterns. The wallpaper can create images within its patterns. The wallpaper can have compositions and color and expression! She cannot commit the sins that the wallpaper can. The pressure builds and the creative impulse continues to linger inside her. Her state of mind becomes questionable; “This paper looks at me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (516). The wallpaper is an inanimate object in reality but her perception has been contorted. The wallpaper is personified and taunts her with its expressiveness. The images become animated delusions hence the symptoms of madness.
I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments…It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here…In this damp weather it is awful I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house –to reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of paper! A yellow smell; (521).
This passage is describing in great detail what the wallpaper smells like. Indirectly, she is telling us about her mental condition. Her perception of reality has changed and these are the first glimpses of her madness here in this metaphor of the wallpaper. It represents oppression, her husband’s restrictions due to the society of that time period. The wallpaper is also symbolic as a physical representation of the narrator and her mental condition. She begins to see more within the pattern, the more time she spends without expressing herself creatively. The more she begins to relate to the wallpaper, the more her reality is deformed, and then the crazier she becomes. The narrator increasingly becomes more desperate to free herself from these circumstances. She has spent most of her time alone, sleeping during the day and then obsessing over the wallpaper at night. Her symptoms continue to magnify; her delusions becoming increasingly worse. She begins to distrust everyone around her, convinced that they are plotting against her and her wallpaper. She has grown extremely possessive of it and is “determined that nobody” (520) find the woman hidden within its pattern. The wallpaper then becomes more corporeal to her, evolving into a “bad yellow” (521) smell that “gets into [her] hair” (521) and “creeps all over the house” (521). She seriously contemplates “burning [down] the house” (521). For these reasons, it is evident that her condition is become drastically severe. Her mental health steadily declines as the wallpaper continues to deteriorate representing their relationship to each other. It is the correlation between the state of the wallpaper and the state of the narrator’s mind.

The last of the inanimate factors in her external environment that left the narrator with bats in the belfry was the pressure to hide her creative expression. She was constantly hiding her writing from her husband and his sister; “There here comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word” (515). During this time period, women were discouraged from thinking for themselves and restricted from expressing themselves. The social norm was that the man made all the decisions. It was believed that women needed to practice “will and good sense to check that tendency” (515). The narrator refuses to give up her creative impulse; “I did write for a while in spite of them: but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet heavy opposition” (513). The woman was going against the social norm and her husband’s will for her to rest and control her. This pressure adds to the already overwhelming number of symptoms of a mental illness consequently leading to her inevitable doom and complete mental breakdown.

Artists are driven to madness as a result of their conformity to societal pressures. Art is in the soul and the desire to create it is in the heart and mind. To deprive a human of this creates chaos and madness. The mind and the heart of an artist needs to express openly to live happily and mentally sound. “Happiness equals reality minus expectations” Tom Magliozzi.







Work Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed.
Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays. 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2006.