The Yellow Wallpaper and the Shifting Archetype
You can read “The Yellow Wallpaper” here.
It is hard to interpret the unnamed woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper. The story is written in first person journal entries, but we slowly lose touch with our character as she slips out of sanity. The year is 1892, and marriage, childbirth, and seclusion are the core of women’s livelihoods.
This is all represented in The Yellow Wallpaper’s setting; a man and wife, after having a child, retreat to a old, abandoned estate only to have the wife go insane after her mental illness is ignored. The wife character is hard to define since she shifts from a Hero archetype, to a combination of a Herald and Threshold Guardian archetype, then finally becomes a Shadow archetype. She becomes a shadow of herself, created by neglect from her husband and society. We know the woman is our protagonist because she carries, in her own way, “the external goal of the plot, but also the internal goals in the subplots” (Marks).
We know the main antagonist is her husband, the physician, John. He creates the “obstacles that give the story momentum” and “creates an environment in which [her] transformation can take place” (Marks). The way the story unfolds is unique, unsettling, and utterly complex, but mapping out the woman’s archetype-shifts fleshes out the brilliantly creepy story Gilman is trying to tell.
The woman begins the story as a Hero archetype. She tells herself things to keep her place as a wife and a stable main character for us to idolize; “I will let it alone and talk about the house”. With “conviction to succeed” (Voytilla) as a helpful, sane wife, her journal entries are controlled and calm. But, we can tell deep down the potential for conflict. The woman struggles in this environment of seclusion and a marriage based on patronization and ignorance. She has a “nervous disorder” after giving birth that her husband tells her will go away if she just just rests and stops writing. As Vogler puts it in The Writer’s Journey, the Hero archetype lets us identify with her “desire to be loved and understood, to succeed, to survive, be free…or seek self-expression” (Vogler).
It is easy to relate to the scary idea of our own, personal creative outlets being banned or snuffed out. One could categorize this woman as Loner Hero since she is “estranged from society” (Vogler) because of her gender. Her passion as a writer is a lonely occupation, especially since those around her, John and the nanny, don’t want to her to write. Heroic qualities come into question when she foreshadows the destruction of her somewhat-stable, complacent character; “I don’t mind it [the house] a bit — only the paper.”
The hideous and torturing wallpaper in her bedroom is what morphs our main character. We are losing sight of the heroic, mild-mannered wife as her personality begins to form wild claims and shadowed secrets. The journey our Loner Hero begins to take is one that is hard to understand, but if we track it with archetypes, it can become a little clearer. In story theory, the one who brings the call to change is a Herald archetype. Heralds get the story rolling and are important to every story told. When “some new energy enters the story that makes it impossible for the hero to simply get by any longer” (Vogler), the Herald is there.
In Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the Herald is her own voice, trying to get messages across to the readers; “I must say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief!” or when looking at the paper saying “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”. This foreshadows that she is coming close to her breaking point and the hallucinations are becoming all too real. Our character is now seeing things that John and the nanny are not seeing, change is seeping in, and our character is “quite sure it is a woman” in the wallpaper.
“Sandy Nelson’s twelfth Oran Mor show, directed by Sacha Kyle”
The antagonists don’t help our character and the tests begin to manifest. She becomes more desperate, “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time”. The archetype that tests the main character is the Threshold Guardian, a being who guards the Special World. They are usually external beings, but can manifest as “internal demons: the neuroses, emotional scars, vices, dependencies, and self-limitations” (Vogler).
Threshold Guardians are not antagonists, but those who wish to further develop the character in the form of tests. Our woman character is being tested by many things, her husband’s neglect, society’s mental health taboos, and her own hallucinations. Her own mind is testing her and, as a reader, it becomes difficult to find a sane thought after she is forced to succumb to insanity.
Her desires and characteristics are now being illustrated in abstract ways as the narrative goes on. She becomes infatuated with the smell of the wallpaper, like she is living inside its “enduring order”. There is more excitement and awareness of her situation in her tone; “I am feeling ever so much better!” and “He [John] asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind”. Even if she is more aware, she is becoming an unreliable narrator. But like all good stories, we are intrigued to see where our Hero ends up. As Vogler puts it, “Threshold Guardians who appear to be attacking may in fact be doing the hero a huge favor”, in this case, her insanity is what disconnects her from the tortuous existence of a woman in the late 1800’s.
Inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman by abigail larson
In in the end, we lose our character to the Shadow archetype that she becomes. This happens because her message was never heard and her servitude to her husband and gender was always going to be her demise. A Hero’s downfall can happen from sympathetic intentions, like Michael from The Godfather films. But in Gilman’s story, our Hero is lost to reasons out her control. In the story’s final, fantastical, supernatural image of the writer becoming the woman in the wallpaper, it reads:
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
The reader learns in the end that the wife’s name might have been the Jane being referenced. We realize, all too late, that we have lost our main character to her illness, to the dark woman within the walls. We lose touch completely, not even knowing if there is more than one woman in the hideous, unreliable wallpaper. A Shadow may be something that a character is “always wrestling with” and can “be a destructive force, especially if not acknowledged, confronted, and brought to light” (Vogler).
Our unhinged character symbolizes a woman who society, at this time, feared; “the Shadow is a reflection of the Hero’s qualities, it may represent positive qualities that the Tragic or Loner Hero may have suppressed or rejected.” (Voytilla). The positive qualities being her self-expression, motherhood, her emotions, and her own sanity. The Yellow Wallpaper is a challenge for readers since one might end up purely unsettled by its happenings, but not understanding of them.
We see an interesting, compelling character completely alter and lose themselves. Her own sanity becomes a burden that she must sacrifice.
Works Cited:
Daley, James. The World’s Greatest Short Stories . Dover Thrift Editions, 2006.
Marks, Dara. Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc. Three Mountain Press.
Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. 3rd ed., Sheridan Books, Inc., 2007.
Voytilla, Stuart. Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Sheridan Books, Inc.
