“She Shall Be Sick As She Pleases”: Madness and Identity in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Haunting of Hill House
This is an edited academic paper written for a college course, and despite my best attempts is still formatted as such.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper is a canonical piece of feminist literature which tackles loss of identity and agency, madness, and the effects of the patriarchy on both. The Haunting of Hill House, a novel written by Shirley Jackson in 1959, deals with the same themes in a less pointedly gendered manner. Both contain female protagonists who share remarkably similar journeys, each influenced by erosion of identity and denial of their existing mental illnesses. Each piece deals with architecture and motherhood, suppression of anger/fear, and oppression by loving male authorities. Each piece ends with the protagonist committing a horrifying act of madness which allows her finally to be taken seriously. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, this act is at least partially successful and possibly premeditated, whereas The Haunting of Hill House ends in the protagonist’s almost certain failure, madness, and death.
The two fictions begin in the same manner — with the protagonist arriving at her new (haunted) home. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the unnamed narrator (who I’ll refer to as “the narrator” for brevity) goes to a country home to attempt a “rest cure” which her husband, a doctor, recommends for her postpartum depression. The Haunting of Hill House begins when Eleanor Vance goes to the titular house, ostensibly to assist in a ghost-hunting experiment. In reality, she is trying to escape her sister’s stifling home and the lingering effects of her life taking care of her invalid mother. It’s worth noting that both characters begin their stories already in poor mental health, and unable to continue caretaking roles.
While the narrator is isolated by her cure, attended to by her husband and his sister Jennie but kept from other contact, Eleanor shares Hill House with three others: Theodora and Luke, two charming, outgoing young people who Eleanor falls in love with by turns, and Doctor Montague, the professor of the supernatural who invited her to Hill House. Notably, the doctor in Hill House is also somewhat controlling — Eleanor is guided by Montague’s comically precise directions to Hill House, and he immediately establishes himself as a father figure to the younger three. “‘You are three willful, spoiled children who will nag me for your bedtime story,’” he tells them.
As the women spend further time in their new settings, they become entwined with the architecture around them. The narrator focuses on the yellow wallpaper, while Eleanor and her compatriots continue to study the confusing dimensions of Hill House. Eleanor’s obsession takes longer to flower, and is more sudden — the house singles her out by writing her name on the walls. As the supernatural phenomena continue, Eleanor’s already tenuous mental state worsens, but her companions refuse to take her seriously, and as her attempts to belong grow more desperate, they turn away. Estranged and isolated from her fellows, she turns to the house itself, surrendering to it: “I will relinquish this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; what it wants of me it can have.” (Jackson). The wallpaper, by contrast, slowly monopolizes the narrator’s thoughts as her isolation continues. She becomes “fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper! It dwells in [her] mind so!” (Gilman). Eventually she, too, feels a sense of ownership over the paper: “I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that no one shall find it out but myself!”, “…no one touches that paper but me — not alive!” (Gilman). The narrator imagines that there is a woman trapped behind the pattern of the wallpaper, and devotes herself to ripping it away in an attempt to free her.
Driven by external denial of their own mental illness, isolated and infantilized, both characters slip further into madness. Each loses her identity — Eleanor to the house, essentially becoming the ghost that is haunting it, and the narrator to the wallpaper, becoming the woman trapped behind it. Having undergone this drastic loss of identity, they each commit a shocking act of madness. The narrator beings to “creep smoothly on the floor” (Gilman), a sight which startles her husband into a faint. Eleanor dances through Hill House, knocking on doors and singing, and dashes up the rotting iron staircase to the tallest point of its tower, unaware of what she’s doing until Luke brings her down again. As she’s sent away from Hill House by Dr. Montague, for her own safety, the further estrangement from the last place she believes she belongs drives her to commit suicide, crashing her car into a tree at the end of the drive.
In the last page of The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator also contemplates suicide: “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate.” She says, “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but…I wouldn’t do it of course! I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.” (Original manuscript, Gilman). This attitude illustrates a clear difference between Eleanor and the narrator — the amount of agency each has in her ending.
The narrator is consistently controlled and suppressed by her husband, who speaks down to her and treats her as he would a child, instead of listening to her concerns about her own health. Denise Knight, in her essay ’I am Getting Angry Enough To Do Something Desperate’: The Question of Female ‘Madness’, suggests that the narrator externalizes her anger onto the wallpaper: after John laughs at the narrator about the wallpaper and forbids her once again to write, she remarks on how the wallpaper seems to be strangling and vicious. Each time John laughs at his wife, she follows it by discussing the wallpaper and her anger at it, projecting her anger against her husband, forbidden in a 19th century woman, onto the wallpaper, where it can be safe. Read in this light, her regression and irrational behavior reads less as insanity than conscious rebellion. Her dismissal of suicide as being too easily misinterpreted speaks to rationality, as does her anger and frustration throughout the text. Gilman scholar Richard Feldstein points out that “While other patients [dissatisfied with treatment] simply withdraw from analysis, the nameless protagonist must either file for divorce (as Gilman did in her lifetime) or find another effective means to register her dissatisfaction…mindful of John’s desire to misread her symptoms, the narrator chooses to act out, visualizing her experience…” (275). That is, with no other means of escape, she chooses to creep, regressing to infanthood, as a protest against her husband’s infantilization.
While Feldstein argues for a more purely feminist motivation for the narrator’s creeping, it is also an unmistakable act of protest against being told she does not know her mind. Knight points to the use of the word “nervous” (used nine times) versus “angry” (used only four): “That the narrator emphasizes her nervousness over her wrath suggests that her anger is subordinated to the more pressing concerns about her health, which she believes would improve if she were only allowed to indulge her imagination through writing.” (77). While the narrator exhibits an almost textbook case of postpartum depression/psychosis, her husband insistently ignores her own input on the nature of her illness: “John consolidates his authority to undermine the protagonist’s confidence in her intuitive understanding of her illness.” (Feldstein 274). The narrator’s anger, then, is not so much at patriarchy in general, but how it specifically dismisses, minimizes, and actually worsens her mental condition. To convince her husband of the seriousness of her condition, “she can finally only modify her circumstances by forcing him to see what he has been refusing to hear.” (Knight 76). The narrator “creeps” in order to explicitly show her husband the extent of her mental degeneration.
Eleanor is subjected to the same minimizing of her own mental illness. Throughout her stay at Hill House, she feels as if she is being “skillfully guided away from the thought of fear, so very present in her own mind.” (Jackson). The legitimacy of her feelings of being guided and treated as a child is debatable in the beginning of the novel — she is characterized as “morbidly self-conscious” and possessing a persecution complex as a “reaction formation to the fact that others barely notice her.” (Hattenhauer). However, immediately after she is singled out by her name being written (by forces unknown) on the walls of Hill House, she is unmistakably handled as a child. Luke pulls her hair and teases her like a schoolboy, and Theodora purposely makes her angry in order to shock her out of a hysteria which seems not unreasonable at all. Eleanor is immediately aware of this: “They think Theodora did it on purpose, made me mad so I wouldn’t be frightened; how shameful to be maneuvered that way,” she thinks. (Jackson) After that point, as Eleanor’s instability grows more visible, she is consistently steered away from the topics of fear, blame, and madness, teased every time she tries to reveal her feelings. When she speaks honestly about her fear of dissolving into the house on page 160, and again on 212 when she reveals her guilt about her mother’s death, Theodora and Luke gloss over her input and pretend as if nothing has happened. Like the narrator, Eleanor is painfully aware of the way her fellows are treating her; “They are all carefully avoiding looking at me,” she thinks bitterly, “I have been singled out again, and they are kind enough to pretend it is nothing.” (Jackson). Her act of madness — pounding on doors in the night and running up the rickety tower — only compounds her dismissal. Luke, climbing to bring her down, threatens her out of fear, Dr. Montague’s visiting wife says “…this young woman has given us enough trouble for one night” (Jackson), and Dr. Montague sends her away. It’s clear that he’s doing this out of concern for her, although his own fear of the irrational (ironic in a ghost hunter) certainly enters into it. And yet to a woman who is terrified of rejection, this is exactly the wrong step to take. “If he had handled her anxiety with less of his own, she would not have killed herself.” (Hattenhauer). Eleanor’s midnight haunting is an attempt to emphasize the severity of her condition, analogous to the narrator’s creeping, and it works in the same way — horrifying those who have been minimizing her mental illness — but it backfires. Although she only wants to belong, to be home, her action isolates her further, and completes the rejection of her state. Forced to leave Hill House, Eleanor commits the last desperate act that the narrator only considers — she commits suicide.
It appears that Eleanor is forced farther by her circumstances than the narrator, although it is reasonable to conjecture that the narrator will be sent to an asylum or rest home after the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper. Nevertheless, that piece ends on a note of triumph for the narrator, while The Haunting of Hill House ends in clear failure. “…the greatest horror of Jackson’s haunting is not that the house seduces Eleanor into literally sacrificing herself for the sake of belonging, but that having done so, it still does not let her belong…after all, whatever walks in Hill House walks alone.” (Lootens).
The idea of being seduced is noteworthy when discussing Eleanor’s actions. The narration style in The Haunting of Hill House highlights this; it is in a fairly objective third person, but is close enough to allow the reader to see Eleanor’s subjective reality. We see her thought processes but we’re not seeing the world entirely through her eyes. Eleanor is the only character into whose head we see with any great detail, and with that closeness, it is obvious that her mind is not entirely her own. We even see her specifically relinquish control in the section quoted above, in which she surrenders to the house. Whether this is due to incipient mental illness, the influence of the house, or some combination of the two is unclear, but she herself feels at several crucial junctures that she is not in control of her own actions.
“…Eleanor is another one of Jackson’s disintegrating protagonists. Losing control, she tells herself she is presiding over her own dissolution…soon she is hearing voices that no one else hears, and she believes they are real…as her condition worsens, she says “I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven…” (160)”
(Hattenhauer 159)
In contrast to the narrator, Eleanor desires acceptance and belonging, rather than independence and freedom. This contrast is clearly emphasized in the treatment of architecture in both pieces. Architecture features heavily in each, so much so that it is the title of both, and connects strongly to another major theme in each piece: motherhood.
Both women are initially repulsed by the architecture they encounter; the narrator introduces the wallpaper by saying “I never saw a worse paper in my life”, calling it “repellant, almost revolting” (Gilman). Eleanor’s first thought when she arrives is “Hill House is vile, it is diseased…” (Jackson). There is also a circular element to each house — Eleanor’s obsession with the house mirrors the original owners, the Crain sisters, who feuded and drove each other insane over the question of ownership. The narrator moves into a home that was clearly previously occupied by another “madwoman”, although she mistakes it for a nursery, and she emulates the actions of the previous occupant down to gnawing the bedpost and tearing at the floor. It is significant that the narrator assumes her prison is a nursery — her feelings about motherhood are made all too clear by her aversion to her own child, who she “cannot be with…it makes [her] so nervous.” (Gilman). Her sense of being imprisoned is clearly reflected in the wallpaper, which, by moonlight, “becomes bars” (Gilman), that trap the woman behind them in a clear metaphor for the narrator’s imprisonment in the role of mother and invalid. “…as the narrator sinks more deeply into what the world calls madness, the terrifying implications of both the paper and the figure imprisoned behind the paper begin to permeate — that is, to haunt — the rented ancestral mansion…” (Gilbert and Gubar). Imprisonment is a common theme in the works of Victorian women authors, as “women artists found themselves describing dark interiors and confusing their sense that they were house-bound with their rebellion against being duty bound…” (Gilbert and Gubar).
In contrast, Hill House is seen as an engulfing, and, to the abandoned and mother-dominated Eleanor, maternal presence. “Eleanor has been both mother and child. On the one hand she detests the mother’s dominance, resenting the loss of her own youth in the forced assumption of the mothering role. On the other, she feels guilt at not having mothered adequately…Eleanor is haunted by guilt as a mother over the neglected child within herself.” (Newman). Unlike the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, cast purely and unwillingly into the role of both mother and child, Eleanor’s relationship with her surroundings is complicated by this image of herself as unwilling mother who yearns to be a child. Luke, motherless himself, describes the “motherliness” of the house with a dose of misogyny: “’Everything so soft. Everything so padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once –‘” (Jackson). Theodora, independent and uninterested in familial ties, compares her arrival at the house to a first day at camp — an environment specifically without parents. To Eleanor, however, yearning and fearing to be taken in, the house is immediately engulfing: “Hill House came around her in a rush” (Jackson) as she steps for the first time onto the veranda, and when she is inside she feels she is “a small creature swallowed whole by a monster” (Jackson). The comparison to a child in the womb is inevitable, and as Eleanor moves towards acceptance of the house as caretaker/mother rather than other humans, it becomes more welcoming; she moves from characterizing the house as consuming — “it wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house…” to feeling “wrapped up by the rich hills” (Jackson). After surrendering her identity and being rebuffed by Theodora, bored by Luke, and dismissed by Dr. Montague, the house feels “luxuriously warm” and “gathered comfortably into the hills…protected and warm.” (Jackson). While Eleanor sees herself as belonging to and being a part of the house, clearly in the child role, the haunting itself is more complex. “Eleanor’s internalization of both the ‘unmothered child’ and the ‘neglected mother’ images is reflected in the double mother-child nature of the haunting.” (Newman). She identifies the “ghost” first with her invalid mother, tapping against the wall, and then with a child, begging and whimpering to be let in (ibid).
The Haunting of Hill House and The Yellow Wallpaper are two sides of the same coin. As Gilbert and Gubar explain, “The paradigmatic female story inevitably considers…the equally uncomfortable spatial options of expulsion into the cold outside or suffocation in the hot indoors” . Eleanor fears expulsion, and willingly gives up her identity despite discomfort with her role as child and mother, while the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is suffocated and imprisoned, and breaks free. Both characters become conflated with the architecture that engulfs and entraps them, respectively, and both struggle against male authority figures minimizing their mental illness, telling them that they don’t know their own mind. Through acts of madness, both protagonists attempt to seize control of their minds, driven by desperation to self-destruction as the only assertive action they are allowed. It is distinctly possible that the narrator’s triumph and Eleanor’s failure are tied to how willing they are to be infantilized, and the fact that the narrator asserts individuality while Eleanor, with equal tenacity, asserts her desire to belong. This is not to say that Eleanor is not a feminist figure, but rather that her struggle is more personal and less explicitly gendered. Both protagonists ultimately reject the patriarchal assumption that they should be dominated, meek, and willing mothers, and perhaps it is the timing which determines their success or failure. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to specifically protest a misogynist medical treatment, and as a pointed allegory for the almost total oppression of women in the late 1800s. Shirley Jackson, writing in the late 1950s at the advent of second wave feminism, would have seen feminism as a more nuanced and subtle struggle, one in which the Victorian captivity narrative occupied a more complicated place. Regardless, both works accurately capture the struggles of women with mental illness, and occupy an important place in horror fiction.
Works Cited
Feldstein, Richard. “Reader, Text, and Ambiguous Referentiality in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Dual Text Critical Edition. Ed. Shawn St. Jean. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. Print.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting Of Hill House. New York, NY: Penguin, 1984. Print.
Knight, Denise D. “’I am Getting Angry Enough To Do Something Desperate’: The Question of Female ‘Madness’” The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Dual Text Critical Edition. Ed. Shawn St. Jean. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. 73–87. Print.
Lootens, Tricia. “’Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Ed. Beatrice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland & Co., 2005. 150–168. Print.
Newman, Judie. “Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Motherhood: The Haunting Of Hill House” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Ed. Beatrice M. Murphy. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland & Co., 2005. 169–182. Print.
Pasco, Allan H. “Crazy Writing And Reliable Text” The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Dual Text Critical Edition. Ed. Shawn St. Jean. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. 88–99. Print.
