Short Essay on “The Yellow Wallpaper” — Female Mental Illness and the Visualization of Projection
In the 1800s, patriarchal ignorance dominated medical understanding, and subsequently misdiagnosing and causing great psychological damage to women. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkin Gilman sets up an interesting narrative that discusses projective identification due to misogyny. “The Yellow Wallpaper” frames the anxiety of not being able to identify as a female with mental illness because of male roles, as the desire to visualize madness in order to identify herself and have authority over herself and mental state. Gilman uses her personal life to commentate on the dangers of when women do not have an identifying piece of themselves and how it protects the boundaries of a presumed normality that has been decided by men. John accuses Jane of hysteria, however Jane briefly mentions giving birth to a child; “it is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” (Gilman 649). It is very common in women who recently gave birth to suffer from postpartum depression. It is also not rare for postpartum depression to include episodes of psychosis. Hysteria has long since been an accusation to silence and devalue women, so her postpartum depression being mislabeled as such has a misogynist overtone in the sense that John has some sense of conservatorship over Jane. Her agency becomes restricted. She is confined to the nursery, reminding her of the child she had and cannot be with. When “demanding encouragement and assistance, she found instead that there was no appreciation or sympathy anywhere” (William 45). With an unsupportive husband who “assures friends and relatives that there really is nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression– a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 648), John not only recognizes her postpartum depression as temporary nervous depression, but assures anyone that there is nothing wrong with her. Something is clearly wrong, but because the men in her life (the doctor and her doctor-husband) tell her otherwise, she believes them. Eventually, she loses her mind, with no means to exercise, work, roam, or speak freely. She begins to project onto the yellow wallpaper, a parallel to when Gilman “imagin[ed] stories on blank walls” (“Why I Wrote”). The tone shifts throughout the course of the story as Jane’s postpartum depression metastasizes into puerperal insanity. She slowly spirals into incoherent babble, droning about gardens and greenhouses. She briefly mentions “[the greenhouses] are all broken now” (Gilman 648). Jane’s postpartum depression is no longer allowing her to grow, and she feels broken due to the rapid decline of her mental health. She has begun to identify herself with the world around her and finds a way to express herself through it. Jane eventually identifies with the woman she hallucinates in the wallpaper as she refers to her by her own name. Jane’s projection of herself onto the figure she perceives may be because the woman is confined to the walls just as Jane herself is confined to the room. Jane is inescapably trapped by John and is ignorant to her situation. However, John’s fainting incident changes place with “the woman,” and takes on “female attributes of incarcerated and “castrated” powerlessness while [Jane] assumes the male prerogatives of freedom and force” (William 52) Because of the way the story is structured, readers never see John’s perspective or understand his desires, ultimately taking away any “male gaze” or patriarchal standing. Jane becomes much more empowered, “creeping just the same, but [she] looked at him over [her] shoulder” (Gilman 656). Now the roles have shifted. This becomes almost a triumphant moment for Jane, as she finally is able to justify her anger towards John because she has transformed into the role of a male and projected relatability into identity.
CITATIONS
Veeder, William. “Who Is Jane? The Intricate Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Arizona
Quarterly 44.3 (1988): 40–79. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 182. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg, vol. 201, Gale, 2008. Gale Literature Resource Center. Accessed 1 Dec. 2022. Originally published in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, edited by Catherine J. Golden, Routledge, 2004, pp. 45–47.
