The Yellow Wallpaper (2021): adapting a classic
It’s always a challenge to adapt a classic text to another medium, such as cinema. It’s a much bigger challenge when the adapted text is one of the most important texts in feminist literature. Written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson — better known as Charlotte Perkins Gilman — in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” might be only 27 pages long, but it’s a seminal work from the first wave of feminism. It was adapted before, as a short film and a film made for TV, but now the iconic story hits the big screen as a 100-minute feature, which is a very faithful adaptation.
Written as a confidential diary, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person narrative of a woman who is suffering from an unnamed sickness that her husband, a physician, dismisses as a temporary nervous depression. She writes whenever she has the strength and in the rare occasions she’s left unattended in the house her husband has rented for them to stay until she feels better. Her prose is about her health and her feelings, but little by little the hideous yellow wallpaper in her room becomes the main theme. She gets obsessed with the wallpaper, its ugliness and its apparently changing pattern.
The film gives the unnamed narrator a name, Jane (played by Alexandra Loreth, also co-producer and co-writer). The other three characters from the short story are there, too: the husband John (Joe Mullins), the sister-in-law Jennie (Jeanne O’Connor) and the nanny Mary (Clara Harte). Even the narrator’s brother, only mentioned in the short story, appears: he’s James (Mark O’Connor), a physician. The adaptation is very faithful, with some pieces of dialog by John and other slices of text taken verbatim, especially when it comes to Jane’s writings, read in a voiceover narration by Loreth.
Perfect in its content, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the movie, is also outstanding technically. Like in film noir, the ceiling is shown in some scenes — but only the ceiling of the bedroom with the yellow wallpaper. Odd camera angles are used in the bedroom to make us feel uncomfortable and quick editing creates tension near the end of the film. The reflection of the wallpaper gives Jane an unhealthy, pale look whenever she is in the bedroom. Details like this help create a feeling of oppression and spiraling into psychosis.
In the very first sequence of the film, a baby starts crying in the carriage and John, the father, asks the mother to do something to make the kid stop crying — as if, as the father, he couldn’t do anything. Jane, the mother, takes the baby from the basket and throws it away, to the father’s shock. If there has ever been a better visual metaphor of postpartum depression, I don’t know.
There is more powerful imagery throughout the movie, like the image of baby mice trying to be breastfed by a dead mother mouse — Jane then stomps the mice. Next, she tries to bury her baby in the woods. Jane’s vivid dreams, told to Mary, are also something that doesn’t exist in the short story but are a good element to show how lonely she feels.
The short story only hints that the narrator suffer from postpartum depression because she briefly mentions a baby. The diagnosis is much clearer in the film. In fact, Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself was inspired to write “The Yellow Wallpaper” when she suffered from postpartum depression and was advised to take a “rest cure” — during which she was forbidden to do chores, to read and write. The rest cure did Charlotte more harm than good, but also gave her inspiration.
It’s widely known that the treatment of women by male physicians until very recently — and sometimes, even nowadays — was something that could have been taken from horror tales, especially when it came to mental health. Deemed “hysterical” whenever their behavior deviated from the expected meekness, women were submitted to shock therapy, cold baths, lobotomies and, if they were lucky, to simple and useless “rest cures” like the one Charlotte got into. Let’s not forget that the world “hysterical” comes from the Greek word for “uterus”, and it was believed that only women could be hysterical because hysteria was a malady connected to the uterus.
Some interpretations of the short story affirm that it was written as a way for Charlotte to protest against her husband and their suffocating marriage. This could be inferred by the way the narrator’s husband is portrayed in the short story, as a less-then-sympathetic character. Some lines criticize — ironically and not so ironically — the husband and husbands in general, and at least one of them was used in full in the movie:
“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage”
“He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction”
“John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him”
Co-producers and co-writers Alexandra Loreth and K. Pontuti have been working together for five years on short films, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” is their first feature. The adaptation of Gilman’s story was suggested by Loreth, who was eager to play the lead — which she did in a great, powerful yet nuanced, way.
Cinema was invented in 1895, only three years after “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published. The first feature film was made — by a woman! — in 1896. But it took more than 120 years for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most famous work to be adapted to the big screen satisfactorily. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the movie, should become a cult classic and be appreciated by generations to come, as the short story has been. More than telling a compelling story — and it sure does that — the film shows that horror doesn’t need monsters, vampires or other creatures to exist. The real horror may be being a woman in a patriarchal society.
