You’re Going to Go Crazy in There: The Yellow Wallpaper and American Horror Story
The classic, yet tragic, tale, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a family who moves into a house for reasons unbeknownst to the readers in the beginning. Throughout the story, though, we learn that the main character Jane is slowly going insane and eventually will have a complete mental breakdown. She holds quite a few similarities to Vivien Harmon from the first season of the hit FX show, American Horror Story. However, Vivien is not the only character with close connections to the story. In fact, it is entirely possible that the first season of this show took its own spin on Gilman’s story in regard to the characters and the plot itself.
The TV show and the story are so alike that it’s scarily uncanny. Together, we have gone through each episode and compared the TV show to the story from the main characters to the house itself. Once we are done, you, the reader, may see it as well.
Let’s start with briefly discussing Gilman’s story. In an attempt to get her to a more “normal” mental state, a man by the name of John takes his wife, Jane, to a home away from home. Within the confines of this house, John orders his wife to rest therapy. However, this form of recovery does the exact opposite; in fact, poor Jane slowly gets worse and worse before her inevitable mental breakdown.
Right from the get go, Vivien Harmon has already been through a lot in the first episode between the recent loss of her unborn baby and walking in on her husband having an affair with one of his students. In order to get away and fix their problems, the family buys a new house that has quite a grotesque history, one that leaves numerous bodies in its wake. This house is filled with the tortured souls who died in horrific ways. These said souls torment the Harmon family, who unknowingly moved into one of the most haunted lots in Los Angeles, known by many locals as the “Murder House.”
Now this is when things start to get a little more interesting with some interpretation. It could be debated back and forth that the only reference to Gilman’s story is the scene in episode eight, titled “Rubber Man”. However, it takes a good amount of digging and looking into the plot and characters of American Horror Story to find the extremely heavy ties, so we’ll do the hard work for you.
The first hint, one that may have easily flown over all of our heads the first time we watch this season, is in the first episode after the family moves in. Vivien takes it upon herself to give the den a makeover by removing the, quite frankly, ugly wallpaper. The catch is that she finds an even more terrifying set of paintings underneath it all, and Ben makes a comment that whoever painted it must be “seriously disturbed”. At this point in the research, we are already well aware that Vivien represents Jane, and the story ends with Jane tearing off the wallpaper in her room in order to “set the woman free”. While the intentions are different in translation, the idea and what it represents are still the same. Perhaps that, by Vivien revealing those horrific paintings, she’s releasing the inevitable and rather upsetting end of her sanity. Her sanity was already at stake due to her fragile state of mind from her husband’s infidelity and the miscarriage. However, now she’s really playing on the edge of danger for moving into such a dark and twisted home.
Ben Harmon, the dirty liar and cheater that a majority of the audience has come to know and hate, is a direct translation of John, Jane’s husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Both men are doctors, albeit in different specifications with John being a physician and Ben being a psychiatrist, and both have wives suffering from supposed mental illness. In the long run, John believes Jane will be able to recover through rest therapy, which is essentially what made her situation way worse than it originally was, all while Vivien was admitted to a psych ward by Ben and the police in an attempt to help her recover. The kicker here is that neither women were crazy to begin with. Jane was most likely suffering from postpartum depression, and Vivien was made out to look insane by the ghosts of the house. However, it could be argued that she was possibly suffering from depression as well, due to the storyline prior to moving out west.
In the aforementioned scene between Moira O’Hara (the literal two-faced housekeeper) and Vivien, take note of how Moira mentions the way men would often lock women up and deem them insane. Things are starting to fall into place here, and hopefully they’re starting to make sense. Moira giving Vivien this unfortunately relevant history lesson is oddly reminiscent of both Vivien’s situation as well as Jane’s trail to insanity.
Now comes the pièce de résistance: the idea that the ghosts of the house representing the yellow wallpaper itself, specifically Hayden McClaine- Ben’s young mistress and former student- and Tate Langdon- a fellow ghost with a heavy past. While a majority of different ghosts had their play at making Vivien upset and feeling as though she’s gone in a downward spiral, Hayden and Tate played a particular part in sending Vivien off to the psych ward. Tate is a huge part of the guilty party for following through with Hayden’s plan to rape Vivien in order to give the baby to the ghost of the first owner’s wife, Nora Montgomery, who had tragically lost her own son in the 1920s. With the wallpaper making Jane crazy, and the ghostly duo making Vivien feel insane, is that to say that Hayden and Tate are a direct personification and text-to-screen translation of the yellow wallpaper?
As you can see, there are many similarities from the story to the TV show. This is how women are perceived to react when driven crazy. They don’t normally act out violently, but they normally act out by breaking down. From both families moving into a new home to start over, to having maids, to the wives going crazy. The wives both get put into “solitary confinement”. Vivien actually gets put into a hospital and Jane is locked up in her bedroom. The outside surrounding did not help these women. They made it worse, when in all reality these women could have had the help they needed without being locked up by their “doctor husbands”. Whether or not Ryan Murphy and company had specifically planned this out when writing the first season, one cannot deny the eerie resemblance between storyline and characters of Gilman’s story.
Written in collaboration with Coren Meister.
