A Psychological Reading of The Yellow Wallpaper

The story begins with a ruling. Her husband and her brother, both physicians of high standing, tell friends there is nothing the matter but temporary nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency. She is absolutely forbidden to work. She disagrees, but only on a page she keeps hidden: “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

The originating wound is not an event. It is a structure. Her own report of her body and mind is ruled out before she can make it. John “knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” A person told that her pain cannot be real has two choices. She can argue and be called hysterical, or she can agree and lose the name for what she feels. The narrator does neither. She writes, and she hides it.

John is not a brute, and that is the point. He is “very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” He carries her upstairs, calls her a blessed little goose, and reads to her until it tires her head. Each tenderness comes with an instruction. When she says she is not gaining, he answers, “I am a doctor, dear, and I know.”

Psychologists call this kind of message a double bind. Two signals arrive together and cancel each other. You are loved, and your account of yourself is wrong. To object is to refuse the love. To accept the love is to give up the account. When she begins, “Better in body perhaps,” he gives her a stern, reproachful look and she cannot say another word. He does not intend cruelty. He is guarding a bargain in which her silence is the price of his care.

By the second entry she has taken his voice inside her. She feels “basely ungrateful” for his care. She is “a comparative burden already.” She will not make him uncomfortable “just for a whim.” She cannot be with the baby, because it makes her nervous, and she then finds a reason to be thankful: “I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.”

Winnicott described a false self, a compliant surface that keeps a living self safe by hiding it. The narrator describes the cost herself. She writes, “I take pains to control myself,” and adds “before him, at least,” and that this “makes me very tired.” The tiredness is the price of the surface. Once the guard is inside her, John can leave the room. The quietest loss in the story is the child. A mother kept from her baby by a cure for her nerves has been wounded by the cure.

The form carries the psychology. This is a secret diary, and it breaks off whenever someone approaches: “There comes John, and I must put this away.” She calls it “dead paper” and finds relief in it. At first the sentences run on, dry and quick. Then they shorten. “I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able.” She says the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

What is withheld is as telling as what is shown. We are never clearly given her name. We never see the baby. We see John only as she reports him, and yet her notes show that he is watching her, because he asks Jennie professional questions. The prose stops where authority walks in. The reader is placed where she is: reading in a hurry and listening for footsteps.

A mind that is banned from work does not stop working. It looks for material. Lying still is her one permitted task, so she makes the paper her task. She follows the pattern “by the hour” and calls it “as good as gymnastics.” She decides, “for the thousandth time,” to follow it “to some sort of a conclusion.”

This is displacement with a purpose. The habit John calls “story-making” used to be hers to use. As a child she found entertainment and terror in blank walls, and one chair seemed like a strong friend. Now the habit has no page, only a surface. She writes the story on the wall and then reads it back as a woman. Gilman later said she recovered by returning to the work the cure had forbidden. The narrator is never allowed that, and her mind takes the nearest thing.

Behind the loud front pattern she sees a faint sub-pattern, and then “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” By moonlight the front pattern “becomes bars.” By daylight the woman is subdued and quiet, and the narrator offers a line that sums up her own treatment: “I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.”

This is projection in plain view. A self that cannot be shown to John, to Jennie, or to the page when footsteps come appears outside her as another person. The woman keeps the narrator's hours. She is still by day and restless at night, and she shakes the bars. The narrator sometimes sees “a great many women” and sometimes “only one,” because the split is not stable. Then she does something revealing. She protects the woman, says she does not want anyone to free her “but myself,” and plans to tie her with a hidden rope. The captive and the jailer are both parts of the narrator.

The turn comes in the middle. She says she is “getting a little afraid of John.” Then she says life is “very much more exciting” now that she has “something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch.” She eats better and she is calmer. John is delighted and says she seems to be “flourishing in spite of my wallpaper.” She does not tell him the truth, which is that she flourishes because of it.

Here the cure's measure and the illness agree. John sees the chart improve and reads it as success. The improvement is the symptom, working. A woman who is fed, quiet, and secretly occupied looks well. The narrator knows this and says nothing, because honesty would end the one thing that keeps her going. Lying awake, she writes, “cultivates deceit.” The compliant surface has become a mask worn on purpose. Her suspicion is not only fear. She is right that she is being watched.

In the last scene she locks the door and throws the key into the front path. She says, “I want to astonish him.” It is her first act of her own, and it is a plain one: she makes a room that no one can enter. When John gets in, she tells him, “I've got out at last... and I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!” John faints. She creeps over him.

Does the ending resolve the tension or suppress it? It does both. She has stopped obeying, and the watchful narrator who kept the journal is gone. “I” and the woman in the wall now speak with one voice. She has not left the room. She prefers it, because “here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” Outside, “everything is green instead of yellow.” The self she wanted to free has been found, and its only road is round and round. The cure produced the illness it had denied.

Few readers live in a rented house with barred windows. Many have sat in a consulting room and been told the pain is stress, or nerves, or too much attention to the pain. The story gives that moment an inner life. A calm, kind voice makes you doubt your own report, and then you hear yourself saying the same thing back.

The modern pull lies in the combination. The diagnosis arrives with warmth. The person who dismisses you is also the person who looks after you. Many people know the weariness of managing how they appear to those in charge of their care. Gilman saw that this weariness is not weakness. It is work, and no one counts it.

This reading uses ideas that did not exist in 1892: the double bind, the false self, and projection. Gilman wrote about a medical regime she knew first-hand. Her later account of why she wrote the story shapes how readers see it, and it can crowd out other readings. The story has also been read as a ghost tale, as a case of postnatal depression, and as a plain study of one marriage. John's tenderness is real on the page. A reader may see a man bound by his training rather than a jailer.

One detail stays open. In the last scene she says she got out “in spite of you and Jane.” Some readers take Jane as a slip for Jennie. Others take it as the narrator naming herself from outside. The text does not settle it. Finally, this essay treats a fictional woman as a case. She is a made figure, and the diagnosis is the reader's, not the book's.

Jane Eyre also puts a woman behind a locked door and gives the man in charge a kind reason. Bertha Mason is the figure in the attic whom the heroine hears but cannot see. Gilman turns the attic inside out. Her narrator is the one locked in, and she imagines another locked woman in the wall. The Awakening ends differently. When Edna Pontellier's husband consults a doctor, he is advised to leave her alone, and Edna walks into the sea. Edna leaves the house. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper never does. Read together, the three books suggest that confinement does not always need a lock. It can be a schedule, a voice, or a loving instruction, and the woman inside may carry the key without knowing it.