OVERVIEW: The Yellow Wallpaper
Dec. 23rd, 2020 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virago 1993
It so happened that this volume, containing the above short story and an afterword, was the next on my ‘to be read’ pile, and I’m sure ‘Singled Out’ influenced my reading of this classic. Reading it in 2020, one is primed to think, ‘Is this a story about coercive control?’ Well, it’s a depiction of a late nineteenth-century, middle-class marriage and its devastating effect on the nameless narrator. It’s also got a horror element –the descriptions of the wallpaper the narrator becomes obsessed with are disturbing – and a credible depiction of a mental breakdown.
The (overlong) afterword, written from a second wave feminist POV, makes a strong argument for the autobiographical nature of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, unique in the writer’s work. Its account of the response to the story is interesting, showing how male the literary establishment of the US at the time was. Surely women readers would have responded differently. Certainly, the infantilising and degrading way ‘loving’ husband John addresses his wife raised my eyebrows. I was reminded a little of Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ although I found this more effective (but I admit it’s many years since I read ’TToTS’.)
It so happened that this volume, containing the above short story and an afterword, was the next on my ‘to be read’ pile, and I’m sure ‘Singled Out’ influenced my reading of this classic. Reading it in 2020, one is primed to think, ‘Is this a story about coercive control?’ Well, it’s a depiction of a late nineteenth-century, middle-class marriage and its devastating effect on the nameless narrator. It’s also got a horror element –the descriptions of the wallpaper the narrator becomes obsessed with are disturbing – and a credible depiction of a mental breakdown.
The (overlong) afterword, written from a second wave feminist POV, makes a strong argument for the autobiographical nature of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, unique in the writer’s work. Its account of the response to the story is interesting, showing how male the literary establishment of the US at the time was. Surely women readers would have responded differently. Certainly, the infantilising and degrading way ‘loving’ husband John addresses his wife raised my eyebrows. I was reminded a little of Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ although I found this more effective (but I admit it’s many years since I read ’TToTS’.)
