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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides a stunning and disturbing account
of a women's decline into madness. Margaret Atwood comments in the
Blind Assassin that life little more than a period of waiting
interspersed with a few significant moments. For the nameless women
in The Yellow Wallpaper, this is one of those moments. Over a three
moment period we see in acute and distressingly real detail how her
inability to match her identity with the role of submissive wife
that late Victorian society demanded leads to a steady, inexorable
descent from sagacity to despair. Suffering from some unnamed
illness - which modern readers might relate to post-natal
depression, she is confined to a room for rest and sleep. Unable to
find any outlet for emotion or intellect, she becomes obsessed with
the room's wallpaper - it's complex and endless pattern of pointless
swirls. At first she just dislikes it, then hatred bordering on fear
follows, to be usurped by a semi-dependent fascination and
ultimately total identity: she becomes, not so much the wallpaper,
but the embodiment of the creeping women who dwell, reluctantly,
behind the pattern. |
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It is a picture of personal despair, of desperate attempts to retain
sanity and ultimately of failure. On one level it's a chilling
horror tale reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. On another it is a
clinically precise picture of a mental aberration. But it is more
than that. A powerful indictment of the institution of marriage, of
the social mores and misguided kindliness of late Victorian
middle-class America, and of the treatment of women, Gilman's story
is as timeless as it is authentic.
I would particularly recommend the
Virago Modern Classics edition which includes a literary and
biographical commentary. |
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