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The Yellow Wallpaper
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"The Yellow Wallpaper"
1988 edition cover
Author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Country
United States
Language
English
Genre(s)
Captivity narrative, Feminist literature
Publication date
1892
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women in that period.[2][3] She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.
The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."[4]
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But 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."[5]
Contents
[hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Interpretation
2.1 Gilman's interpretation
2.2 Feminist interpretation
2.3 Other interpretations
3 Dramatic adaptations
3.1 Audio plays
3.2 Stage plays
3.3 Film
3.4 Television
4 Popular culture references
5 See also
6 References
6.1 Bibliography
6.2 Further reading
7 External links
Plot summary[edit]
The story details the descent of a young woman into madness. Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after the birth of their child. The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it". She and her husband move into an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery, having it serve as their bedroom due to its multitude of windows, which provide the air so needed in her recovery. In addition to the couple, John's sister Jennie is present; she serves as their housekeeper. Like most nurseries at the time the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. The narrator attributes all these to children, as most of the damage is isolated to their reach. Ultimately, though, the reader is left unsure as to the source of the room's damage.
The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room – its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.
On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I've got out at last,...in spite of you and Jane", and her husband faints as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each time she passes.
Interpretation[edit]
Gilman's interpretation[edit]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman circa 1900
Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.[6]
In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical and professional oppression against women at the time. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. At the time women’s rights advocates believed that the outbreak of women being diagnosed as mentally ill was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing, because their writing would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance for them. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time where they had very few rights.[6]
Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways".[7] She had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.
After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis and started to work again. After realizing how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own misdiagnosis complaint. She sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response.
She added that The Yellow Wallpaper was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.[8]
Feminist interpretation[edit]
This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the male control of the 19th-century medical profession.[9] The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, engage with society instead of remaining isolated, attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as irrational and, therefore, unqualified to offer ideas about her own condition. This interpretation draws on the concept of the "domestic sphere" that women were held in during this period.[10]
Feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the story. While some claim the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a woman's assertion of agency in a marriage in which she felt trapped.[11] The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found the escape she was looking for. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him. This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her sanity.
Susan S. Lanser in her article "Feminist Criticism ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and the Politics of Color in America" praises contemporary feminism and its role in changing the study and the interpretation of literature. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was one of many stories that were lost because of an ideology that determined the works' content to be disturbing or offensive. Critics such as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly rejected the short story because "[he] could not forgive [himself] if [he] made others as miserable as [he] made [himself]." Lanser argues that the same argument of devastation and misery can be said about the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but his work is still printed and studied by academics.[12]
"The Yellow Wallpaper" provided feminists the tools on how to interpret literature in different ways. Lanser says the short story was a "particularly congenial medium for such a re-vision . . . because the narrator herself engages in a form of feminist interpretation when she tries to read the paper on her wall".[12] The narrator in the story is trying to find a single meaning in the wallpaper. At first she focuses on contradictory style of the wallpaper: it is "flamboyant" while also "dull", "pronounced" yet also "lame" and "uncertain" (p. 13). She takes into account the patterns and tries to geometrically organize them, but she is further confused. The wallpaper changes colors when it reflects light and emits a distinct odor which Jane cannot recognize (p. 25). At night the narrator is able to see a woman behind bars within the complicated design of the wallpaper. Lanser argues that Jane was able to find "a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection".[12] Lanser creates a relationship between the narrator and the reader. Just like the narrator as a reader, when one comes into contact with a confusing and complicated text, one tries to find one single meaning. "How we were taught to read" as Lanser puts it, is why a reader cannot fully comprehend the text.[12] The patriarchal ideology has kept many scholars from being able to interpret and appreciate stories such as "The Yellow Wallpaper." Thanks to feminist criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has become a fundamental reading in the standard curriculum. Feminists have made a great contribution to the study of literature but, according to Lanser, are falling short because "we acknowledge the participation of women writers and readers in dominant patterns of thought and social practice then perhaps our own patterns must also be deconstructed if we are to recover meanings still hidden or overlooked.[12]
Martha J. Cutter discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women."[13] Gilman's works challenge the social construction of women in patriarchal medical discourse by displaying women as "silent, powerless, and passive"[13] who refuse treatment. At the time in which her works take place, between 1840 and 1890, women were exceedingly defined as lesser than—sickly and weak. In this time period it was thought that "hysteria" (a disease stereotypically more common in women) was a result of too much education. It was understood that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. In fact, many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as the result of a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman is one who is "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician".[13] A hysterical woman is one who craves power and in order for her to be treated for her hysteria, she must submit to her physician whose role is to undermine her desires. Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to "tame" them and basically keep them imprisoned. Treatments such as this were a way of ridding women of rebelliousness and forcing them to conform to social roles. In her works Gilman highlights that the harm caused by these types of treatments for woman i.e. "the rest cure" has to do with the way in which her voice is silenced. Paula Treichler explains "In this story diagnosis 'is powerful and public. . . . It is a male voice that . . . imposes controls on the female narrator and dictates how she is to perceive and talk about the world.' Diagnosis covertly functions to empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patient's".[14] The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to participate in her own treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says. The male voice is the one in which forces controls on the female and decides how she is allowed to perceive and speak about the world around her.
Other interpretations[edit]
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness.[15] Alan Ryan, for example, introduced the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not."[16] Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) that "'The Yellow Wall Paper' rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined." [17]
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her book Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper", concludes that "the story was a cri de coeur against [Gilman's first husband, artist Charles Walter] Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded." Gilman was attempting to deflect blame to protect Gilman's daughter Katharine and her step-mother, Gilman's friend Grace Channing.[18]
Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley used the story as a reference and a metaphor for the situation of women in the church in his sermon at the ordination of the first women priests in Australia on 7 March 1992 in St George's Cathedral, Perth.[19]
Sari Edelstein has argued that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an allegory for Gilman's hatred of the emerging yellow journalism. Having created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy headlines. Gilman was often scandalised in the media and resented the sensationalism of the media. The relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper within the story parallels Gilman's relationship to the press. The narrator describes the wallpaper as having "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin". Edelstein argues that given Gilman’s distaste for the Yellow Press, this can also be seen as a description of tabloid newspapers of the day.[20]
In Paula A. Treichler's article "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'", she places her focus on the relationship portrayed in the short story between women and writing. Rather than write about the feminist themes which view the wallpaper as something along the lines of ". . . the 'pattern' which underlies sexual inequality, the external manifestation of neurasthenia, the narrator's unconscious, the narrator's situation within patriarchy," Treichler instead explains that the wallpaper can be a symbol to represent discourse and the fact that the narrator is alienated from the world in which she previously could somewhat express herself. Treichler illustrates that through this discussion of language and writing, in the story Charlotte Perkins Gilman is defying the ". . . sentence that the structure of patriarchal language imposes." While Treichler accepts the legitimacy of strictly feminist claims, she writes that a closer look at the text suggests that the wallpaper could be interpreted as women's language and discourse, and the woman found in the wallpaper could be the ". . . representation of women that becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak." In making this claim, it suggests that the new struggle found within the text is between two forms of writing; one rather old and traditional, and the other new and exciting. This is supported in the fact that John, the narrator's husband, does not like his wife to write anything, which is the reason her journal containing the story is kept a secret and thus is known only by the narrator and reader. A look at the text shows that as the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper grows stronger, so too does her language in her journal as she begins to increasingly write of her frustration and desperation.[14]
Dramatic adaptations[edit]
Audio plays[edit]
Agnes Moorehead performed a version twice, in 1948 and 1957, on the radio program Suspense.
An audio book of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1997) was produced by Durkin Hayes and read by Winifred Phillips. This Radio Tales version can also be heard on Sonic Theater on XM Radio.[21]
BBC Radio modified and dramatized the story for the series Fear on Four, starring Anna Massey.[22]
Stage plays[edit]
Heather Newman scripted and directed an adaptation of the original short story, as part of the 2003 season at Theater Schmeater, in Seattle, Washington.[23][24] This adaptation won the 2003 Seattle Times "Best of the Fringe" award,[25] and was also produced in 2005 at Tarrant County College by Dr. Judith Gallagher, and directed by Melinda Benton-Muller. In May 2010, Benton-Muller and Dr. Gallagher spoke on a panel about this adaptation at the American Literature Association, with members of the ALA and the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society.[26][27]
Rummage Theatre researched, wrote and directed an hour long play called Behind the Wallpaper (first performed at The Bay Theatre in 2014). The play was inspired by "The Yellow Wallpaper," but focuses on exploring postnatal depression and postpartum psychosis in the present day and uses shadow work cast behind wallpaper to represent the "Shadow Woman" which new mother Julie sees as part of her psychosis. The play toured Dorset in 2014/2015.[28]
A Company of Players presented a stage adaptation of the original short story, written and directed by Kristi Boulton, at the 2014 Hamilton Fringe Festival in Ontario, Canada. This production was well received by critics and won a "Best of Fringe" award.[29][30]
Central Works of Berkeley presented a one-woman show consisting of the text of the play recited and performed by Elena Wright and with a TBA-nominated score written and performed by violinist Cybele D'Ambrosio in 2015.[31][32][33]
Portland, Oregon-based Coho Productions staged an adaptation written by Sue Mach in early 2016, which integrated "expressionistic audio, visual and movement interludes with the haunting literary text." The stage adaptation was co-produced and conceived by Grace Carter, who also portrays the primary character, Charlotte. The play was directed by Philip Cuomo.[34]
Film[edit]
In 1977, the story was adapted as a short film (14 min) as The Yellow Wallpaper by director Marie Ashton and screenwriter Julie Ashton; it starred Sigrid Wurschmidt.
In 1989, the story was adapted as The Yellow Wallpaper by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), later shown in the U.S. on Masterpiece Theatre. It was adapted by Maggie Wadey, directed by John Clive, and starred Julia Watson and Stephen Dillane.[citation needed]
In 2009, the story was adapted by director John McCarty as a short (30 min) film called Confinement starring Colleen Lovett. (McCarty had originally written a treatment of the story in the late 1960s on spec for a television anthology. The idea was shelved, but the treatment was eventually revised for Confinement.)
In 2012, the story was loosely adapted into a feature-length film called The Yellow Wallpaper by Logan Thomas starring Aric Cushing.[35] (DVD release, 2015)
In 2014, Amandla Stenberg directed a short film based on the story.[36]
In 2016, Kourosh Ahari directed a feature film based on the original story. The adapted screenplay was written by Amy Liz Roberts.[37]
British artist Julia Dogra-Brazell's short experimental film, The Rules of the Game (2015), also found inspiration in this text.[38]
Television[edit]
An episode of The Twilight Zone — "Something in the Walls" (1989) — is a variation on Gilman's story, in which a woman commits herself to a mental institution and insists on plain white walls and no patterns within her hospital room, after having seen faces in the patterns of her bedroom's yellow wallpaper and hearing ominous voices from those faces.
Paper Walls (1992), a TV short, directed by Glenn Holsten and Lynn Tomlinson, is a version of "The Yellow Wallpaper." (It is mixed live action and multi-media animation; 6 mins.)
Popular culture references[edit]
The TV series Pretty Little Liars (2010) uses the original book cover as a wallpaper design in Aria Montgomery's bedroom.
The TV series American Horror Story season 1 (2011) references The Yellow Wallpaper in the eighth episode.
In the sixth episode of the 2017 TV series Riverdale, Jughead Jones (played by Cole Sprouse) asks Betty Cooper (played by Lili Reinhart) if she's gone all “Yellow Wallpaper” on him yet.
See also[edit]
"Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman" - An unfinished novel about a woman imprisoned in an asylum
Changeling - A film about a woman imprisoned in a mental hospital
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Stetson, Charlotte Perkins (January 1892). "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story". The New England Magazine. 11 (5,).
Jump up ^ Gilman 1892, p. 1
Jump up ^ Treichler 1984, pp. 61–77
Jump up ^ Gilman 1892, p. 11.
Jump up ^ Gilman 1892, p. 15.
^ Jump up to: a b Quawas, Rula (2006). "A New Woman's Journey Into Insanity: Descent and Return in The Yellow Wallpaper". Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association. ProQuest Research Library (online, Oct. 2012): 35+.
Jump up ^ Thrailkill 2002, p. 528.
Jump up ^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (October 1913). "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper". The Forerunner.
Jump up ^ Ford 1985, pp. 309–314.
Jump up ^ Thomas 1997.
Jump up ^ Hochman, p. 2002, pp. 89–110.
^ Jump up to: a b c d e Lanser, Susan (1989). "Feminist Criticism ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, and the Politics of Color in America". Feminist Studies. 15 (3): 415–441. JSTOR 3177938. doi:10.2307/3177938.
^ Jump up to: a b c Cutter, Martha J. "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction," Literature and Medicine 2001 Fall; 20(2): 151-182.
^ Jump up to: a b Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Vol. 3, No. 1/2, Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 61-77.
Jump up ^ See, for example, Johnson 1989.
Jump up ^ Ryan 1988, p. 56.
Jump up ^ Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). "Supernatural Horror in Literature". The Recluse. The Recluse Press.
Jump up ^ Publishers Weekly. October 4, 2010, p. 38.
Jump up ^ Carnley, Peter (2001) pp. 85–92
Jump up ^ Edelstein, Sari. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Yellow Newspaper" Legacy 24, no. 1 (May 2007): 72–92.
Jump up ^ "Radio Tales - Horror". Radio Tales. Retrieved 1 September 2015.
Jump up ^ "BBC Radio 4 - Fear on Four, The Yellow Wallpaper". BBC. 24 May 2008. Retrieved 1 September 2015. >
Jump up ^ "The Yellow Wallpaper". Rain City Projects.
Jump up ^ "Plays: History: 2003". Theater Schmeater.
Jump up ^ "Best of the Fringe" award". Seattle Times.
Jump up ^ "The Yellow Room (panel discussion)". Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. May 2010.
Jump up ^ "The Yellow Room (panel discussion)". American Literature Association. May 2010.
Jump up ^ "Behind the Wallpaper". Rummage Theatre. Dorset, England.
Jump up ^ "The Yellow Wallpaper". A Company of Players.
Jump up ^ "The Yellow Wallpaper". 2014 Hamilton Fringe Festival.
Jump up ^ Hurwitt, Robert (16 May 2015). "‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ at Berkeley City Club". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
Jump up ^ "Stage Premiere of THE YELLOW WALLPAPER Up Next at Central Works, 5/16-6/21". 13 April 2015. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
Jump up ^ Edevane, Gillian (3 June 2015). "The Writhing on the Wall". East Bay Express. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
Jump up ^ "Coho Productions presents The Yellow Wallpaper".
Jump up ^ "LJ Media Reviews: October 1, 2015". Library Journal Reviews. Retrieved 2016-03-21.
Jump up ^ Stenberg, Amandla (Director) (2014). The Yellow Wallpaper.
Jump up ^ Ahari, Kourosh (Director) (2016). The Yellow Wallpaper.
Jump up ^ "1.5 (The Rules of the Game 2015)". Julia Dogra-Brazell. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
Bibliography[edit]
Barth, Melissa E. The Yellow Wallpaper. Masterplots II: Short Stories Series. Frank N. Magill. California: Salem Press Inc., 1996. 4331–4333. 10 vols.
Carnley, Peter (2001). The Yellow Wallpaper and other sermons HarperCollins, Sydney ISBN 1-86371-799-4
Ford, Karen (Autumn 1985). ""The Yellow Wallpaper" and Women's Discourse" (PDF). Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. University of Tulsa. 4 (2): 309–314. JSTOR 463709.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins & Phillips, Robert (Editor_ (1989). "The Yellow Wallpaper". The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories. New York: Carrol and Graf Publishers Inc. CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper (1997 ed.). Dover Publications.
Hochman, Barbara (2002). The Reading Habit and "The Yellow Wallpaper". Duke University Press.
Johnson, Greg (Fall 1989). "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper". Studies in Short Fiction. 26 (4): 521–30.
Ryan, Alan (1988). Haunting Women. New York: Avon Books. ISBN 978-0-380-89881-7.
Thomas, Deborah. "The Changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"". Retrieved September 14, 2012.
Thrailkill, Jane F. (Summer 2002). "Doctoring "The Yellow Wallpaper"". ELH. 69 (2): 525–566. JSTOR 30032030. doi:10.1353/elh.2002.0019.
Treichler, Paula A. (1984). "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. pp. 61–75.
Weinstein, Lee. ""The Yellow Wallpaper: A Supernatural Interpretation." Studies in Weird Fiction 4 (Fall 1988), 23–25.
Further reading[edit]
EDSITEment's lesson plan Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wall-Paper
The Yellow Wallpaper at Project Gutenberg.
Full Text of The Yellow Wallpaper, retrieved January 22, 2008.
The full text of The Yellow Wallpaper at the CUNY Library
Books That Grow leveled book
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper", The Forerunner, October 1913, accessed November 15, 2009.
The Yellow Wallpaper, audio, CBS radio, 1948.
The Yellow Wallpaper on IMDb
The Yellow Wallpaper A 2006 film inspired by the short story that relies on the gothic/horror interpretation.
Bak, John S. (1994). "Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (Winter 1994), pp. 39–46.
Crewe, Jonathan (1995). "Queering 'The Yellow Wallpaper'? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 14 (Fall 1995), pp. 273–293.
Cutter, Martha J. "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourse in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fictions." Literature and Medicine 20. 2 (Fall 2001): pp. 151–182.
Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan (1980). The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02596-3
Golden, Catherine (1989). "The Writing of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ A Double Palimpsest," Studies in American Fiction, 17 (Autumn 1989), pp. 193–201.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper," Women’s Studies 12 (1986): 113–128.
Hume, Beverly A. "Gilman’s ‘Interminable Grotesque’: The Narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper," Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Fall 1991): 477–484.
Johnson, Greg. "Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’" Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall 1989): 521–530.
King, Jeannette, and Pam Morris. "On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’" Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (Winter 1989): 23–32.
Klotz, Michael. "Two Dickens Rooms in 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'" Notes and Queries (December 2005): 490–1.
Knight, Denise D. "The Reincarnation of Jane: ‘Through This’ – Gilman’s Companion to ‘The Yellow Wall-paper.’" Women’s Studies 20 (1992): 287–302.
Lanser, Susan S. "Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America." Feminist Studies 15 (Fall 1989): 415–437.
External links[edit]
The full text of The Yellow Wall Paper at Wikisource
Media related to "The Yellow Wall Paper" at Wikimedia Commons
The Yellow Wallpaper public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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The Princess (Tennyson poem)
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'A prince I was' – one of Charles Howard Johnson's illustrations for the 1890 edition
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1892 and remains one of the most popular English poets.[a]
The poem tells the story of a heroic princess who forswears the world of men and finds a women's university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are discovered and flee, but eventually they fight a battle for the princess's hand. They lose and are wounded, but the women nurse the men back to health. Eventually the princess returns the prince's love.
Several later works have been based upon the poem, including Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida.
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
2 Synopsis
2.1 The prince seeks Princess Ida
2.2 The prince is discovered
2.3 Battle and aftermath
2.4 Conclusion
3 Critical opinion
4 Works based on The Princess
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links
Background[edit]
Tennyson planned the poem in the late 1830s after discussing the idea with Emily Sellwood, whom he later married in 1850. It seems to have been a response to criticism that he was not writing about serious issues. It was also a response, in part, to the founding of Queen's College, London, Britain's first college for women, in 1847.[1][b] Two of Tennyson's friends were part-time professors there.[1] Other critics speculate that the poem was partly inspired by the opening of Love's Labour's Lost and other literary works.[2][3] Janet Ross, the daughter of Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon recalled that "[Tennyson] told my mother that he had her in mind when he wrote The Princess. I don't think she was as much flattered as many of his admirers would have been".[4]
Tennyson is reported as saying, in the 1840s, that "the two great social questions impending in England were 'the education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women'."[5] The women's rights movement, including the right to higher education, was still at an early stage in 1847.[6] In Britain, the first university-level women's school, Girton College, Cambridge was not opened until 1869,[7] more than two decades after Tennyson wrote The Princess.[c] In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), however, Mary Wollstonecraft had been an early advocate of the equality of men and women,[6] and writers such as John Stuart Mill had argued for female emancipation.[7] Nevertheless, "Tennyson was in the vanguard in writing of the subject[d] and although feminist critics have complained about the conservative ending of his poem, he must be credited with broaching the topic and voicing some of the injustices women suffered."[2][6] In The Princess, "Tennyson describes with such clarity the principal problems of feminism".[8]
As in the case of many other Tennyson poems, The Princess is framed by a prologue and a conclusion outside of the main narrative.[6] The description of a summer fête that opens the poem is based on a feast of the Mechanics' Institute at a country house, Park House, near Maidstone, in 1842. The narrative device is a tale of fancy composed in turn by some university undergraduates, based on an old chronicle.[9] Though the poem was moderately successful, Tennyson wrote to a friend, saying "I hate it and so will you". He revised the work after its first publication. Some of the best-known lyrics, including "The splendour falls on castle walls" were added for the third edition (1850).[9]
Synopsis[edit]
As with many of Tennyson's works, The Princess has an outer setting to the main narrative, consisting of a Prologue and a Conclusion that take place at a Victorian era summer fete. The characters in the Prologue agree to participate in a storytelling game about a heroic princess in days of old, based on an ancient family chronicle. The main narrative follows, given in seven lengthy "Cantos", with the prince as narrator.
The prince seeks Princess Ida[edit]
"O marvellously modest maiden, you" – 1890 illustration
In the main narrative, a prince has been betrothed since infancy to a princess, Ida, from a neighbouring land. The princess has grown to become beautiful and accomplished and has founded a university of maidens in a remote retreat. Her father, King Gama, explains that she refuses to have anything to do with the world of men and is influenced by other women, Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, who have all resolved never to wed a man. The prince and two friends, Cyril and Florian, decide to infiltrate the university to try to win the princess's return. They disguise themselves as women and ride into the university asking to enroll as students. Florian is Lady Psyche's brother and hopes to influence her.
The "new students" are taken to see the princess, who tells them that they must "cast and fling the tricks, which make us toys of men", so that they may become equal with men. The men are impressed by the princess and debate the merits of women's equality. They move around the university, listening and learning. Their tutors, Lady Psyche and Lady Blanche, discover the men's subterfuge, but hide their knowledge for reasons of their own. Blanche and Psyche are intellectual and political rivals at the university, and Blanche vows to force Psyche out.
The prince is discovered[edit]
Ida and the prince walk together, and, still posing as a woman student, he tells her news of the prince and his court, and they discuss the marriage contract between Ida and the prince. He tells her how the prince loves her from afar. She speaks of her ideals of equality. The prince touches hands with Ida on the path. At a picnic, Ida invites the prince to sing a song from her [his] homeland. He sings of love, but Ida mocks it and talks of the inequality of love between men and women. She invites another song about the women of her [his] land. Cyril sings a drunken tavern song, and chaos breaks out as the men's identities become obvious to all. In the confusion, Ida falls into the river, and the prince saves her from drowning.
The men flee (and Psyche flees with Cyril, leaving her child behind in the castle), but the prince and Florian are recaptured. Letters arrives from the prince's father (the king) and Ida's father (Gama). Gama tells how he started to come to Ida to plead for the prince but was taken hostage by the king. The king tells Ida not to harm the prince and to free him, or the king's army will storm the castle. The prince declares his love for Ida, saying, "except you slay me here according to your bitter statute-book, I cannot cease to follow you... but half without you; with you, whole; and of those halves you worthiest". Word comes that the king has arrived to storm the castle. Ida gives a stirring speech, saying that she will lead the maidens into battle. Though Ida appears to be forming an interest in the prince, she renounces her marriage contract. The prince and Florian are freed and pushed out of the castle. Psyche is distraught at having betrayed Ida and her cause, and having lost her child.
Battle and aftermath[edit]
The king wants to make war, but the prince wants to win Ida's love. He says, "wild natures need wise curbs... not war: lest I lose all". Gama and the prince have developed a warm relationship, and Gama supports the prince's cause, but Ida's brothers support their sister at all costs. The prince and his friends offer to fight Ida's brother and to let the battle decide whether Ida must keep her contract. Ida's brother Arac sends word of this proposal to Ida, who rants against the harm done to women, but confident of her brothers' victory, she agrees to abide by the contest. Meanwhile, Ida has been growing to love Psyche's child.
In the battle, Ida's brothers defeat and wound the prince and his friends. The prince acknowledges defeat and pleads with Ida to let Psyche reclaim her child, but he falls into a coma. Ida rants against Psyche's betrayal. The king says that he cannot let such a hard woman tend his son. Ida relents and asks the king to let her tend the prince's injuries, and to let the ladies tend to Cyril and Florian. This shows her willingness to bend her own laws. By ministering to the men, the ladies of the university become more fair, and Ida finds peace. Love blossoms between the nurses and the nursed.
Ida eventually comes to love the prince. As he regains consciousness at times, they discuss their ideas of love, and she discovers that they agree on the equality of love; not, as she had always feared, women's servitude in love – he has been well-schooled in this by his mother. The prince envisages a future where "The man may be more of woman, she of man". He says "my hopes and thine are one" and asks her to place her trust in him.
Conclusion[edit]
In the Conclusion, the narrator reflects on how to tell the long story, noting that the events are "Too comic for the solemn things they are, / Too solemn for the comic touches in them."
Critical opinion[edit]
The Princess has divided opinion about where Tennyson's sympathies lay. The poet's son Hallam wrote that his father held that "the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that 'woman is not undevelopt man, but diverse', the better it will be for the progress of the world."[10] The cool reception of the piece "seems to have led Tennyson to revise the poem after publication more extensively than any of his others".[6] The early view that Tennyson was sympathetic to a progressive view of women's education but found it expedient to subordinate it to the dictates of Victorian society[11] led the poet to rebalance The Princess by adding the interlude songs in his 1850 revision: "I thought that the poem would explain itself, but the public did not see the drift."[12]
The songs, which relate to the contemporary world of Tennyson's time, are in contrast to the main narrative, which is male-oriented, with a mock-mediaeval setting. Thus, it can be argued, Tennyson balanced the anti-feminist message of the men's narrative with the practical progressiveness displayed in the women's songs.[13] Other critics conclude that the final message of the narrative is plain and anti-feminist.[14]
Works based on The Princess[edit]
W. S. Gilbert, perhaps attracted by Tennyson's serio-comic treatment of the subject of women's education,[15] adapted and parodied the poem twice. First, in 1870, he produced a musical farce called The Princess.[16] Later, in 1884, he adapted his farce into a comic opera with composer Arthur Sullivan entitled Princess Ida, which is still performed regularly today.
Other musical works inspired by the poem include a setting of "As through the land" composed by the poet Edward Lear in his lesser-known capacity as a composer.[17] Both Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frank Bridge composed settings for the "Tears, idle tears" section of The Princess.[e] Gustav Holst set "Home they brought her warrior dead."[18] In addition, Holst wrote a set of five songs for female voices based on Tennyson's work including Sweet and Low, The Splendor Falls, Tears, Idle Tears, O Swallow, Swallow and Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal while he was teaching at a girls' school in South London.[19] Among later musical works inspired by The Princess are Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, which includes a setting of "The splendour falls",[20] and a setting of "Ask me no more" by Ned Rorem.[21] There is also a fine recent choral setting of Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White by the Welsh composer, Paul Mealor.
John Melhuish Strudwick's painting Oh Swallow, Swallow is based on this poem.
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ See, for example, Tucker (2009), forward
Jump up ^ The college was not quite a higher education institution in the modern sense: it admitted girls and women from the age of twelve upwards, and is now an independent secondary school for girls: see Cockburn, King & McDonnell 1968, p. 311-312
Jump up ^ Even then, it was not recognised as a full constituent of the university until 1948. See Girton's official website
Jump up ^ Tennyson must have been aware of a number of earlier writings about women's higher education as he wrote the poem. See Zimmerman, p. 77.
Jump up ^ Both settings are for voice and piano, and they were composed, respectively, in 1902 and 1905.
^ Jump up to: a b Scott (1992).
^ Jump up to: a b Lang (1904), Chapter IV – 1842–1848 — The Princess.
Jump up ^ Zimmerman (2008), p. 77.
Jump up ^ Ross (1912), p. 16.
Jump up ^ Tennyson, Hallam (2005), p. 206.
^ Jump up to: a b c d e Shaw (2003).
^ Jump up to: a b Mack & Strobel (2008).
Jump up ^ Lefkowitz (2007), p. 1.
^ Jump up to: a b Drabble (2000), p. 817.
Jump up ^ Tennyson, Hallam (2005), p. 249, quoted in Clapp-Itnyre (2000), p. 230.
Jump up ^ Clapp-Itnyre (2000), p. 227.
Jump up ^ Tennyson, Hallam (2005), p. 254, quoted in Clapp-Itnyre (2000), p. 230.
Jump up ^ Clapp-Itnyre (2000), p. 238
Jump up ^ Shaw, Marion. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1988), p. 47, quoted by Clapp-Itnyre (2000), p. 227.
Jump up ^ McCann (1997).
Jump up ^ Howarth (2009).
Jump up ^ Lear (1859).
Jump up ^ Holst catalogue H81, Op. 20a.
Jump up ^ published by Treble Clef Press Music TC-201 and available from Subito Music <http://www.subitomusic.com>
Jump up ^ Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, third section, "Nocturne".
Jump up ^ "The Lied and Art Song Texts Page". RecMusic.org. Retrieved February 2015. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
References[edit]
Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa (Summer 2000). "Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critique of Conventionality in The Princess". Victorian Poetry. West Virginia University Press. 38 (2): 227–48.
Cockburn, J.S.; King, H.P.F.; McDonnell, K.G.T, eds. (1969). "Schools: Queen's College, Harley Street". A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 1, Physique, Archaeology, Domesday, Ecclesiastical Organization, the Jews, Religious Houses, Education of Working Classes To 1870, Private Education From Sixteenth Century. London: Victoria County History.
Drabble, Margaret, ed. (2000). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Howarth, Paul, ed. (19 November 2009). "The Princess by W.S. Gilbert". The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive. Archived from the original on 19 September 2011.
Lang, Andrew (1904). "Chapter IV – 1842–1848 — The Princess". Alfred Tennyson. W. Blackwood and sons.
Lear, Edward (1859). Poems and Songs by Alfred Tennyson, set to music and inscribed to Mrs Alfred Tennyson. London: Cramer, Beale & Company.
Lefkowitz, Mary R. (2007). Women in Greek Myth. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8650-3.
Mack, Beverly B.; Strobel, Heidi A. (2008). "Scholars and Scholarship". In Smith, Bonnie G. Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History'. Oxford University Press.
McCann, Bill (24 November 1997). "Introduction to Tennyson's The Princess". The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive. Archived from the original on 8 June 2011.
Ross, Janet (1912). The fourth generation; reminiscences by Janet Ross (4th impression ed.). London: Constable and company.
Scott, Patrick (September–November 1992). Island 2: Tennyson, Interpreter of Mid-Victorian Britain. Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina — exhibit on Tennyson's works including The Princess.
Shaw, Marion (6 June 2003). "The Princess". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved September 2009. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
Tennyson, Hallam (ed.) (2005). Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son. Kessinger Publishing. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)
Tucker, Herbert F. (ed. and foreword) (Spring 2009). "Tennyson at Two Hundred". Victorian Poetry. West Virginia University Press.
Zimmerman, Virginia (2008). Excavating Victorians. SUNY Press.
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Princess (Tennyson poem)
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Princess (Tennyson)
Comparison of Tennyson's poem, The Princess, with Princess Ida
"The Princess" annotated by Alexander Scutt, with a prologue and materials about the Gilbert connections (2013)
The Princess online
The Princess public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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