Yesterday in class we discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." We shot out topics for the basis of a good paper on the story, encompassing perception VS reality. Everything we discussed were valid arguments, but what Jared, whom we picked to elaborate on his chosen thesis, actually wanted to write on was how he felt everything the narrator experienced was in her head and suffered from sever schizophrenia. Having never taken any psychology courses before and knowing little about the field, I had to look the word up at thefreedictionary.com, which defined it as "a psychotic disorder (or group of disorders) marked by severely impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors."
With this knowledge I look back to when I read the story, and I get the same vibe from it. I don't go as far as Jared did in claiming that the whole story is simply an hallucination, but it's as if what the narrator is experiencing is a reality that has happened in the past and she is re-playing it back in her mind. I think she is now in a mental institution, possibly in a room with yellow wallpaper, and it triggers the memory of of the wallpaper from the house that caused her to lose it. On page 325 in our text, she describes a woman she thinks she sees through the wallpaper and out in the daylight, saying, "I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I'll tell you why-privately-I've seen her!" I believe the "woman" is actually her, and she gets out in the daytime because she is not allowed to be out at night, due to being confined in a mental institution. I'm not sure if this was Gilman's intent, but she was very against the rest theory medical practice of the day. The narrator was subscribed to this treatment, and what better way to show its flaws than to have her ultimately imprisoned in an insane asylum?
Creepy idea. Kind of reminds me of that Leonardo Dicaprio movie "Shutter Island" (I hope you've seen it cause I can't explain that comparison more without spoiling the movie.) I found some more quotes that supports the idea that if nothing else, the women trapped in the wall paper is/was our narrtor but if it’s in a physically or symbolic sense I can’t say. I should state now that Im honestly having trouble with trying to figure out what the relation is between the women/woman outside the house and the woman/women in the wallpaper. But I digress, back to supporting you! First off near the end, when she’s going to take down the wallpaper she states: “I’ve got a rope up here…if that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!” Also as she’s tearing the wall paper down she comments on the pattern “ all those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!” (derision means mockery). (p.677) These quotes would imply that the woman in the wallpaper is not her as she sees it. However just a few lines later as she’s talking about looking at the women outside the house she writes: “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did? But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope-you don’t get me out in the road there!” so if your right and she now currently actually in a mental hospital she differently goes back and forth in her thinking or, rather, her grasp on her reality.This fact is important whether she's Schizophrenic and in a mental hospital or not.we've had a good many unreliable narrators in this class but none who are so mentally ill (with the exception possibly, of the narrator in “The Cask of Amontillado”). interpreting the narrator as schizophrenia definitely opens up a lot of possibility's.
ReplyDeleteAs a Psy major side note: more often then not when people are talking about schizophrenia they are talking about a type called paranoid schizophrenia which is what I believe Jared was referring to since he brought up the movie “A Beautiful Mind” in his explaintion, which is about a man with paranoid schizophrenia. It’s a mental illness that comes with the whole casboose of “crazy” . for example a person suffering from an extreme case definitely has delusions, might hear voices or see things that aren’t there, think that they are god, assume the government has satellites on them, that the cat is talking to them, that your planing ideas in their head, that they are really some place they are not, that the toaster is trying to kill them, that they can fly…things like that. Its intense.
Gilman Perkins, Charlotte. “The Yellow wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 9th ed. Peter Simon. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2005. 667-78.
Woohoo, score for the shoutout!
ReplyDeleteTruth is, it's not a definite that the entire story is fabricated from an illness riddled mind, but I maintain it is entirely plausible. The casual details of bars on the windows, large iron rings on the walls, scratches and gouges in the floors and bedframes and torn and clawed walls are very reminiscent of an old insane asylum. (Images of Arkham Sanatorium from the Cthulu mythos comes to mind.) But the notion that the main character has some sort of perception distorting mental illness would be entirely possible to create such elaborate fabrications.
I agree with you that the notion of the narrator having some sort of distortion in her recollection of events, I just personally believe it can be taken a step further, and hope I can sufficiently prove that with my paper. But, I'm glad to see we're relatively on the same page.
Personally, as I was reading it for my course, the first thing I thought was that it was an asylum. I also do not believe the husband character is actually her husband, but her physician. I don't think anything written in the story can be taken as truth, but seen through the fog of schizophrenia. Great and creepy story.
ReplyDeleteShe is not schizophrenic- she is suffering from post-partum psychosis!! (It was written from Gilmans own experiences, though it is an exaggerated version)
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