By Anna Seger
Edited by Sara Belmore and Coco Usher
To understand the multidimensional realms developed within the confined space of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is critical to understand the story’s foundation in Hawthornean tradition. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories operate on two levels—metaphorically and literally aligned with light and dark—which Herman Melville illuminates in his essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Melville argues that beneath their sunny, intelligible surfaces, Hawthorne’s stories harbor an inherent darkness (5). This darkness is mostly unintelligible, and therefore not immediately visible to all readers, necessitating close-reading and interpretation to unveil it. In Hawthorne’s short story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” this light and dark duality is not merely a critical metaphor imposed by Melville, but a structural and symbolic technique employed by Hawthorne himself. He transforms light and dark into distinct realms: the former aligned with rationality, the latter with imagination. Because “The Yellow Wallpaper” is structured around the narrator’s—and thus the story’s—physical confinement, Gilman builds on Hawthorne’s technique to develop an equally multivalent narrative. Gilman interweaves Hawthorne’s light and dark realms with gendered binaries—femininity and masculinity, the unintelligible and the normative—to configure them in a more explicitly political manner. Yet, this dynamic web remains grounded in the central duality of light and dark to develop a narrative about female entrapment and emancipation.
To further establish the light and dark dichotomy that permeates both Hawthorne’s and Gilman’s stories, Melville’s analysis in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” becomes essential. Reflecting on Hawthorne’s style, Melville observes, “[f]or spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black” (Melville 1158). This image of the “dark half of the physical sphere” situates Hawthorne’s technique in the literal temporality of day and night. Both Hawthorne and Gilman present night and day as distinct realms with completely different imaginative possibilities. Melville also emphasizes the inevitable cyclicality between the day’s light and the night’s darkness, noting that “this darkness but gives more effect to the evermoving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world” (1158). In both Hawthorne and Gilman, this cyclicality heightens the stark differences that emerge between the two realms. Melville further unveils the autonomy of the two levels and the potential necessity of the dark’s unintelligibility. Melville states “[n]or need you fix upon that blackness in him…Nor, indeed, will all readers discern it, for it is, mostly, insinuated to those who may best understand it, and account for it” (1161). Readers need not focus on the underlying darkness to grasp the narrative, as the sunny, intelligible surface can sustain a complex story; but, readers attuned to the underlying darkness will gain access to the deeper truths that the narrative conceals.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne’s light and dark duality transcends metatextual framing and becomes an explicit structural technique. Hawthorne develops a narrative in which the sunny, intelligible surface appears literally in daylight, while the underlying darkness emerges in the imaginative realm of night. This darkness reveals itself through the imagination that flourishes at night, only to be stripped away in the harsh, rationalizing sunlight of day. Soon, after Giovanni arrives, he watches Beatrice tending to her father’s garden, questioning “whether it were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another,” and observing that “flower and maiden were different yet the same, fraught with some strange peril in either shape” (Hawthorne 3). Night becomes an imaginative realm where boundaries, such as those between nature and human, blur together. Giovanni’s sense of “some strange peril in either shape,” gestures toward an implicit darkness, one that he and the reader learn is the poison infesting Beatrice’s body. In the morning, however, his concerns dissipate as he reflects that “there is influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine” (3). Morning light functions as a stabilizing force, clarifying the “errors of fancy” that the night produces. These “shadows of the night” transform rational thought into “less wholesome” judgment suggesting a latent danger to observations made during the night. Notably, this danger is not because of inaccuracy. Giovanni is, ultimately, perceptive: he notices something amiss in the garden long before he learns anything concrete about Beatrice or her father’s poisonous experiments. The danger of judgment lies instead in the darkness that threatens to reveal itself upon deeper scrutiny. By contrast, the “first rays of sun…brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience,” reestablishing normative clarity (3). Sunlight, then, dulls his imagination and forces his impressions “within the limits of ordinary experience” or normative rationality. The emphasis on “limits” marks rationality as a constraining force, which interrupts and delays Giovanni’s emerging—and ultimately accurate—sense of the darkness surrounding him.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman intertwines the light and dark dynamic with the gendered power imbalance between femininity and masculinity. The narrator, prescribed the rest cure by her physician-husband John, understands the deeply entrenched association of masculinity with rationality and authority. She reflects, stating that “[i]f a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” (Gilman 2). In the late-19th century, hysteria diagnoses were being routinely weaponized to dismiss women’s complex and poorly understood mental health. The narrator’s question reveals a somber awareness that her diagnosis can be used to invalidate her thoughts and feelings as mere female hysteria. Inevitably, her mental state increasingly contrasts that of her husband. As his masculine rationality clashes with her imaginative, “hysterical” state, the narrator begins to find a paradoxical sense of comfort and freedom within her hysteria.
In Gilman’s text, the narrator’s hysteria is implicitly connected to postpartum psychosis. Her baby appears only in brief allusions, such as when she notes that “[i]t is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby…And yet [she] cannot be with him, it makes [her] so nervous” (Gilman 3). John cannot understand her mental state because its underlying cause is distinctly female, rooted in the emotional and physical upheaval of the postpartum period. Early in the story, she attempts to bridge the widening gap between the narrator’s and her husband’s dissonant mental states. When the narrator first senses “something strange about the house,” she tells John one moonlit evening, but he dismisses her unease as a “draught” and simply shuts the window (2). It is no coincidence that her first attempt to articulate her concerns takes place on a “moonlight evening,” and that he immediately casts them off. Here, Gilman begins to mark moonlight and darkness as a feminine realm that is largely unintelligible to men. The narrator’s vulnerability—offering a subjective intuition and a plea to be taken seriously—is met with John’s cold and rational rejection. His practical solution—shutting the window—fails to meet her in the realm of subjective feeling and imagination. John functions much like the sunlight in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: he appears to clarify and rationalize, yet actually suppresses the narrator’s intuitions by forcing them into normative intelligibility.
Gilman intensifies the association between sunlight, masculinity, and rationality, complicating the dynamic that Hawthorne establishes. Looking out her window, the narrator observes “people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned [her] not to give way to fancy in the least” (Gilman 3). John insists that with her “imaginative power and habit of story-making,” a “nervous weakness” will “lead to all manner of excited fancies,” and that his wife should use her “will and good sense” to suppress them (Gilman 3). In these lines, John again embodies the cold rationality of light. His attempts to suppress his wife’s “fancy” parallel the way the sunlight corrects Giovanni’s nocturnal “errors of fancy,” reinforcing the gendered logic of rationality dominating imagination. The narrator’s “imaginative power” becomes threatening because it grants her access to a feminine realm of freedom that resists his authority and control.
Although the narrator grows increasingly repulsed by the yellow wallpaper in daylight, the imaginative influence of darkness disrupts her repulsion. In sunlight, she describes the wallpaper as having a “sickly sulphur tint” (Gilman 3). Though yellow typically connotes brightness and joy, she notes that it has been “strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (3). Sunlight—implicitly aligned with the masculine, rational forces that oppress her—fades the wallpaper into its “repellant,” “sickly” shade (Gilman 3). Just as sunlight dulls the wallpaper’s color, John’s control dulls the narrator’s imagination, driving her deeper into sickness; in moonlight, however, she begins to notice a female figure emerging from its pattern. Freed from the oppressive influence of sunlight, the narrator sees that “in the places where [the wallpaper] isn’t faded,” there is “a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade,” a “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (4). Gilman subverts traditional visibility: light obscures the wallpaper, while darkness reveals it. On a metatextual level, the wallpaper’s depth embodies Melville’s theorization of Hawthorne’s multilayered stories. If she observed only the “silly and conspicuous front design” visible in daylight, she would never notice the figure trapped behind it. Likewise, readers who consider only the story’s intelligible surface forfeit access to the narrative’s latent depths.
The narrator’s initial repulsion with the wallpaper shifts as it becomes an intellectual outlet for her otherwise understimulated mind. As she examines the wallpaper more closely, she writes: “I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry” (Gilman 5). The story initially offers little information about the narrator’s background: her identity is largely defined by her sickness and by her husband. Here, the narrator’s invocation of design principles reveals a set of interests that grants her new depth and agency. She continues to analyze the wallpaper through an artist’s lens, from its “breadth” to its “bloated curves and flourishes,” yet is unable to find any sort of consistent or logical pattern (5). In a story where rationality is gendered masculine, the wallpaper’s resistance to intelligibility renders it distinctly feminine. Its unintelligibility draws the narrator into an implicit alliance with the pattern through their shared experience of misunderstanding, even before the narrator consciously identifies with the woman trapped behind the wallpaper.
The cyclicality of light and dark that Melville illuminates becomes, in Gilman’s story, the rhythmic passage of day into night that heightens the narrator’s awareness of her entrapment and drives her deeper into the realm of the wallpaper. The feminine realm of freedom and imagination that the narrator accesses at night is repeatedly interrupted by the harsh sunlight of the day. Daylight forces the narrator back into compliance under the watchful eyes of John and his sister who also assumes a position of masculine, authoritative rationality by partaking in the restrictive surveillance. The most consequential of these restrictions is their prohibition of her writing. From the beginning of the story, the narrator is very explicit about her desire to write: “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (Gilman 3). Writing becomes a form of thinking that helps her track and interpret her impressions, especially as her environment grows increasingly complicated by the figure emerging in the wallpaper. Readers sense her urgency and determination to document her experiences in her diary despite the looming threat of confiscation. She writes, “[t]here comes John’s sister…I must not let her find me writing” and later, “[t]here comes John, and I must put this away,” fearing that her only form of self-expression will be taken away from her (3, 4). The cycle of day and night propels her between the imaginative, feminine realm of darkness and the harshly rational, masculine realm of light. The narrator’s ultimate descent into madness can thus be read as an attempt to escape patriarchy by remaining in the dark, imaginative realm that offers her temporary freedom.
The narrator’s relationship to her writing is central to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where content relies explicitly on its diary-like form. A threat to her ability to write is also a threat to the readers’ access to the story itself, which consists entirely of her firsthand accounts. As she begins to see beyond the wallpaper’s repulsive surface, she insists, “[t]here are things in that paper that nobody knows but [her], or ever will” (Gilman 6). The observation recalls Melville’s theorizations on the dual levels of the short story; Not only is the story itself threatened through the restrictions placed on the narrator, but the content that readers receive is wholly shaped by her restricted point of view. Readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are therefore necessarily “in the dark,” as the line between reality and imagination blurs. The narrator’s ability to represent reality—or even her own impressions—becomes increasingly uncertain. The reader’s understanding is mediated through fragmentation, placing them in a position akin to John’s: unable to ever fully enter her mind, and thus unable to differentiate reality from imagination.
As the narrator grows increasingly attached to the wallpaper and begins to see the figure within it as a woman, the wallpaper becomes a symbol of her own entrapment within patriarchy and within her marriage. She writes that “[o]n a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (Gilman 7). In the normative light of day, the narrator is frustrated by her inability to make sense of the wallpaper. Melville suggests that one cannot grasp the unintelligible darkness of a narrative—or, of the wallpaper—while confined to normative rationality (5). The repulsive outside pattern that dominates the wallpaper in daylight becomes associated with oppressive masculinity. In line with this, the woman behind the wallpaper becomes intelligible only in the imaginative darkness of night. The narrator reflects on the wallpaper’s transformation: “[a]t night in any kind of light…and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (7). She cannot understand it because, “By daylight she is subdued, quiet…it is the pattern that keeps her so still.” (7). Daylight confines both the narrator and the woman behind the wallpaper to patriarchal expectations of female passivity. The narrator observes, “[i]n the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (8). In darkness, the narrator gains the imaginative freedom to envision emancipation from patriarchal control—a desire she projects onto the woman behind the wallpaper as she struggles to break free.
In the end, the narrator appears to succumb to her hysteria, yet simultaneously discovers a form of freedom in her final act of resistance to normativity, rationality, and patriarchy. She works with the woman behind the wallpaper to tear it down: “I pulled, and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (Gilman 9). Eventually, though, “when the sun came,” “that awful pattern began to laugh” at her (9). As established earlier, the sunlit pattern represents the oppressive confines of patriarchy, which here mock her for the perceived irrationality of her actions. Yet this mockery only intensifies her determination. By this point, the narrator has become so closely aligned with the woman in the wallpaper and sees so much of her own oppression reflected in the woman’s entrapment that the boundary between them blurs. She even refers to herself in the first person as the woman behind the wallpaper: “[i]t is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” (10). With John locked out of the room, she is finally able to “creep around,” free from his judgment, surveillance, and control.
The narrator’s freedom, however, is not permanent, as she reflects, “[she] shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night” (Gilman 10). This observation highlights the inescapable cyclicality of night and day that Melville emphasizes. While darkness and the wallpaper offer her a temporary outlet for female expression, freedom, and imagination, the overarching sense is that this outlet is fleeting and ultimately unsustainable. Though her descent into madness functions as a powerful imaginative escape from her patriarchal confines, the story implies that a lasting escape cannot be entirely self-contained in the female imagination, where it can be conceived but not materially sustained. Liberation must instead confront and bridge the opposing dynamics these stories establish in order to bring oppression to light and dismantle it at its source.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 1892.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” 1844.
Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” 1850.
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