Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the
English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an
account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to
an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous
disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria,
separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad,
convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.
Even this
straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of
content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the
first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other
students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?
The choice
isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about
the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:
The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a
smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is
a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
Two
important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the
colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage
of time.
Earlier in
the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the
colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This
is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in
the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage
of time, in Great Expectations
(1860-1):
I saw that everything within my view which
ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was
faded and yellow.
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.
Jane even links
the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:
The only thing I can think of that it is like
is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.
In doing so,
she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’,
isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s!
For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle,
yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with
degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding,
boredom or excess.
Lord Henry
gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow
paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of
dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:
It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches
all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great
place on the other side of the room low down.
Later, in
Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this
book:
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I
should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book
to any one. It does harm."
This
suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one
which Wilde rejects firmly:
There is no such
thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
badly written. That is all.
But it is
interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular
model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is À Rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate
(French) life.
It was the strangest book that he had ever
read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of
flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that
he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had
never dreamed were gradually revealed.
Dorian’s
feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly
with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel
and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what
could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life –
but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.
When it came
to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in
no doubt what to name it – The Yellow
Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died
out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey
Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of
this period.
It is within
this context too then that The Yellow
Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’.
It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the
Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender,
motherhood and madness?’
We’re nearly
there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me
your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting
@SVictorianist!