Is 'The Yellow Wallpaper' a short story or a novella? Do I know the difference anyway? Probably not. It's not surprising that it has become canonical as a feminist text. Apart from the fact that Charlotte Perkins Gilman became an important campaigner for women's right in the USA, so this example of her early writing - published in 1892 - would have interested people researching the development of feminism in America irrespective of its literary qualities.
The front cover of Virago edition that I purloined from my daughter sub-titles the work with the phrase 'A Literary Masterpeice'. It's difficult to disagree with that. The portrayal of the protagonists inner state is vivid, claustrophobic and disturbing. The prose is spare and direct, sentences often short and pithy; or if longer, made up, almost list-like, of short simple clauses which pile up. The effective is obsessive. Most powerful of all, the use of the central image of the yellow wallpaper whose strange 'shape-shifting' patterns obsess the main character and chart her slow, inexorable derangement.
The main character is imprisoned, both psychologically and to a large extent physically by her position as wife to a respectable doctor who espouses a purely scientific and materialistic view of the world. His reaction to his wife's misery and need to write is to view both as something 'not to dwell upon' and increasingly the main character is forced into a subservient position, unable to take the simplest decision without recourse to her husband or his sister. We never get to find out the main character's name; her husband simply refers to her as 'my little girl'.
Perkins Gilman positions the protagonist in an interesting way between the reader and the other characters in the story, it is told exclusively through her eyes. What she tries to keep hidden from them - the extent of her misery, her increasingly insane feelings about the wallpaper - she confides in the reader. We share her secrets, but only sometimes, she does not fully trust us. Her feelings towards the other members of the household, particularly her husband, are conflicted and inconsistent and by turns, deceitful, spiteful, simperingly compliant or wracked by guilt at her inability to meet their demands. It is a disturbing account of the mix of dependency and humiliation, resentment and fear that must be experienced by anyone who is enslaved. I think the horror of the story is twofold, firstly a fear of enslavement and powerlessness, but also a fear of becoming 'enslaved' by madness, of losing ones mind.
It is this latter aspect of the story which places it within its time, whereas the feminist aspects of the work emerged over subsequent decades as the hidden voices of the women's movement were increasingly acknowledged, early commentators on the story, as Elaine Hedges' afterword' makes clear, valued the more 'chilling' aspects of the work rather than its power as social comment. In this respect you can draw parallels between this story and other developments in late nineteenth century art and literature. Wilde's 'Portrait of Dorian Gray' or Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, which both use a central device to chart the effects of psychological disturbance. I am reminded too of the work of Edvard Munch, such as 'Puberty' where dark shadowy interiors hint at inner disturbance, as does the use of colour in later Van Gogh. These works anticipate the development of Expressionism in the early part of the twentieth century, and in a sense seem more 'modern'' than than the time in which they were produced.
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| Puberty 1895; Oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm (59 5/8 x 43 1/4 in); Nasjonalgalleriet (National Gallery), Oslo |
The second short story I looked at was part of preparatory reading for the session on 'creative responses to the source' - Chekov's 'A Lady With A Dog'. Whereas 'The Yellow Wallpaper' concerns derangement grounded in subjugation, Chekov's story charts what might be considered as an arc of sullied redemption. It is narrated mainly through the male character, Dimitri - a well-to-do banker from Moscow on vacation in Yalta. He is presented as a fairly reprehensible character, charming, vain, dismissive of his wife - who remains in Moscow - a serial adulterer who enjoys the excitement of 'having a fling' but regards women as a 'lesser species'.
He notices a young women walking her dog who appears to be on holiday alone, so 'arranges' to bump into her, apparently by chance, one lunch time. They become friends, and soon afterwards lovers. Anna, like Dimitri is dissatisfied with her marriage. She seems distant from her husband, who she calls 'a worm'. She is vague about the nature of his job - some kind of 'official' in a provincial town - and the fact that she is holidaying alone points to a less than intimate marriage. Anna's reaction to her infidelity is to become wracked by remorse, but she continues the relationship until the holiday's end.
Somewhat to his surprise over the coming months Dimitri finds, unlike his previous liaisons, he cannot get Anna out of his mind, and finally goes to search her out in her hometown. Though initially shocked to see him at the theatre, Anna agrees to visit him in Moscow on the pretext of needing treatment for a medical problem, The story ends with this arrangement continuing and Dimitri reflecting a little ruefully that finally he has found he is able to love. The ending is inconclusive, both structurally and morally. It is this open-ended' uncertain quality in Chekov's stories which so different to the resolution found in most nineteenth century novels; it influenced modernists such as Virginia Wolf and Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield who I will look at later.
Adrian, who is leading the session tonight on creative responses to text asked students to produce a diary entry written from Anna's point of view. I don't do creative prose - so produced a short poem that I imagine Anna writing in her diary the morning after she was surprised by Dimitri in the theatre.
- the silliest thing I ever said.
I dreamed I found you in the snow
outside the theatre, “Go, please go!”
I urged, then promised you instead,
“I will come to you in Moscow.”
I'm on the stage, star of the show,
you, at my feet; I fear you’re dead.
I dream - “I found you in the snow,”
me singing in shrill soprano,
a sun-kissed Snow Maiden – “unwed,
I will come to you in Moscow.”
I woke, “It’s only you I know,”
I whispered to the empty bed.
No dream: I found you in the snow,
heart shaking, a frozen sparrow
fled from summer’s afterglow. I dread
I will come to you in Moscow,
just to dream I’ll find you in the snow.It's not quite what Adrian asked for, so I'm not sure how it will go down. I hope the villanelle form captures the obsessive brooding nature of 'not being able to get someone out of your head'. I imagine that Anna would have been shocked by Dimitri's appearance at the theatre and this may have re-occurred as part of her dream. In the dream she has been transformed into the heroine of Rimsky Korsakov's opera 'The Snow Maiden' whose discovery of love unlocks the world from winter, but melts as the first rays of the Spring sun touch her.
Adrian also suggested we look at the work of Katherine Mansfield. I managed to download her complete works on my Kindle for 99p - how's that for a bargain! Katherine's work dates from a few years later than Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Chekov's stories. She was friends with T S Eliot and D H Lawrence and married the writer and editor John Middleton Murry. Katherine's bisexual and bohemian lifestyle provides the backdrop to many of her stories which seem to simultaneously celebrate yet satirise the life of the early moderns. There are parts of the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and the portrayal of the bedsit scene in section III of the Waste Land that seem to me to owe much to Mansfield.
Compared with Gilman Perkins and Chekov's spare, almost minimalist prose, then Mansfield style is rich, using lavish, detailed description to reveal the intensity of the characters' emotions. It comes as little surprise to read that she admired the Fauves. At times I do find the style over effusive, but this tendency becomes less marked in her later work. A particular favourite on mine is her short story 'Bliss' in which the protagonist, Bertha, spends her day espousing what a 'divine' life she leads while preparing for a dinner party. She is mysteriously drawn to a beutiful young acquaintance Pearl Fulton and feels they share an inner life. This notion is reinforced that there is a mysterious bond between when, after dinner both find themselves looking at the pear tree in Bertha's garden, illuminated by the moonlight. The true nature of their shared bliss is only revealed at the very end of the story when Bertha sees her husband embracing Pearl What Bertha and Pearl have in common in reality is the attention of Bertha's husband. Bertha's situation is further complicated by her own feelings of love towards Pearl, which ambiguously provoke a stong physical desire in Bertha towards her husband, whom she previously describes as a 'good pal'.
There are less than twenty years between the wriying of the Yellow Wallpaper and Bliss. One senses in the differing situation of the main female characters a sense of emancipation. It's fair to say however that the behaviour of the male characters changes little, they are partrayed in all three stories as dissmissive of women's feelings at best, and at worst given to infidelity. Is it ever thus?
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