It is reminiscent, too, of Charlotte Brönte's Bertha Mason. Incarceration in the attic, by physician-husband John, evokes the Grimms' fairytale Rapunzel in the Tower the yellow wallpaper is a surrogate for Rapunzel's coils of golden hair, which both trap and free her. This genre allows metaphysical explorations of the wallpaper-thin borderline between sanity and madness. Things happen to it, a metaphor for an unwell woman's passivity, while male doctors enforce rest.Ĭonfined to her nursery-bedroom for a ‘rest cure’, Gilman's surreptitious diarist smuggles biographical horrors into a gothic haunted-house story: ‘A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house’.
Gilman's eponymous wallpaper becomes a character, stripped of agency. Subversion begins with her title, suggesting domestic design manuals, hinting at papering-over of cracks. The story chronicles her postnatal psychosis and is highly critical of her treatment.
When feminist activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her epistolary short story The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892, she meant it as a protest work.
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