The Wallpaper is Torn; the Wall Remains to be Demolished: An Appraisal of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as an Early Feminist Text

Abstract

Abstract

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is one such text, which despite being ?merely? a short story, has come to enjoy a canonical status in the feminist literary discourse. From Hardy to Henry James, from Ibsen to Tolstoy ? numerous authors have highlighted various aspects of the stifled female generation of the late nineteenth century. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, we find a woman author speaking for herself and for women at large. The story makes use of and yet goes beyond the gothic paraphernalia and the rather handy theme of ?mad? women to register its protest against the then claustrophobic Victorian domestic milieu. The symbolic victory of the woman at the end of the story comes at the cost of her sanity. However, possibly no more wholesome avenue of female triumph was available to her. With an unsentimental, suggestive and powerful narrative, Gilman here delivers her tour de force.