Enough Rest to Go Mad
In the nineteenth century, when women would get what we now know as postpartum depression, it was known as female hysteria. Hysteria was often treated with the rest cure, which was basically a doctor’s note that forbade the patient from doing anything. However, patients given this treatment often felt like they were going crazy. The isolation did not allow them to deal with their feelings, just mull over them for ages. Thusly, many patients actually went insane. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman details one woman’s descent into madness as shown through the diction, syntax, and language of the narrative.
One particular line emphasizes how the room is speeding the descent into madness. “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls” (Gilman 154). The physical way the narrator describes the room elicits an image of a prison. The bars in the windows and rings in the walls seem prisonlike and torture chamber-esque. She is literally locked inside this room, with the horrible paper. She also mentions how these things are ‘for little children’, which she is not, but it only emphasizes how she is being coddled and pampered by her husband. As we know now, the best way to treat postpartum depression is to force the patient to continue to act as an adult, not a child. The room is treating the narrator as a child and deepening her sickness.
In addition to the prisonlike aspects of the room, the wallpaper is detestable. From the very beginning, the narrator makes her feelings regarding the wallpaper abundantly clear. “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 154). The wallpaper is horrible, a crazy mass of curls and loops that sprawls haphazardly around the room. The narrator reveals that she has had a measure of education, and thus does not need to be patronised, with her phrase ‘committing every artistic sin’. This means that the narrator must know what artistic sins are. She has had some level of training in art, and, presumably, some level of education. In this age, women were taught drawing and music along with more conventional subjects. Later in the line, the use of sprawling and flamboyant next to each other adjusts the rhythm, pulling out that detail. Sprawling, at least in America, is typically pronounced by drawing out the ‘a’ sound, while flamboyant stretches the ‘boy’ sounds. The two words are drawn out, dropping sound by sound like water droplets on a spider’s web. This emphasizes the details of the paper, and makes the patterns seem even larger than they would described any other way.
The narrator goes on to describe the revoltingness of the paper in more detail. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study…” (Gilman 154) The narrator utilizes parallel structure to emphasize the paradoxical nature of her views of the paper. Dull and pronounced are opposites, and it does not make much sense for one thing to be both at once, but this is true. The paper is a study in contradictions. It confuses and provokes the viewer with its unexplainable nature. The narrator is unable to explain how it makes her feel, and what she is experiencing while viewing it. This inability to communicate shortly consumes her thoughts as she slowly spirals into insanity. Also, the use of the word ‘enough’ further shows her confusion. The paper is not wholly dull or wholly confused. It is simply ‘enough’. This also details the narrator’s confusion. She does not understand how she feels about the wallpaper, or what it is, precisely.
Furthermore, the colour of the wallpaper itself is deeply disturbing to the narrator. She uses some of her most descriptive language in this passage on the colour of the paper. “The color 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” (Gilman 154). The repetition of ‘r’ and ‘s’ sounds emphasizes the disgustingness of the paper. Reading those repeated sounds makes the nose turn up; they create such a clear picture of the wallpaper. The paper is ‘unclean’ and ‘sickly’, further tying the wallpaper to the narrator’s condition. If the paper is sickly, how can continuous exposure to it help cure the narrator?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman utilized many literary elements to show her meaning in The Yellow Wallpaper. Her language emphasized the narrator’s condition and how ineffective the treatment is. Repetition of ‘r’ and ‘s’ sounds show the horrible colours and patterns of the paper. The very words used elicit prison images and the contradictory nature of the wallpaper. This story very clearly shows one woman spiraling into insanity after the birth of her child. It also shows the uselessness of the treatments prescribed by doctors. The rest cure is not helping the narrator, and Gilman shows this through her writing.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Diyanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. 152-163. Print.