Irresolvable Tension Between Light and Darkness-- What Does the Tension Reveal and How Does it Work Within the Story - Essay Example

?Irresolvable tension between light and darkness – what does the tension reveal and how does it work within the story. [The Yellow Wallpaper] Introduction Charlotte Perkins Gilman published The Yellow Wallpaper in 1899 at a time when respectable women had very few rights, and were firmly controlled in a patriarchal order that gave all the power to fathers and husbands. The story describes what happens when an intelligent woman is cooped up, oppressed and infantilized, not by cruelty but by rigid social conventions. It illustrates how the same space can be interpreted in very different, and even opposite ways, and it shows the destructive power of the imagination if it is suppressed too much and ridiculed by others. The author uses the play of light and darkness on yellow wallpaper to symbolize the irresolvable tension suffered in the mind of a married woman who is both literally and symbolically trapped in a confined space, and who gradually declines into madness. Outdoors and indoors The story opens with an ironic and playful description of the place that the narrator and and her husband visit for the summer. First, she stresses the magnificence of the setting with the phrases “ancestral halls… A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate” (Gilman, 1899, p. 1). After this she jokingly calls it “a haunted house” but makes it clear that this is “the height of romantic felicity” (Gilman, 1899, p. 1). Her first impressions take in the whole context of the house, including its situation back from the road, the distance from the village, and its “hedges, and walls and gates that lock” (Gilman, 1899, p. 1) Adjectives like “beautiful” and “delicious” (Gilman, 1899, p. 1) have very positive connotations. In short, the overall impression at first is of an impressive, though somewhat dilapidated mansion, and very much a desirable place for a luxury vacation. As the story progresses the narrator retreats more and more to the interior of the house. The men in the narrator’s life, her husband and her brother, and the distant, forbidding figure of S. Weir Mitchell, are all doctors, coming and going as they please, with active professional duties in the wider world. The narrator, on the other hand, is restricted to two roles which confine her to an indoor fate: the sick person, and the domestic wife and mother. A third role, that of the confined child, is indicated in the description of the room that becomes her own: “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, 1899, p. 2). The room thus manages to have, at the start of the story both a quality of openness since it is described as “ a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore” and a quality of stuffiness and decay, which is conveyed by means of the bars on the windows and the unbearable yellow wallpaper. The room is a place of tension, between outside and in, and as the story progresses the walls appear to close in on the narrator, shutting out the healthy light of the sun. Daytime and night-time Over the course of the narrative, the narrator is increasingly drawn to the night time, and as she surveys the interior of the house by light of the moon, it takes on an altogether more sinister aspect. It has been pointed out that the nursery-bedroom assumes many of the aspects of a Gothic location, and the fittings of the room can be interpreted as those of a mental asylum or torture chamber (Davison, 2004, p. 59). The wallpaper has a fascination for the narrator because it appears to change with the changing light, revealing hidden patterns “where the sun is just so” (Gilman, 1899, p. 4). The narrator can see that the light is making the pattern appear to have a life of its own because she describes the confusion of the design as “great slanting waves of optic horror” (Gilman, 1899, p. 4). When the moonlight comes in through only one window or other, adding menace to the images in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that the dimming of the daylight is what transforms the wallpaper into a terrifying object because she notes “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman, 1899, p. 6). This statement marks a key turning point in the story, because it shows that the narrator is succumbing to the power of the wallpaper, no longer as an optical illusion, caused by changing light, but as a real phenomenon that is actually happening and is only being revealed by the light. This marks the point where the author can no longer distinguish what is real and what is imaginary. Real and Imaginary The theme of writing is central to The Yellow Wallpaper and clearly the narrator enjoys her writing, even though her relatives frown upon it, and she sees it as a part of normal, happy life. Writing down thoughts and imaginings can be innocent and entertaining, and it does represent a different way of seeing the world than the usual way (Haney-Peritz, 1986, p. 118). If it goes too far, however, imagining terrifying things can be a symptom of madness, since things appear to be different when people are mentally ill. As the narrator becomes more obsessed with the wallpaper, and shifts her attention more and more to her night-time imaginings, the reader detects a tension between the viewpoint of the first person narrator and the actual state of affairs that is being described. Gilman, the author, subtly indicates this by inverting normal patterns in the observations of the narrator, for example, in the cheerful comment “I’m feeling so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.” (Gilman, 1899, p. 7). The imaginary has taken hold of the narrator, and this is a very worrying sign for the reader (Hochman, 2002, p. 100). The conflicting meanings of yellow The skill of Gilman is most apparent in the symbolism surrounding the yellow wallpaper. Yellow is cited as the color of light, and sunshine but at the same time it is mentioned in connection with hotter colors like orange and with the chemical sulphur which suggests the tortures of hell. The narrator sees different things according to internal moods. At first she sees all of the connotations, but as she retreats inwards, she begins to see mainly the sinister ones. The change in the wallpaper is not real, it is merely suggested by the changing light.. The reader can see both meanings at the same time but the narrator falls into a paranoid focus on the dark and creepy aspects of the play of dark and light, and she is unable to resolve them into an objective view of what is happening to her. Conclusion The failure to resolve the tension between dark and light and between the real and the imaginary is a reflection of the failure to bridge the gap between masculine and feminine views of the world. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes the pain and madness that comes of oppression, and there is a subtle message in the story, to the effect that the tension can be better managed if the woman is free to come and go as she pleases. The real darkness is power, and the real light is freedom, and that is the message of the story. The anonymous narrator cannot resolve the tension she feels between the person she wants to be and the person she is being forced to be which is why she identifies with the creepy, shifting image of the woman behind bars in the yellow wallpaper. References Davison, Carol Margaret. “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper.2 Women’s Studies 33, (2004), pp. 47-75. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Available online at: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Forerunner, October 1913. Available online at: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental feminism and literature’s ancestral house: Another look at “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Women’s Studies 12 (1986), pp. 113-128. Hochman, Barbara. “The Reading Habit and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. American Literature, 74 (1) (2002), pp. 89-110. Read More