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LITR 5431 American
Romanticism 2010 Student Midterm Samples #2 short essay |
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Danielle Maldonado
Essay 2B: Gothic Elements in “The Yellow
Wallpaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written
just after the Romantic period, is chock full of gothic elements and images.
Blindly blamed on mental illness or a medical condition, the slow deterioration
of the protagonist can be traced back to discontentment and entrapment within
her marriage. This story illustrates the slow psychological deterioration of a
woman plagued by the societal designation of who she should be and her role in
the marriage and household. The home and marriage are all linked with gothic
images that foreshadow the outcome of the main character’s problematic marriage.
The color of the wallpaper in the room where the protagonist
of the story stayed also carries with it some gothic elements. While the gothic
is usually described in terms of light and dark, there is something menacing
about the wallpaper’s yellow color, representing something stale, old and
decayed. The yellow is described as “a smouldering unclean yellow” that is
“strangely faded by slow-turning sunlight.” Her use of the word, “smouldering,”
(sic) meaning being in a state of suppressed activity, suggests she thought the
same of her marriage to John. There is also something dark and gothic in nature
about the suppression and “unclean” color. From the beginning of the story, the
colonial mansion is also described as a “haunted house,” leaning toward gothic
evidences, according to the course website. In addition to the color the of
wallpaper, the room in which she’s kept seems to evoke feelings that it’s a
haunted space, even if it’s only haunted by the protagonist herself.
The wallpaper seems to spawn more haunting and gothic images
when the protagonist says, “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but
[her], or ever will.” She claims, “Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes
get clearer every day.” Later, she notices a “woman stooping down and creeping
about behind that pattern.” She says she sees bars within the wallpaper when she
mentions, “at night in any kind of
light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it
becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as
can be.” Whether representative of her declining mental faculties or her
desperation to leave her marriage and the societal standards of the time behind,
there is something evocative about the images she sees within the wallpaper.
I also noticed gothic elements in the fact that the
protagonist is nameless and thus, powerless to her predicament. Her repressed
desire to leave her marriage makes this item, otherwise not of particular
interest, noteworthy. The overarching idea of being trapped in her marriage and
in the “great immovable bed” that she’s kept in represents, to me, some
non-traditional gothic images.
If her mental faculties are in question, I’d like to propose
that we view both the nameless protagonist as well as the woman in the wallpaper
as split personalities, leaning toward more gothic elements. Later, the one
woman becomes many when the protagonist says, “there are so many of those
creeping women and they creep so fast,” suggesting many personalities or
factions of her identity. Once she tears the paper off of the wall and frees
this manifestation of a woman, she believes that she frees herself. This
haunting disconnect in her mental health and her continuous connection with the
woman in the wallpaper suggests the protagonist represents a gothic character.
While images in “The Yellow Wallpaper” don’t necessarily fit
the conventional definition of the gothic, they definitely lean toward something
unknown and haunted. The manner in which the protagonist’s husband, John, keeps
her in a room to “rest” is haunting enough but the additional elements within
the room and the wallpaper lead to an unsettling feeling that could be described
no other way.
