Transcript
Speaker: Hello, listeners. This is your Blanket Spoiler Warning. We will be spoiling the yellow wallpaper and any of the other books we have discussed on this podcast. Also, this story mentions suicide, so if that is an uncomfortable topic for you, please take care.
Speaker: I never saw a worse paper in my life, one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study. And when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
Speaker: The color is repellent, almost revolting, a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today we are discussing The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I'm Carley, and I know I read the story in high school, but I didn't remember it at all. And this time it just made me angry.
Speaker: I'm Caroline, and I love this story because it makes me think about how I define myself through my domestic space, and also, again, as other books have, about how maybe social media has changed our sense of home. This short story, only 30 pages, is written by an unnamed woman who has been confined to a rented country house by her husband, John, a doctor, in order to cure her of her temporary nervous depression, as she calls it.
Speaker: He refuses to allow her to work or have any activities. Instead, she must rest, which she does in an upstairs room while her sister -in -law takes care of all the household duties, including the baby who was only mentioned once. She is not even allowed to write in her journal, but rather must do it secretly. The room upstairs to which she is confined was formerly a nursery.
Speaker: and it is covered in the most hideous yellow wallpaper. There is also a bed bolted down to the floor and bars on the windows. She describes the wallpaper as mad, unreasonable, shifting. She lays in bed, confined to her room to rest, and watches the wallpaper.
Speaker: The woman grows jealous almost of seeing her sister -in -law and her husband of studying the pattern on the wallpaper. She says the yellow wallpaper leaves smooches on all who touch it, and she sees the telltale signs on her sister and husband. She says it moves like fungus. It emits a smell that clings to everything.
Speaker: The yellow wallpaper is like prison bars and she comes to believe that there is another woman in the wallpaper creeping around and behind the pattern like a prisoner behind bars. That woman creeps she says and sometimes creeps out during the day and creeps around the whole house and the property taking care not to be seen. The unnamed narrator even improves briefly because she's so fixated on and fascinated by the wallpaper.
Speaker: She's excited to watch developments, as she calls it, in the wallpaper. When it's time for all of them to leave the rented house, she locks herself in the room and starts shredding the wallpaper. She throws the key out the window and starts creeping around the room like the woman in the wallpaper. Eventually her husband enters and she tells him,
Speaker: I've got out at last in spite of you and Jane, and I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back." He faints, and she continues making her circuit of the room, creeping over him every time. So the opening question is, is this house haunted? And can we call a house haunted if it's haunted only for one person?
Speaker: First, a little bit of background because at first blush, this doesn't really seem like a haunted house stories in some ways. In the first couple paragraphs and pages, I think actually in the fifth sentence, she says that this house is a country estate that would make a perfect haunted house. She says a couple times later that it has these beautiful grounds and she imagines
Speaker: ghosts wandering around it only to be told by her husband that's ridiculous and she just feels a draft out the window and she should close the window. I say that because there's this first suggestion of this house is appropriate for being haunted but then the scope is really narrowed to it's just her. Nobody else either has these inclinations would find that to be a romantic cool idea and certainly no one else experiences the wallpaper like she does.
Speaker: Well, so with the turn of the screw, we kind of had a question of, is anyone else experiencing supernatural stuff? So that was a question too.
Speaker: We didn't ask the question if the house can be haunted for one person, right? So simple answer, yes, absolutely, a house can be haunted just for one person. And that goes along with what we've talked about as far as how our protagonist in many of these books have a specific trait or struggle that they're dealing with, and that makes them susceptible to the haunting. And I don't see that being any different here.
Speaker: push back on that, because I think it is a little different here. One of the conversations we've had with all of the other books is that there's some sort of phenomenon, apparition, something like that, that seems to leave a physical trace, even though it also seems to originate in someone's mind.
Speaker: I don't... did we have that in Turn of the Screw? Was there some phenomena that it seemed like other people saw it too? It was left perfectly unclear, right? Right. Okay. But the other books, like The Haunting, other people could hear what Jack was hallucinating. There's zero suggestion of that here, that anyone else sees what's happening in the wallpaper. Right, right, right.
Speaker: Yeah, although I guess it's not true. She says she comes upon her sister stare at her sister in law staring at the wallpaper. It's phrased in a way where I thought she was just delusional. But maybe her sister also saw something in it. So I guess that's not entirely true.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I agree. There's not a physical there's nothing physically happening that other characters notice or could say that there is something outside of our narrator's head, that there's something in the real world happening. There's no corroboration of her experience. Yeah. Which is part of the problem. She's so isolated.
Speaker: Yes. I mean, from the very first line, we learn this woman does not allow to have any agency in her own life. She wants to have a room downstairs and her husband says, no, of course not because we can't have twin beds and we're going to be upstairs in this nursery. That looks like it has been very well worn. Like the wallpaper has already been torn in spots. The bed, which is fixed, nailed to the floor,
Speaker: has been gnawed on. At one point, it's hard to tell if, is this normal wear and tear of children because it was a nursery in a playroom? Or is there something more sinister that possibly happened in that room before? She talks about teeth marks on the bed, and then she bites the bed.
Speaker: Yeah, at the end she does bite the bed when she's having, oh, when whatever is occurring to her is occurring. But you know, it didn't occur to me until this moment that maybe something bad had happened in that room before. That would lean towards more classic haunted house.
Speaker: you know, it's had a similar effect on other people sort of story. Whereas I read this initially as it coming entirely from her. No, because she says that Rue, that the house hadn't been occupied in many years. And sort of the genre trope way of nobody stays long in this house might be implied. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, I completely missed that too. Okay. Yeah, I don't want to read too much into it. Is it something that an idea that occurred to her that in a playful way and she wanted to play with the idea, but her husband doesn't engage with her in that playful way. And that is another frustration between her and her husband because
Speaker: In addition to that, anytime she wants to do something, she wants to do some work, and her husband says, no, you're too sick. She doesn't want to rest in the yellow wallpapered room, but he insists that she rest after every meal, and so she ends up just staring at the wall. In every single way, what she wants to do and how she wants to occupy herself, it's denied to her. And it's denied to her in this nurturing way. The reasoning is always
Speaker: coming from a place of care and how much he loves her and how precious she is and how he wants her to be healthy. She says that she can't say this to anyone but she can she can put it on dead paper. I thought that was an interesting use dead paper.
Speaker: that she thinks he is, he is making her more sick or preventing her from, from healing with all of these strict rules about what she can do and eat and sleep. She says, you know, sometimes I suspect that the, the fact that my husband is a doctor is why I cannot get well. Yes. Okay. So have we seen that theme of lack of agency before? I don't, I mean, I don't think so.
Speaker: I think that's kind of new to this one. Well, again, it reminds me of the turn of the screw because in the turn of the screw, it was a very class restriction, right? Like we talked about the governess being confined by her class. And then I remember Eleanor in the Haunting of Hill House, she had been in a very restricted life and was finally free. But the haunting ended up taking that from her, basically.
Speaker: like there's a lot of similarity between Eleanor and this unnamed protagonist because of the inability to speak what you desire and feeling restrained in that way. Like Eleanor was also extremely angry and she she wasn't able to express it because it made her ineffectual. And I think that's a uniquely feminine trait of like not being able to speak and how that
Speaker: creates this anger and even speaking to someone who says that they care very much about you, it doesn't do any good.
Speaker: the fact that they care can prevent you from saying certain things, right? Like she couldn't possibly accuse her husband of hurting her. He's made it clear how much he is trying to help and values her and loves her. He says it all the time. Yep. Okay. So there's that sense of confinement into roles by other people here, literally into one room.
Speaker: Which I think is interesting because we sort of ended our conversation about House on the Borderland. We talked about, is this about a transition in what home means and the purpose of a home? And I wonder if this story is reflecting a transition as well. Like it starts out that she and her husband, John, are ordinary people. And so being in this hereditary estate is kind of a rare
Speaker: treat, but it's that dealing with the shift in how property is related to family. And then also like how women in the domestic sphere and that their roles are changing. What is the change that you think is happening? This book is from like 1912 or the story. I mean, sometime in the first 15 years of the 20th century, right? Published? No, published 1892. Okay, 1892.
Speaker: So what shift do you think is being captured here? I think it's ahead of its time talking about this shift because it does make me think of a shift in women moving outside of the home or having responsibilities that's not maintaining a home and taking care of children. So a sort of a proto Betty Friedan, feminine, mystique, women are drowning in the home and because they're bored, their lives don't have sufficient meaning, right? Yes.
Speaker: And that book came out in the 50s, so I see what you mean about it being advanced. Yeah, I see that. She appears to be much higher class, but confined by that in its own way because she outsources everything to her sister -in -law.
Speaker: and also maybe a helper. I don't know if you noticed, but she calls, you know, there's her sister -in -law, but then she also mentions the three different names of women, and it's unclear if she's just not doing a good job of keeping track of someone, her sister's name, or there's also a housekeeper, or there's a succession of them.
Speaker: Or maybe it's meant to suggest that to her the help is so generic she can't even remember their names. I don't know. But the point is she has people to depend on who handle the work, which is part of why she has this problem. Right.
Speaker: Well, that's unfair. She has this problem because of her husband, but her husband can prescribe that she does not work because of their class. Well, and I wondered if there's something about these vague many named women of helpers in the house and then the creeping woman. And then she says that she sometimes she refers to the creeping woman as multiple women, like lots of them around the grounds. And I don't know if there's something there. That's true.
Speaker: Yeah, she does at some point refer to the woman in the wallpaper as the women, is that there's almost an army of them. Can we talk a little bit about the ending where she says she's identifying with the woman in the wallpaper and she says, I've got out at last and you can't put me back because I got rid of the wallpaper. So she has a sense of imprisonment like this woman and wants out. I guess what would that look like if she got out?
Speaker: Because there's not a lot of language of her saying she just yearns to be, you know, a housewife up to her elbows in dishwater and that sort of thing, right?
Speaker: She mentions she'd like to work. She likes reading and writing. I mean, just being able to write in her journal without having to justify it and argue that it's okay. Isn't that enough? Or to hold her baby? Is she neglecting her child? Or is she being prevented from spending time with her child?
Speaker: We don't know. True, we don't. I guess I was just wondering because it seems, as you point out, I agree, there's an identification of the woman in the wallpaper, perhaps with the women who are actually working in her home, which implies she wants that, but she doesn't really say that.
Speaker: And maybe the issue is that she's so isolated and so deprived of any activity that she can't even name what she wants. She just wants out. Like when you're in prison, you just want out. You are not necessarily laying out a specific life plan. And I don't know if that's true either, but maybe that's what's going on in her head, right? She's so far from doing anything that she just knows she wants out.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's someone who has denied her own agency for so long, she doesn't even recognize that that's what's going on. That's the horror for me in the story is like, she can't even see what's surrounding her. It makes sense that she would fixate on something like there's something wrong, I don't know what. And so she fixates on the wallpaper and that becomes the focus of it's got to be the wallpaper is the cause of everything that's wrong.
Speaker: Well, okay. I want to step back because you said she doesn't know what's going on. I think that depends on how you read her statements about her husband and otherwise. I thought those statements were very wink, wink, nudge, nudge. She just loves me so much.
Speaker: I can possibly say anything wrong, but I do sometimes wonder if having a doctor for a husband is why I'm not well. Some of this seems fairly pointed in a way where you could deny it if someone else read your journal. It has a superficial meaning. If her husband found her journal, she could say, yeah, I just recorded how much you love me. But maybe a more subtle person reads it and realizes what's going on. So I think there's a good chance she knows exactly what's going on.
Speaker: matter that she knows right what would that knowledge do for her yeah that's interesting i didn't read it that way i read it as she's convincing herself that like especially with choosing the room like she didn't wanna be up in the nursery she wanna be on the ground floor
Speaker: And of course, John gives us good reasons for why they should be in the nursery. And it seemed to me that she was convincing herself that, yeah, but of course he's right. And of course, I don't like the wallpaper and I don't like this room, but of course he's right and I should just adjust to it. And, you know, so, hmm. Yeah, I think those are two very different readings. I'm not sure they're that opposed. I think when you're in a situation where you don't have power to change it, even if you are completely knowledgeable and fully cognizant of what happens,
Speaker: I think people, and myself included, have done this.
Speaker: I think you see saw back and forth between being willing to admit that to yourself and frankly wishing you didn't admit it to yourself, trying to talk yourself out of it and talk yourself into believing the alternative that your husband just really does care for you and that's good. Yes, I definitely think that happens a lot, unfortunately. I wonder how true it is that she doesn't have power, right? Because what would happen if on that first day she
Speaker: insisted and yelled and screamed and said, no, I want to be on the ground floor. I don't know why I'm fixating on this, but it really bugs me that she doesn't get to pick her room. And it seems early on, what really would have happened? The story doesn't tell us, but I can imagine that if she yelled and screamed and put her foot down and said, no, I want to be on the ground floor,
Speaker: It doesn't matter that we can't be in the same room, you can be in a different, you know what, like if she had really insisted, would her husband have met her with an equal force or would he have let her have her way? You know, I don't know. And so that's kind of like what I want her to do. It's tragic the way her madness develops, and it develops into her creeping around that nursery.
Speaker: instead of yelling and screaming and breaking things and demanding to be heard. So in horror, there's often this idea that you learned too much about the world and that was horrifying. I think sometimes
Speaker: There's also this idea for me at least that you gained some knowledge and it doesn't matter. And in some ways that's even more terrifying. Right. So I think that if she put her foot down about the bedroom, I think she might've ended up confined either in that same room or in some sort of
Speaker: psychiatric facility, what was, I think it was called a sanatorium at the time because husbands had complete legal power, et cetera. You know, it comes down somewhat to the character of her husband, but let's assume she knows him better than we do. And she didn't try that route. So to me, the terrifying thing is maybe she was fully cognizant of what he's doing, how he's treating her, the lack of respect. And it just doesn't matter. Yeah. There's nothing she can do. Right. To me,
Speaker: that's more terrifying than this idea that if she stood up for herself, maybe it'd be different. I agree that that is more terrifying, right? I'm always a little drawn to the idea that having the knowledge doesn't change anything, because I think in the year 2022, certainly the way I was raised in you, there's this idea that if I learn the right things, that alone changes things.
Speaker: I think that's a large part of the idea behind therapy. If you can learn what happened, learn how to articulate it to yourself, that by itself is very healing and causes change. But what if it doesn't? What if knowledge doesn't really matter? It doesn't by itself change your circumstances, right?
Speaker: No, I agree. But what I would like for this character, this unnamed character, is that if she was confined in a mental institution, at least that would be a result of her own action versus a result of inaction. I find it more, I guess, empowering. I feel like that would be more acceptable. It's like, well, these are the consequences of my actions versus accepting the world as it is being an intolerable world and yet accepting it.
Speaker: I mean, is that what you would do? I don't know. I have no idea what I would do. I'd like to say that I would fight and argue and scream, but maybe not. I also enjoy my comfort if my comfort and my familiar house was at risk. I don't know that I would do the brave thing. I don't either for myself. I think it's a hard choice here. I personally don't
Speaker: blame her at all for how this ends up. She's confined by forces bigger than herself. I think there's some bravery and also madness, but bravery in a way and creativity in finding the yellow wallpaper and letting it become so large. Here we are, we're assuming that the haunted
Speaker: part of the haunted house isn't real and she's kind of creating this. So I guess I've circled around and now I'm saying it was all in her head. But if it was, well, she presented it strongly, right? Yeah. Okay. So there was a reading early on of like, are the medications poisoning her? I think you found
Speaker: that wallpaper in this time period might have had arsenic. So what do you think about a chemical influence in this madness? Let me back up a little bit. It says early on that her husband is giving her phosphate and tonics. That was a common treatment at the time for nervous disorders.
Speaker: But there's also the phrase where she says, you know, dare I say if my husband were not a doctor, I would be getting better, which to me could implicate that he's poisoning her either with the tonics or some other way. So I went and in the course of looking up what phosphates do and learning that they are a standard treatment, I learned that Victorian wallpaper often included arsenic. And at about this time period, people were learning that it was causing severe illness.
Speaker: And so it's possible that's a consideration here. That was just background for your question, which was, what if there is a chemical cause here? I mean, if there is, that's horrifying, right? Your possessions are attacking you. Also a little ironic because it's so ugly, right? It's not like something pretty is attacking you. It's something she thought was ugly and wanted gone anyway, and it's poisoning her.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a part two, she notices the smell and the smell becomes stronger when it's, you know, like foggy and bad weather and so they keep the windows closed and that could exacerbate poisoning. Well, so it's very different if her husband is poisoning her, whether it's intentional or not intentional. And then the arsenic, if there's arsenic in the wallpaper, also her like probably like pulling at it and tugging at it doesn't help either. Oh, that's true.
Speaker: so if the house is chemically poisoning her is it a haunted house yeah i don't i don't know either way getting out of the house is the solution and her first reaction to seeing the house is that it's weird it's it's she's the word queer she uses the word strange she just has this aversion to the house in general and if she had had
Speaker: her own desires honored, maybe they would have left the house. Or does she, doesn't she say like she wants to leave the house and her husband's like, uh, we have three weeks left on the lease. We're going to stay until the end of the lease. Right. Very rational. Yeah. And yes, rational. And so that's the big dichotomy of whether or not she's mad or hallucinating her instinct, her intuition is telling her,
Speaker: let's get out of the house, but her husband's reason is saying no. And that reason comes from him being a man and having a lot more power in the society. It comes from being her husband, having power over her. It comes from him being a doctor. So if it's a chemical poisoning and she is somehow intuiting this and therefore they should have listened to her, okay, that's one interpretation.
Speaker: And in that interpretation, her intuition was correct in a hard factual way. There's actually points. Okay, what if that's not true? There's not arsenic in the walls so that her intuition doesn't have that easy win. Is there still something accurate about her intuition? Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. You've talked about a house being a pressure cooker and it's your question, so I want you to ask it.
Speaker: What was my question? Oh, yes. Okay. So related to the pressure cooker imagery is the way that he limits everything to the rational and the scientific, creating an inevitable explosion of the irrational, the emotional, the intuitive.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so. I mean, if if I could point to anything that the story is about, it would be that like that. But let's trace that. So he just he denies her feelings at every turn her feeling that she would like to go to work that she doesn't want to rest as much that the house is not good. Right. And those aren't reasons necessarily. Right. I mean, she says, I think at one point, I don't have a reason for thinking I would do better
Speaker: I was working, that just seems like it would be true. Whereas, of course, he has tons of reasons for why she shouldn't work. It'll just further impair her nervous system.
Speaker: Yep. I mean, it just makes me angry. So, so angry. Like listen to people when they tell you what they want. Like you don't have to justify your instincts or your desires. And I think maybe it's just personal for me because I feel like it took me a long time to follow my gut instinct and
Speaker: It took me a long time to realize that when I followed my gut instinct in making decisions, big and small decisions, I never regretted it. However, if I rationalized myself to do something different from what my gut was telling me, I have regretted it. And it took some hard experience to figure that out. That was a huge shift for me personally to stop relying on this rational exercise.
Speaker: of putting data behind things and it's all personal and statistical and trying to use that when really the choice for me was maybe didn't fit with what objectively was a good decision. It sounds like there's an example here that you're thinking of.
Speaker: I can't think of any one example. It happened over and over again, many different times, you know, picking jobs, picking a place to live, picking friends, choosing a certain diet or lifestyle or habit, like all of those things. So I have a general question and then I'll explain how I got there. There's some history. My general question is, I hear what you're saying about the need for, let's call it intuition in personal choices. Is there something about the home
Speaker: that also requires an intuitive touch and not necessarily a scientific or rational. And let me explain that by saying that at this time period in American history, this was right when the progressives were about to take off. And a huge part of the progressive project was to modernize home life. And that manifested in a number of ways, including the L -shaped kitchen counter, or the U -shaped counter, like a kitchen counter that was
Speaker: designed by a scientist in the late 1910s as the most efficient way to conduct a kitchen. Because you stand at one place and things are in reach to your right, to your left. For the first time, we had motion studies done both in the factory and for the home about efficiency. You began to see
Speaker: The first explosion of technology in the kitchen and modern foods, everything. I mean, canning was a little older than that, but proto vacuum cleaners. You saw much more what we would now call factory farming, but at that time seemed like the height of modernity. And a lot of that was very specifically aimed at the woman because she was seen to be in charge of the household.
Speaker: And if you followed these steps, you would raise the right children who would be healthy in the right ways.
Speaker: And a lot of it, frankly, was also really racist. There were a lot of sort of, I mean this in a non -religious sense, but almost progressive missionaries who would go into immigrant quarters and teach them the right way to be housewives, which obviously meant this very specific middle -class white way of doing it. But anyway, all that to say at this time, there's this big project brewing about a scientific approach to domestic space and to housekeeping. The term home economics,
Speaker: That comes from now, the idea of housekeeping as a science. Is that good? You know, to have a sort of scientific or rational approach to the home, obviously we see here the extreme end of it. And John, you shouldn't do that. Is there a lesser version that's okay? It's the concept of what is good or what is the right way to run a home that bugs me. Like, yes. Okay. Yeah. It's whatever works for you and be like,
Speaker: if these efficiency and I love that stuff. I love learning about like, how color coding buttons and improves in efficiency. Like, I love that stuff. I color code everything, you know what I mean? Like, but it's it works for me, right? And there are many, many people
Speaker: people in my own family maybe for whom it does not work and if I try to impose my systems on the people I love it does drive them crazy and that I think this applies to John he needs to be a husband to this person he shouldn't be her doctor maybe it's about a public persona and a private persona and
Speaker: Interesting. We should separate that out. If you serve a role as a doctor or if I serve a role as a project manager in my job, trying to bring that into my home is going to ruin my relationships because it doesn't fit. I mean, what I kind of get about this is the home, the house, the domestic space is supposed to be
Speaker: a little special, different, and maybe have more space in it for what I'm going to call the human. It's not necessarily logical or illogical. It's just personal to those people, right? Absolutely. I'm very sympathetic to this. I like, in general, the idea that there's certain ways of knowing or being that can't necessarily be quantified or fit into logical versus illogical. And I think housekeeping, homemaking,
Speaker: actually homemaking is the right term, is one of those. There are people who are very good at it and you can see the results. So in that way it is a talent and a skill, but not when you can explain or describe or transmit to others, not a science. You certainly can't test it and prove it. Right. And you kind of quoted that part before where she's like, I don't know, but I have a feeling. And like having that freedom to experiment and see what works.
Speaker: Like that's what I want for our protagonist. Yeah. Okay. So we've just described the freedom to figure out what works, homemaking as a very valuable skill and.
Speaker: this idea that you can find not just value, but maybe something closer to validation in your home space. So that's the good version of it. But maybe that dream can also be confining, right? As I think we talked about in the Abigail Lane episode, the American dream is a dream that also can confine and limit in certain ways. And maybe this dream of homemaking is also like that.
Speaker: Well, so being confined, I mean, she's physically confined in the home. Like, hmm. It's also not their home. I don't know if that's extremely important to the story. Yeah, I did find that interesting. It kind of goes to what you were saying in our last episode about inheriting traditions and the pressure of those because she, you know, she comes into this estate house and it drives her mad, right? The pressure of it in some way drives her mad.
Speaker: Or maybe you could say that because it's not her home.
Speaker: There's an additional layer of alienation and lack of agency. You're right. It is a flaw in this argument that it's not her home. Right. And so I want to connect this to how she relates to the objects in the house. There's a lot said about how the bed is fixed and nailed to the floor. And really like if you're renting a house, should you be pulling the wallpaper off the wall, even if it is already damaged? Like that's a nice little subversion, you know, that she's just like,
Speaker: Nope, I'm going to do this. It's my, she kind of claims the wallpaper as her own. Like she doesn't even want her husband or sister in law looking at it too much because it's, it becomes her own fixation and it belongs to her and she doesn't want it to reveal its secrets to them. So interesting you say that legally there is a distinction between the objects and a home and the fixtures. And if you sell, if you buy or sell her home, that comes with the fixtures.
Speaker: So if something is affixed, like a sconce in the wall or something that's bolted down, that is legally part of the house and that is what was bought or sold. So when the current occupant goes to move out, they are not allowed to take that. And that's why these contracts normally specify what's going to happen with all the appliances, because those are fixtures that by default would go with the home in most cases.
Speaker: I guess not the microwave because you just unplug it. But like you, I started thinking about, yeah, what's her relationship to objects? But then I realized that these objects are affixed to the house here. Yeah. And that makes me think of she remembers the furniture in her childhood bedroom. And she would anthropomorphize it where the way that the knobs looked like eyes. And it seemed like most of the furniture in her childhood bedroom felt friendly to her.
Speaker: And there was a chair that looked especially friendly and safe that she thought she could go, if something else scared her, she could go jump in that chair and she would be safe. And so I thought that was interesting that like in her childhood, she had a room that felt safe. And now as an adult, the room is not safe.
Speaker: Right. I mean, this room definitely is not right. Which makes me think of like, you know, what the expectations of an adult woman and a wife, like, is that part of this pressure? I mean, I would guess so. I guess we should name what that pressure is, right? To have a
Speaker: perfectly produced domestic space that is warm and inviting at all times and yet also functional and efficient that produces good humans who are well connected to one another and capable of going out in the world and achieving.
Speaker: something like that, right? It's a lot of pressure. Yes, but in this story specifically, it's the role of submissive wife that, right, like she's supposed to obey her husband. Yes, she is, but also he's kind of breaking the rules too. At this time, like over the course of the Victorian era, for the first time we had the concept
Speaker: in the West of a division of spheres of influence that the man was outside the home and the woman was in charge of the domestic state space. That's not an eternal idea at all. Previously, homes were essentially also businesses and both parties worked out of the home, which was a business. You didn't have this idea of women as guardians of the domestic space.
Speaker: which anyway was only possible because they had legions of servants. We're talking about a very Western European white woman idea. But that was the idea that was circulating at the time. And he's kind of breaking the rules because he's not staying in his lane. He's telling her what to do at home where she's supposed to be supposed to be in charge. Right. Because she already has a nervous condition. So it's like she's not
Speaker: meeting expectations and so he has to step in. That's true, which I guess we could say was postpartum. There's a baby around. That's very much, that's a term we would use today. I mean, it's a real thing. I'm not sure that was at all in the consideration of Perkins when she wrote this because she only mentions the baby once.
Speaker: Let's talk about the wallpaper. And, you know, the patterns, she talks about the patterns, keeping this creeping woman, the creeping woman is like shaking trying to get out. And somehow removing the wallpaper lets lets the creeping woman out, although she sneaks out, and our narrator sees her around the house and around the grounds, and she thinks she might be, you know, she, she feels like the woman could be surprising her, you know, could
Speaker: be watching her and stuff like that. And then at the end, she claims to be the creeping woman. She claims like, I've been released, you can't put me back in. And it seems to match this idea of like someone who doesn't fit into the house. She has to creep and crawl around. She can't walk like a full human. She has to creep and she has to be in the corners and she has to hide when someone comes. And it's like, because she doesn't have a role in the house,
Speaker: she's just sort of hanging around. Well, maybe, but something you said earlier makes me think isn't the perfectly submissive wife also creeping around? You know, not disturbing anyone, staying out of the way. If someone comes over, you know, going to the back room, certainly not seeking to interact with the visitors who are here for her husband, surely. Right. I mean, there's some overlap between creeping around
Speaker: and being very submissive, avoiding notice, just generally trying not to be seen, right? Yeah. Yeah. So our narrator, we're assuming this. I don't think there's a lot of information about this in the story, but if we say that our narrator is in some way rejecting that role or incapable of living up to it, but then at the end, is she accepting the role or rejecting it by becoming the creeping woman?
Speaker: Well, she kind of gets forced into it by the circumstances, right? Which is brutal, right? There's this role you're trying to avoid and other people in your life set up the contours and confines of your life in such a way that you were forced into it or into what looks a lot like it. And the fact that if she leaves that room or the house, she's heavily watched and questioned and limited. She says somewhere else that she sometimes sneaks out and goes for a walk. She has to sneak out.
Speaker: So maybe it's kind of both, you know, she's not embracing it wholeheartedly, but she's having to embrace behaviors that end up being similar and looking the same.
Speaker: Also horrifying, right? Uh, yeah, definitely. Um, to make anything of the idea that there's lots of women creeping women in the wallpaper and maybe they come out and if you're that isolated and forced into a role, which I assume also inhibits women's ability to communicate with each other. Maybe you look out and it feels like you see a legion of creeping submissive women everywhere.
Speaker: And that's kind of frightening because they're all in their roles. They seem to know what they're doing. There's sort of a conspiracy of silence maybe. And it seems like they're all legion. Why don't I just join them? I don't know. These are just thoughts. That makes sense. Doesn't she say about Jenny, her sister -in -law? Didn't she say that Jenny seems to be really happy in the role? Yes. It's also unclear that Jenny is the sister -in -law.
Speaker: So she mentions the sister -in -law in one paragraph and then Jenny who appears to be the housekeeper. But then she also talks about a Mary and an Anne who are the housekeepers maybe. So there's some fluidity in the identities of the other women, perhaps intentionally. But yeah, she does say, oh, this woman seems so happy having this role. I wish I could be like her. Yeah. That makes me remember there's a line
Speaker: where she also says about this housekeeper or whoever she is, this housekeeper is going to prepare their house for them to move back into. And I think that was very common if you had servants, they would go ahead and prepare your house for you. But my initial reaction as a woman in 2022 is that I wouldn't like that. I wouldn't want someone else setting up my house in the way that they think is right. I would want to have agency and direct control over that.
Speaker: even though I think it was probably customer at the time, that seems like another form of loss, an alienation in there.
Speaker: Yeah, I know I've been in hotels or something and wanting something a certain way and requesting something a certain way, but then the staff just does what they do anyway. They do what works for them. I can't imagine if that was happening in my own house. And I think I've seen plenty of TV shows of the lady of the house losing her temper about, I wanted it this way. And the servants are just like, oh, there she goes complaining again. It's like, it's her freaking house.
Speaker: I mean, is it I mean, if you have if you have a huge staff and they also all live there and they do most of the work and they're probably there more often than you you're off doing whatever is you're doing going between houses traveling.
Speaker: I'm assuming we're talking about wealthy people. Is it your house? I mean, really, in the ways that matter? Yeah. I mean, she's in a hereditary house. They're renting it. They don't really belong there. They're not supposed to be there in some way. So I think I jumped to topics there. But yeah, that just made me think of like, oh, maybe they are really not supposed to be there in that house. You think maybe they're squatting? No, no, no. Not that far.
Speaker: That would be such a twist though. Her respectable husband has actually just sent them to squat in this abandoned zone or something. Well, that feeling of not belonging. They don't belong in the house. She doesn't belong as a wife. She doesn't belong as a mother. I mean, it's just sad. Do you want to say anything about just the style of writing? It's written as if she's writing her journal entries and she says she has to write in secret. And so it's all from her perspective. I mean, that's a little bit
Speaker: stifling as well, just to be in this one character's head as she goes, goes mad. Yeah. And that's part of why we don't know if this is a haunted house or if she's just haunted. You know, if we don't, we don't know if other people are experiencing some aspect of this or it's caused by the house or entirely by her. Right. Yeah. Are we ready to move on to genre themes? Yes. So, you know, I think we've talked about a couple of these. There's an inversion of a couple of the themes. So I think in a lot of haunted houses,
Speaker: or haunted house stories, there's someone who is the skeptic, the man or woman of science who's not impressed. Ultimately, in a lot of these stories, they end up either dying early on or being shown that, yes, this house is supernatural in some horrific way. So here, that's John, her husband, obviously. He doesn't die, but he faints. And at the end of the story, he's just fainted. She continues. Well, and he is also confronted full force with
Speaker: irrational. It happens to be in the form of his wife, but he kind of does get his comeuppance in a way.
Speaker: Oh yeah, that really bugged me in this story where there's a moment where she's, when she seems to be doing better because she is sort of happy trying to understand the wallpaper and her husband's like, you seem, you have a healthier appetite. You have gained weight. And she's like, well, maybe my body is healthy, but my mind is, and then she has to stop herself from finishing the sentence. And her husband is like, don't even think that. Like she's not even allowed to think.
Speaker: that technique of just, if you think it, then you will make it real. In a man of science like that, I've had experience with that. And it seems justified that he has this horrifying comeuppance, as you called it, where like, you've been trying to squash this and squash this, and it's just grown. And now it has taken over your life. That's fascinating what you said, because this idea of
Speaker: If you verbalize it, you realize it, it becomes true. We do hear that from John, the man of science. And I think, you know, I've certainly heard that from more rational than thou types, but that's actually really kind of a magical idea, right? That your brain has this power to create things. And particularly in haunted houses or in these haunted house stories, your
Speaker: brain manifests real things. Like in this genre of all places, that statement is loaded and it is true, but not in the way the speaker thinks.
Speaker: Another trope that we have seen is that there's some reason someone is stuck in the house, you know, by a mortgage, for example, as in 99 Fear Street. But here she's literally imprisoned in the house and isolated, like isolated from the other people in the house. Yes. Yeah. So the Hill House was kind of away in the country and the nearby towns people didn't like it. So it had this sense of physical isolation.
Speaker: this, the isolation is down to one room and one person. We also have sort of the inverse of the skeptical character, someone who is seeking it out maybe a little too much. I think you could argue that was her with a couple things she says at the beginning, but oh, you know, imagine the former residents walking around the garden. She doesn't lean real hard into it, but we have seen that sort of character before and they often end up
Speaker: experiencing a little too much of it. So being open to the supernatural makes you a target. Yeah, I like that better. And then we've seen this a lot. The protagonist becomes the ghost and we've seen it in many different ways. Like she becomes
Speaker: the creeping woman slightly different from Callie and 99 Fierce Street becoming a ghost and but similar to Eleanor who acts like a ghost before she dies. She acts by knocking on the doors and wandering around at night and listening in on everybody. That's right. And back in the shining
Speaker: become similar to these ghostly figures like the butler who serve the hotel. Yeah, so that's definitely a theme. Yeah. Do you have final thoughts about the yellow wallpaper? Yes, because there's something we meant to talk about that we didn't and it's the role of social media and whether you could have a scenario like this nowadays or is the yellow part, the yellow wallpaper nowadays is just you staring at your phone and suddenly going insane. Yes, and that...
Speaker: That is too close to my home. The idea of finding patterns and imposing patterns like that sounds like a conspiracy theory. People who have conspiracy theories, they take random bits of information and they
Speaker: Glom them together to form this conspiracy and like it seems to be a very similar mental process as our character Observing the patterns in the wallpaper and saying there's a woman behind them imprisoned by the pattern You know, it's it seems very similar it's and staring at our screen instead of being able to go walk walk around and connect with people in our real lives and Yeah, I think that that it's a very good parallel
Speaker: Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Okay, so there's a couple, there's a little more to it, right? I mean, this woman is physically confined in a time where you could not communicate much with people outside your immediate physical location. You know, there's letters, there's telegrams, there's early telephone. Not common, not really available. So part of it is the boredom and the isolation. But now we have devices where you never have to be bored.
Speaker: And yet we still kind of get the same effect. Yeah. In theory, I have the whole world in my house. I should never have this problem or nor anyone else of being driven mad by isolation and boredom.
Speaker: But it's looking at our opening quote, she describes the wallpaper as having these lame, uncertain curves and the pattern irritates and provokes study. And I feel like that could be applied to my experience of being on Twitter. There's a conversation happening here, but it's not really traceable. There's not really a clear pattern because there's so much information
Speaker: It becomes noise. It becomes boring. It gets reduced to such typical avenues and it seems like the conversation online has gotten a lot narrower and it's harder to find the cool new things.
Speaker: and I just cycle between the same three or four websites and it's like looking at the wallpaper on four different walls. Literally, like the same, it's just all the social media sites sharing images of posts on the other social media sites. Like that literally happens. Even if you go looking for a topic, it's so hard to find now. I mean, there's a real decay
Speaker: in search engines as well, right? As it became increasingly optimized for their profit, right? Like I'll go, I'll read a book. I know someone else has read this book and had thoughts about it, right? It's not that niche. And if you try to look it up, all you find are the sites that sell the book. And yeah, I've tried other search engines and there's some stuff you can kind of do to juice it, but not much. It's really collapsed. It's all yellow.
Speaker: So my final thoughts, it's incredibly sad. It makes me want to police my own mind because not knowing your own self. That's a terrifying thing about going crazy.
Speaker: your brain is still making connections and making patterns and building rationality, but it does so in a bonkers way. And how do you live when your own mind plays tricks on you? Right. And you don't, you don't know, necessarily, it's, it's only in conversation and with other people that
Speaker: Maybe you figure it out before you get too far gone and maybe not. Right. And then, but then there's the whole paradox of like, okay, so you rely on your loved ones to tell you if you are behaving irrationally. And in this story, it feels very much like she was not behaving irrationally and her husband was telling her she was wrong and telling her that she was. There's not a solid objective truth to rely on. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Uh, I,
Speaker: I find this to be very frightening because to me it's not clear what she could have done. I think when the main character goes mad and you almost feel like congratulating her, like, good job. You took this and you turned it into your own thing, even though people were trying not to let you, right? That's bad, right? When you feel almost happy for them. But that's how I feel for her, honestly.
Speaker: Yeah. So I don't know that I particularly have a final thought other than just, we should all keep an eye out for our versions of the yellow wallpaper. Sure. That topic or whatever we get too interested in. Yeah. All right. Listeners, what did you think of the yellow wallpaper?
Speaker: Do you think this counts as a haunted house story? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing it to openingquestionatgmail .com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod .com. Be sure to send your feedback by November 13 so we can include it in our feedback episode. Our next and final book discussion will be about House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
Speaker: Read with us. You can get your copy by using the affiliate link in our show notes. The Book Club podcast is produced by Carly Jackson and Carolyn Gorman. Music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.
