Like knowledge, space, and time, freedom is measured by degrees. Imagine that you are confined – not imprisoned, shackled, marooned or cuffed; not anything so close to zero as that – imagine that you are under house arrest. Now, any limitation of one's physical circumstances, provided it is not totally uncomfortable, can be endured as long as the mind is in its native state – at liberty. So, let us imagine ourselves bound within the smallest circumference of psychological privation: Let us imagine ourselves obsessed. Let us imagine that a single idea, like a terrible star shining so brightly and hotly in the vast sky of your mind that it obscures all others, dominates your thoughts. Oh dear! Now you are surely to go mad; now, the circles of your reasoning become tighter and tighter until they are the noose around the very neck of your soul. Alas! Now you are like the woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper".
Like any good work of fiction, "The Yellow Wall-Paper", published in 1892, is not so easy to analyze but obligingly easy to summarize: A woman – a mother – suffers from an unidentified mental malady; today, we would probably diagnose it as "postpartum depression". Back then, I think the diagnosis would have been "woman", a potentially fatal condition. The woman herself is unnamed, and it is from her perspective that the narrative proceeds. But, we soon discover, the narrative does not really proceed at all; it circulates; it spirals; it eats its own tail. The woman, whom her physician husband has confined to a rented country house to "rest", becomes fixated on the yellow wall-paper which decorates the bedroom where she spends most of her days and nights.
That the woman is not "normal" is not really in doubt – she cries often and without "reasonable cause", and she does not want to see her baby, who earns only passing mention in a single sentence in the whole story. Though she is a writer, she must conceal her vocation, because of the strict rules of "rest" which her husband has imposed – the stimulation would further exhaust her limited resources. The irony here, of course, is that the mind is, usually, the most rebellious kind of creature, and does not, ordinarily, permit even the lightest rider upon its back; it bucks and kicks against the slightest attempt to control it; it must express itself or die. And so the woman writes, secretly, a secrecy for which she must bear the cost – sneaking and subterfuging impose their own tax on one's energy. As a writer, she is acute in her observations and intact in her sense of taste: "It [the wall-paper] 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". Unless we are hermits living in hermetically sealed domes or superhumans with recourse to a Fortress of Solitude, I think we can all sympathize with the fact of sharing domestic space with things or people we, at least temporarily, find frustrating. The husband has agreed to remove the wall-paper, but he is too busy to follow through with the act – he is, after all, a physician. Poor woman, she has no support!
Like any good symbol, the yellow wall-paper has many meanings, and to my jaundiced eye it must represent the turpitude of our era: our pop culture, media culture, hustle culture, hook-up culture, conservative culture, woke culture, cancel culture, and all the other cultures that snake and writhe around each other like thorny brambles under the hot, hot glare of our attention. The woman, sensitive, and with a strong sense of her identity (identity which can only be formed when tested), knows that the world she inhabits is not really a world which values her insights; the yellow wall-paper is literally an insidious design that, although it may not be actively seeking her destruction, would certainly contribute to it. Indeed, it has already captured an entity, or so the woman believes, "At night, in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outsider pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman." Creepy! Behind the papering of posts on the Wall of Facebook, or the curated pattern of images on Instagram, or the monotonous refrain of Notes on Substack, there are shadowy people, people with voice but no dimension, ghosting around; on the line between the living and the dead, they could be simply objects of a febrile imagination, mutilated angels who appear to screech out a "message" and then dissolve into ether. How strange, to constrict oneself so willingly. Perhaps the woman in the yellow wall-paper is you.
Here are the woman's last words: '"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane [the husband's sister]! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"'.