Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” A Feminist’s Story of Multiple Personality

In this short story, a young married mother feels sick, but says that her physician husband does not take her seriously. “You see he does not believe I am sick!” For he has told her that she has only a “temporary nervous depression” for which he is prescribing a rest-cure in which she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.” “Personally,” she says, “I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

So the nature of her condition is confusing. She says that she cries all the time, is too nervous to care for her baby, has had a poor appetite, and has just not been able to handle things. Is this postpartum depression? But she feels that work, excitement, and a change would do her good. Is she a victim of the patriarchy? What’s going on here?

And then there is her room with the yellow wallpaper, which is oppressive to her in both sight and smell. Moreover, she sees eyes and a creeping woman in the wallpaper.  But, as she also says, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” And she sympathizes with, and wants to set free, the one or more women in the wallpaper. In fact, she’s not upset when the woman or women in the wallpaper come out and creep about. She speaks of restraining them if they were to try to go away.

As these hallucinations and delusions progress, she says that she actually feels less sick. “I’m feeling ever so much better!” Indeed, the story ends triumphantly, with the woman in the wallpaper having come out and taken over the narration of the story. “I’ve come out at last” and “you can’t put me back!” [This reminds me of the ending of Dostoevsky's The Double, when the double has triumphantly taken over, and the regular self is being taken to the mental hospital.]

Thus, the story has described a woman who has two (or more) personalities. The first one hates the yellow color of the wallpaper. The second one—who says, “I don’t want to go outside…for outside…everything is green instead of yellow”—prefers the color yellow.

The problem with a diagnosis of psychosis—whether postpartum, schizophrenic, or patriarchal oppression—is that none of these psychoses involves switches in personality. Only multiple personality does. [And to generalize, whenever you see a person with psychotic symptoms, but whose overall thinking and functioning in life are not psychotic, consider the possibility of multiple personality, which is not psychotic, but may superficially look psychotic.]

Moreover, the story suggests that this woman’s potential and capacity for such experiences has been present since childhood. “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.” [As discussed previously in this blog, multiple personality has a childhood onset.]

So this is a story about a woman with multiple personality who has a crisis due to a patriarchal society and a family life that she found oppressive, and due to an alternate personality who had been waiting for an opportunity to come out.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” [1892] in The Book of Doppelgängers: Featuring stories from famous authors of the weird, edited by Robert Sterling. Doylestown Pennsylvania, Betancourt & Co., 2003.