The Yellow Wallpaper and the Covering That Cannot Speak

The Argument

A Room That Names the Woman Instead of Letting Her Name Herself

The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is covered, in the sense the archive traces from Genesis 3, by a definition supplied entirely from outside herself. Her husband John, a physician, prescribes rest, forbids writing, and names her condition and its remedy without her testimony entering the diagnosis at any stage. The room, the wallpaper, and the treatment together function as a covering built by an authority who claims the covering serves the one it covers – the same claim made by every fig-leaf apron and every false covering the archive reads against the coat of skins in Genesis 3:21, except that here the false covering is imposed by another rather than sewn by the self.

The figure the narrator perceives moving behind the pattern becomes, by the story's end, herself. She creeps the room's perimeter, having torn the paper down, having replaced the identity assigned to her with one she constructs from the only material available inside a locked room. Gilman offers no coat of skins in this story – no substitute, no outside remedy accepted or refused, only a covering supplied and a second covering built from what remains once the first is stripped away.

Read against the Genesis argument, "The Yellow Wallpaper" demonstrates that the shape of imposed and self-built coverings operates independently of any character's stated belief. Gilman was not writing theology. The story nonetheless depends, for its horror, on the reader recognizing that a human being's own account of her condition has been replaced by another's account of it.

Supporting Text

The Room and the Pattern