Journal #31 Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Oh The Ambiguity!

QUOTE:

“It was a nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls” (Gilman 809).


SUMMARY:

The room the narrator stays in seems to have actually been a restraining room for mental patients since the hall most likely used to be a mental hospital. She assumes it used to be a nursery for some very restless, troubled children.


RESPONSE:

When I first read The Yellow Wall-paper, I actually did not pick up on the colonial mansion previously being used as a sort of mental hospital, or asylum. Once that was brought up in class, however, the story seems a lot creepier to me and a little less random. I’m having a hard time deciding if I would have wanted a bigger clue to the mansion originally being a mental hospital though, because I like the ambiguity, and I like how many different explanations can be used to describe what exactly happens to the main character. I think that Gilman probably wanted the story to be just as vague and uncertain as the concept of “Neurasthenia,” which seems more like a “sentence” than a sickness.

I guess that’s what makes The Yellow Wall-paper so interesting and disturbing to read though. There are no answers, which actually can lead to readers even wondering if the main character had actually been to that mental hospital before. It led me to simply thinking that confining “nervous” or “hysterical” people to one room can’t be a good thing. Since this was basically the real “cure” Gilman herself had been told to follow, and since she explains her reasons for writing the story in Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wall-paper”?, it’s probably much easier for readers to draw their own conclusions about the significance of the story to Gilman. My conclusion is that Gilman is addressing the possible similarities between a cause and a cure for a questionable disorder.