Joy That Kills: Freedom & Mortality in Early Feminist Literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894) are not only two of the most quintessential narratives to ever reach publication, but also to provide honest, sharp insight into the servitude of domestic life and feminine existence. The female characters of each story undergo challenging experiences that stimulate an arrival to consciousness; they were previously unaware of their own peril, moving about life under patriarchal governance. This results in a personal uprising for each character which, like most revolutionary movements, is met with opposition—specifically, the opposition of androcentric societal expectations. Both heroines meet a similar fate as a consequence of exploring their newfound desire for autonomy: The Yellow Wallpaper’s unnamed narrator slips into madness, and Mrs. Mallard of The Story of an Hour dies of shock. For women at the turn of the 20th century, death and obscurity were the only modes of liberation in a society hinged upon female oppression.

The setting of each story is the same: the main characters spend the majority of their transformations confined to one room. However, for each woman, this means something completely different. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper has been shut into a nursery more or less against her will. Her husband insists she pass the time trapped within its ugly, yellow walls, symbolizing his control over her life and, even more so, his tendency to infantilize her. Mrs. Mallard, on the other hand, exhibits agency by choosing to lock herself in her bedroom after hearing the news of her husband’s untimely death. Her decision to retreat to her bedroom in the pursuit of privacy and solace is the first decision she makes as a “free” woman. Therefore, this undisturbed, solitary moment in the bedroom represents her new state of independence. She is alone in her room, and in her judgments from here on out.

The way in which the one-room setting serves the same purpose for each woman is that the real change takes place once the walls of the room have been breached. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper descends into a manic, almost feral madness once she begins to peel away at the story’s namesake, freeing the woman she sees trapped inside and simultaneously becoming that woman—simultaneously ‘freeing’ herself. Mrs. Mallard, inside of her room, realizes the gravity of her new state of independence and revels in it privately, leaving the room a different woman than she was upon entering. The single room in each story, in this way, resembles a cocoon, or a womb; it is a feminine chamber and an incubator for rebirth.

Unfortunately, the women in both stories only get so close to the freedom for which they previously didn’t even know they yearned. The unnamed narrator’s exploration and delicate analysis of the yellow wallpaper replicates her own self-exploration. Her desire to internalize the world around her is evident in the very fact that she is journaling in secret, despite the wishes of her husband. She rebels because she longs to know herself and to express her thoughts by any means possible. It is throughout this process that she learns of her own dissatisfaction with being relegated to a life of thoughtless domesticity. However, by this time it is already too late; like the woman inside of the wallpaper, she is fastened into this role so tightly to prevent any means of escaping. Mrs. Mallard reaches the same conclusions regarding her own attitudes toward the life to which she has been sanctioned, but she only experiences the brief rapture of having control before she learns that her husband is not, in fact, dead.

For these reasons, the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper withdraws into madness as her only viable means of escaping the dreadful life she is expected to lead. Mrs. Mallard, having experienced the climax of her life, having grasped at the highest summit for which she could possibly reach, dies in lieu of living a life absent of agency. When she sees her husband walk through the door, the shock of losing the independence she just gained alone in her room is enough to kill her. Though both of these outcomes may seem like conclusions to simple tales of misfortune, they are not unhappy endings. The beauty of each woman’s undoing is that, in realizing the preciousness of independent thought, the idea of going on in an oppressive male-dominated society is enough to make both of them surrender to the ‘other side.’ Whatever they find over there has surely got to be better than a routinely female life, laid out by ignorantly condescending men.

References

Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Print.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper. Print.