The Yellow Wallpaper

 

 

Here is some wisdom from Maurice Sendak, who describes the illustrator Randolph Caldecott:

“Caldecott is too careful and too elegant an artist to become melodramatic; he never forces an issue, he just touches it lightly. And you can’t say it’s a tragedy, but something hurts. Like a shadow quickly passing over.” 

I first read "The Yellow Wallpaper" at the insistence of a neighbor. She warned me about its interpretation, easily feminist, but admitted that she loved it anyway.

So I sat in her small house and read the story, and once I had finished found that I shared her opinion. The story works. It does what a story does - wraps us up in itself and holds our gaze. And indeed, if you want to hold a reader's gaze you can hardly choose a subject superior to insanity.

I appreciate the idea of "something hurting." At least partly for this reason I find myself more fond of American literature than the other literature we study. Perhaps I owe this to my exposure to American literature while growing up. Or maybe I owe it to the fact that I am more familiar with the cursed world I live in than the heavenly world I'll live in later.

Unlike Caldecott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman does verge on the melodramatic. But, again, given the subject, is anything too dramatic?

The ending of the story, deliciously gruesome, delivers what the reader wishes. Unlike Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth," the ending of which deeply satisfies, "The Yellow Wallpaper" thrills the reader with its wildness.

Perhaps it is because everyone aches that "The Yellow Wallpaper" has, as Dr. Hake says, "Come into its own right" while "The Wife of His Youth" has "gone the way of the dodo." In my opinion, not only do we need -as Christian readers are prone to insist - hopeful endings and redemptive elements, we also need someone willing to acknowledge the depth of our ache.

Chelsea Kolz, fall 2012, senior