I don’t know how I missed this story as almost everyone I know says that they read this in high school. I had to spend my high school days slogging through reading things like My Antonia and Pride and Prejudice *Shudder*. Wouldn’t P&P have been a better story if Elizabeth Bennett slipped into gibbering insanity at the end of the story?
Photo from: University of Minnesota Theatre Arts & Dance
The Yellow Wallpaper is horror short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which you can read or listen to here, that tells the tale a woman’s decent into madness as she is confined to her bedroom by her husband because of her “”temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency,”, and slowly loses her mind in the grotesque yellow wallpaper, first finding women trapped in it, then to trying to help the woman escape, followed by becoming the woman herself. It is an eerie story whose last lines sent chills up my spine:
He stopped short by the door.
“What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!”
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
There are many criticisms and interpretations of the Yellow Wallpaper and if you want to check out a summed up version you can do so here.
What I want to do is take a look at this story from the lens of the Horror Struck project. Dealing with the decent into madness, a horror psychology theme can easily be drawn from this story. While reading this story the work of psychoanalysts Melanie Kline and early work Jacques Lacan came to mind, specifically the idea of subject/object split. In psychoanalysis under normal circumstances we all learn to separate ourselves from the world around us, this is usually learned during infancy. However in the case of a psychotic this ability is lost or never learned, for a example a psychotic may see a glass fall and shatter and suddenly they feel as if they have shattered as well. In the Yellow Wallpaper we see the decent into madness and this very ability slipping from our heroine. Her mind becomes the pattern of the yellow wallpaper and the pattern becomes her, even to the extent that her delusions of the woman who is, at first a stranger,who is being imprisoned in the wallpaper than she identifies herself as being the woman. The subject and the object cease to be separated.
As far as the type of horror goes, this horror short story, is a great example of the horror of personality. Our protagonist is trying to make find meaning in her very controlled and choice-less confinement, however in her attempts to find meaning she loses her sanity and her ability to make meaning-full choices, she must now compulsively “creep” along, trapped in the groove in the wall, just as trapped now as she ever was within the Yellow Wallpaper. The scary thing “out there” is really the scary thing “in here with me”.
There is an ambiguity in this story that causes us to wonder where the madness stops and truth begins, is it a decent into madness or is it, as in McGrath’s Spider, the protagonist has always been a raving lunatic and we only think that there was a decent into madness. Ambiguity is the key to horror, whether it is the experienced through an unreliable narrator or in the very real hell of the psychotic who spends every day wondering “Am I the glass or is the glass me?” either way unresolved ambiguity never fails to leave us horror struck.
Do you agree or disagree about ambiguity being a key to horror? Why or why not? Thoughts?
Horror Struck 