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Yellow wallpaper quiz
1. What year was the story published and who wrote it?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story and published it in 1892.
2. What, according to John, is wrong with the narrator?
John says the narrator has "temporary nervous depression---a slight
hysterical tendency."
3. What does the narrator's husband do?
Her husband, a doctor, prescribes drugs and medicines and asks her to
stay in bed at a rented summer estate, barring her from writing,
working, and even going outside.
4. Where is the narrator writing from?
She is writing from her bed in the room with the yellow wallpaper,
during the times when her husband/other people are away because they
would prevent her from writing.
5. What does she see in the wall paper?
She watches the wallpaper, initially just seeing random jots and lines
that transformed into repeated pairs of eyes and then an array of
funguses, but ultimately, at night, she sees "two patterns," a woman in
back and bars in front.
6. Freud defines the uncanny as ``nothing new or alien, but something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become
alienated from it only through the process of repression'' (10). Explain
how The Yellow Wallpaper is uncanny. Please use direct quotations.
The Yellow Wallpaper is uncanny because it reveals that the narrator's
repressed concern about the house, ``I would say a haunted house,'' that
John entirely rejects in his ``intense horror of superstition.'' Of
course, the house is ``haunted'' by the creeping woman behind the
wallpaper. The fear of the eerie, yellow-smelling wallpaper and the
house being genuinely harmful is suppressed by a sense of propriety and
the assumption that, according to John, she ``really [is]
better...whether [she] can see it or not.'' The narrator's deep-seated
fears about the therapy and the house are rejected in large part by John
but are ultimately validated.
7. What characters does the narrator resemble in other texts we have
read? Please give examples.
The narrator nearing the end of the story is similar to Hyde, an
offputting, unhealthy image that terrifies others (at the very end, she
makes her husband faint from her creeping about the room). But at the
beginning, she has a somewhat critical view of her husband and of the
medicine he practices, which correspond to Watson and his passive
criticism of Sherlock's cocaine "habit." She is reasonable in, for
example, her not outright rejection of faith and careful superstition,
unlike her husband or Sherlock Holmes whom appeal solely to rationality.
8. What genre is The Yellow Wallpaper?
This is a feminist allegory, written as a horror story.
9. Why do you think the author chooses the verb "creep" so many times?
Please give direct quotations as evidence.
Gilman uses "creep" to show the narrator's weakening and tiring from
being holed up in the room so long. The narrator wants to creep because
she hasn't the strength to leave. `` `Open the door, my darling!' `I
can't,' '' shows that the narrator is physically weak, just like the bars
being ``too strong to even try [to leave].'' It also shows the narrator
becoming meek, wanting to become like the woman who ``creeps by
daylight'' and ``hides under the blackberry vines.'' This correlates the
narrator being forced in the house with her descent---not exactly into
madness but into ``awfully lazy'' feebleness and unhealth.
10. Based on references in the story, describe "the rest cure." Why do
you think doctors prescribed it?
"The rest cure" is a prescription to avoid any manual labor or exercise,
or even going outside, and it was probably prescribed to "hysteric"
women because of beliefs that they were fragile and that they would be
healthier if they avoided disturbing stimuli. It might also be that
nervousness was treated like a physical disease comparable to the flu or
a cold because those are often treated with rest.
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