The Legacy of Gilman’s Wallpaper in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Temporary Matter’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay considers the literary legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) by arguing that the ‘papered wall’ continues to signify confinement and trauma in the Paris of James Baldwin's novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) and the Boston of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ (1999). In the first essay to analyse these three texts together, I contend that such comparative reading generates new critical and interpretative insights that further our understanding of these writers’ work. In each text, wallpaper becomes a crucial motif suggesting the absence of a permanent home and the traumatic aftereffects of an unnamed, male baby’s birth. But whereas Gilman focuses upon occluded female experience, Baldwin and Lahiri recuperate a father’s sorrow in the wake of a stillbirth. That Giovanni’s heterosexual relationship and the child it produces cannot survive reveals Baldwin’s striking, mid-century critique of America, France, and Italy as sites of heterosexism and gay oppression. While Baldwin masculinises postpartum grief and anticipates later debates about queer futurity, Lahiri exposes the fragility of an outwardly successful Bengali American couple, whose slippery foothold in late-20th-century America is powerfully exposed through the death of their son.