THE WRITING OF “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”: A DOUBLE PALIMPSEST Catherine Golden* The first-person narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper” unfolds as a diary written by a woman undergoing a three-month rest cure for a postpartum depression.1 Judith Fetterley has argued that the wallpaper functions as a text through which the narrator expresses herself; its pattern becomes the dominant text and the woman behind the pattern the subtext with which the narrator identifies.2 To recall the terminology of The Madwoman in the Attic, the yellow wallpaper thus can be perceived as a “palimpsest.” Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story itself can be read as a palimp sest. The hallucinations and dramatic actions of tearing the wallpaper and creeping on the floor comprise the dominant text, but the writing com prises the second muted text, informing the narrator’s final characteriza tion. This muted text shows how the narrator fictionalizes herself as the audience of her story. Forbidden to write but continuing to do so in secret, the narrator comes to express herself by writing her own text. As she comes to see the wallpaper as a palimpsest, she presents herself on paper in a way that suggests that, although mad, she is not completely “destroyed”3 by her patriarchal society. As the story unfolds, the narrator’s writing ceases to match her thoughts and actions or to convey a cohesive characteriza tion of a timid oppressed figure. The increased use of “I” and her syntac tical placement of the nominative case pronoun within her own sentences demonstrate a positive change in self-presentation precisely at the point when her actions dramatically compromise her sanity and condemn her to madness.4 The narrator records her stay in a country ancestral hall through ten diary-like entries, each undated and separated only by several lines of blank space. The separateness of these units can be seen as a spatial indication of the narrator’s own fragmented sense of self.5 As Waiter Ong notes, the audience of a diarist is oneself “encased in fictions. . . . The diarist pretend ing to be talking to himself has also, since he is writing, to pretend he is somehow not there. And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines he is? Or would like to be?”6 Although the narrator may in fact be writing for a fictional self, the way she imagines this selfto be changes as the entries continue. The writing in her early entries matches the dominant text of *Catherine Golden is an Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. She has published in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Salmagundi, TheJournal ofAesthetic Educa tion, and Teaching English in the Two Year College. She is currently at work on a book on Victorian authors as illustrators. her thoughts and actions. In the opening sentence the narrator introduces her husband before herself: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”7 Rarely used for self-expression, the reflexive case more effectively emphasizes an ante cedent rather than replaces a subject. The narrator who claims she wants very much to write also hides her own belief that writing is “a great relief to my mind” (p. 10) by placing this insight in parentheses. Punctuation marks eclipse the forcefulness of this belief, which directly confronts the opinion of those who prescribe her rest cure: her physician-husband, John, who “hates to have [her] write a word” (p. 13); her physician brother; the socially prominent nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell, who is “just like John and [her] brother, only more so!” (p. 19); and even John’s sister Jennie, an “enthusiastic housekeeper” who “thinks it is the writing which made [her], sick!” (pp. 17-18). At this point in the story the self-consciousness displayed through punctuational subordination keeps the narrator in a subordinate place within her sentences. The muted text matches the domi nant text ofher actions, which at this point reveals the narrator as fanciful and fearful. Even though her room initially repulses her, she rests in the former nursery because John chose it for her. The narrator prefers a room “that...
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Jan 1, 1992
Mary Zeiss Strange 
Open Access