Her Own Prison

This is a literary review/essay that reflects on the characters featured in the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell.

Her Own Prison

Lorraine Hampton

            A prison of the mind; the worst kind, where the demons of One’s own subconscious become ethereal beings with all the reality and tangibility that this paper has in your hands, and all the reality that you yourself possess. These demons then further prey on their hosts like parasites, ticks who find their feeding grounds in the minds of many. This prison was built for women of the past. Prior to advancements in the medical understanding of the mind and mental wellness, if a woman suffered from things such as depression and nervousness, it would be dismissed as hysteria, a wholly female issue that was seen as little more than being a silly woman. A woman who suffered these types of mental instabilities would become isolated from society all together and imprison themselves within their own minds. Many examples of this isolation can be found in women’s literature. Some specific examples could be The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Trifles by Susan Glaspell.

            Trifles is the story of a woman living in a farm house miles from even her own neighbors. This isolation is further increased when her husband refused to allow for a phone line to be put on his property. The woman was once Minnie Foster, a bright and cheerful girl who sang in the choir. However, all that was Minnie foster had disappeared when she married John Wright, a good man but cold and distant.  Minnie had become Mrs. Wright, a poor isolated woman. She had little in the way of company save her husband who always seemed so far away as it was. Most farm housewives had some sort of social interaction thanks to their children, but Minnie was not so blessed; she was unable to bare any children and thus was lonely. This loneliness was only sated when Minnie had found company in a canary who much like Minnie’s former self was bright, cheerful, and full of song. However, even this happiness would be taken, causing her to mentally break. The loneliness that Minnie experienced, along with the physical isolation from society, built up in Minnie, allowing for her demonic parasites to take over.

            In yet another story, we witness this gendered isolation. In the story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the year 1896. This story focuses on a woman suffering from “hysteria” whose husband John and he brother had them move to an old house in the middle of practically nowhere for her health. Of course, aside from the fact that they are the men of her life, she must listen to them because they are both physicians of high standing. She also became isolated from the world in this house. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator describes the house, a place where “There are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.” The passage is an example of the issue of confinement in the story. She was allowed so far as the garden at first, but her isolation wouldn’t stop there. She was eventually kept in only the house, and ultimately, locked inside one specific room. This particular room was decorated in ugly yellow wallpaper. She would stare at the wallpaper, tracing its meaningless pattern, hour after hour, minute after minute, nothing but staring. Her mind was collapsing on itself, to the point where the demons of the mind found a physical presence in that wallpaper. Her isolation prompted these demons to fester and feed. In the end her mind broke, and she acted upon her madness, much like how Mrs. Wright in Trifles eventually broke down and (supposedly) murdered her husband.

            This sort of oppression was not uncommon in women’s literature, but these two cases stand out amongst others for their depiction of the severity of the isolation. Such was the case for many women of the age, all the cases ranging from mild to extreme. Literature on female isolation and depression were most often reflections of aspects of the authors’ lives. Gilman was such a writer; she herself suffered from postpartum depression, for which she was prescribed bed rest for hysteria, much like the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper. One could make a case that the woman in the piece was Gilman herself, or at the least, a piece of her that she believed had succumbed to her demons. As for Glaspell, she was a major advocate for the right and practices of women, and thus could have used Trifles as an expression of the world in which women lived under the oppression of the male gender. In both cases, the authors had either faced isolation or stood against it, and thus express this idea of solitude and separation in their writings.

            Though Trifles and The Yellow Wallpaper are in fact fictional stories, the types of situations that the characters face are very much real. Woman of the Victorian era were oppressed in many ways. To start off, for a woman to interact with society on any level was looked upon with scrutiny. If a woman was away from the home, the assumption was that she was causing trouble; This sort of assuming made the grounds for the angel of the house” archetype. This archetype consisted of the idea that women should stay at home, take care of the children, and keep the house “pure” so that man’s filthy world could not corrupt it. Though the archetype changed per class status, this was the general “ideal” woman. Women were further oppressed due to a lack of education, and common beliefs and misconceptions such as the idea that a woman’s brain was smaller than a man’s or the hysteria condition.  Women all over were put under these archetypes and oppressed, and it took authors like Susan Glaspell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to voice the sense of isolation that these women were kept in.

            If this were the case today, I could assure you hardly any woman would not stand against this conformity, but in the Victorian era, this sort of treatment was a norm and a definition of the way of life for women. Though many women stood against this, there were those who conformed to it, such as Sarah Ellis, who was a major advocate for the “angel of the house” style of life, but still there were many who stood against it. To be forced into a life of oppression is to be like a doll for man. The doll may have its own minds and beliefs, but ultimately it was a man pulling the strings. The men pulling these strings were a major source of physical and mental isolation among the women of the time just as it was in both the previously discussed stories.

            The worst isolation is not that of the physical realm, but that of the mind, where demons will run rampant and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. To play victim to those demons of the mind is the worst kind of isolation. Not only would a woman lose her already low social standing, she would lose what control of her mind she had. If they had not been kept in this prison of her own mind, then perhaps there would have been hope for the women in the previously discussed stories. But such was the life for many women of the age, trapped in their homes and kept from the world. Maybe if they had had some sort of freedom, their own mentally parasitic demons would not have taken hold of them.

Author's Note

This is in no way a man-bashing essay, and i am sorry if offense is taken in any way.