18th March: Dark Depths of Yellow

Serious stories are always connected to current affairs or issues experienced by or known to the author. Exceptions can be the ones dealing with topics never out of season, thus they're not really exceptions. After reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper', I supposed it doesn't belong to the latter, so I had to look up its background before evaluating it. The story seemed to be only about a woman driven nuts by a lack of stimuli, so there had to be just more to it. It was reassuring, though, to find out that's exactly the case, only with a reference to the era's medicinal methods partly based on contemporary stereotypes of women.

Her developing madness may be evident from the beginning for those who are keen to suppose it, but assuming other possibilities makes the story more exciting for open-minded readers (provided they don't know the background). Since the narrator is the woman itself, everything is described in a perfectly subjective way. That keeps some questions open, at least unless the creeping woman appears everywhere, that being very typical of madness. Supposing the woman to be more or less sane at the beginning, the wallpaper is already damaged when they arrive, which would allow some space for a fantastic hypnotizing or magical pattern on the wall, though it seems to be ridiculously far from the author's concern.

The criticism of this aspect of the era's medicine is really clear and straightforward: a depressed woman is destroyed being a sister and a wife of two well-recognised doctors, who are never going to assume that their 'modern science' may be flawed at some points. (That should be considered highly unscientific, shouldn't it? It have been typical all along human history, though.)

It's also interesting to see how far we've come from that conception of women (a little bit too far, maybe) that almost totally distinguished their emotional needs – and how this change changed women themselves in the meanwhile.