‘Handled with a Chain’: Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and the Dangers of the Arabesque

Abstract

In her 1903 polemic The Home: Its Work and Influence, Charlotte Perkins Gilman thundered, ‘This power of home-influence we cannot fail to see, but we have bowed to it in blind idolatry as one of unmixed influence, instead of studying with jealous care that so large a force be wisely guarded and restrained.’1 Her point, throughout The Home, as well as her phenomenally successful Women and Economics (1898) and her feminist utopian novel Herland (1915), was that the middle-class home in Gilded-Age America was by no means a benign institution, and that claiming otherwise was both erroneous and pernicious. Combining sexual companionship, child-rearing, and economic dependence, the nineteenth-century middle-class American home turned women into slavish drudges, and men into selfish tyrants, yet, rather than criticizing or seeking to alter the system itself, she argued, society at large repeatedly blamed individual wives, husbands, children, even specific houses, for the ills found within it. Gilman therefore urged that drunkenness, infidelity, domestic violence, infant and maternal mortality and illness, juvenile delinquency, and psychological disorders such as neurasthenia should not be seen as symptoms of the moral degeneracy of those who display such behavioral problems. Instead, the home itself needed to be totally reconceived and reformed, along socialist and collectivist, rather than individualist and capitalist, lines.