The
story makes use of a common convention of
the gothic romance. It opens with
the typical hereditary estate, which the narrator is tempted to call a
"haunted house," and then introduces the convention, best known in
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre," of the mysterious mad woman in the
upstairs room. However, the primary
convention the story uses is the traditional difference between how men and
women supposedly approach reality. The
husband, who is a doctor or scientist, has no patience with faith,
superstition, or anything that cannot be physically verified and converted to
mathematical figures. This contrasts
with the wife's imaginative power and her "habit of
story-making."
Serving
as a background to this tension is the wall-paper itself which gives the story
its title--an image of domestic "woman's things," but which takes on
significance because of the nature of the "patterns" that it
embodies. If you isolate all those references to the
wallpaper in the story, you will see how the patterns begin to take on an ominous
expression of reality. The nature of the woman's "madness" is
projective and thus identified with the nature of writing, for she creates
meaningful patterns and then responds to the patterns as if the meaning existed
in them instead of being projected on them.
Although
this may be at least one definition of madness, it is also a definition of the
artist, who creates meaning out of patterns that readers take to be real and
significant. The difference between
madness and art, of course, is between allowing the projection to possess one
only temporarily or being drawn into it obsessively without the desire or
ability to escape.
What
the narrator does is to transform a "pointless pattern" into a
meaningful one by following it to its conclusion or end and thus determining
its purpose. The narrator says she knows
little of the principal of design, but that she does know that there is no law
or rule that governs the pattern of the wallpaper. Of course, as the story proceeds and she
perceives or projects a woman behind the pattern, the reader knows that
inevitability the woman must be herself, for the conventional rule that applies
here is that if one projects a pattern, the pattern then indeed reflects the
self. The story thus involves two basic notions
of patterns that the reader may need to unravel--patterns created by society
itself that entrap a woman and bind her and patterns the mind of the woman
herself creates that follow only the law of her own psychic distress.
A
1982 film version of this story invents a number of elements to present the
story as a male/female conflict in which the male is responsible for the
madness of the female. For example,
there is the difference between what the wife writes--her impressions and
personal thoughts in a small notebook she keeps hidden in her pocket--and what
the husband writes--a schedule that controls her every move and an academic
paper. Thus, the story is about the
woman's external life dominated by her husband's schedule and her inner life
captured by her own notebook, which her husband wishes to deny her. In one scene the husband explains that he
wants things solid, wants to get at the "reality of things"; he says,
for example, that once pollination was explained to him, the mystery of love
vanished.
A
number of other inventions, such as a mysterious young girl who occasionally
rides through the landscape outside the house on a bicycle, suggest the
possibilities of the wife when she was a young girl herself, possibilities that
have been closed off by the patterns that control her. Throughout the film, the dialogue emphasizes
the husband's view that the wife thinks too much, that her imagination is her
worst enemy. He argues that to be healthy she must be "calm and
pink"; for him the essence of woman is body not mind; as a doctor friend
of the husband says to her, "You must put on flesh."
The
woman realizes that she seems to be living in a world of her own, but that the
more it becomes her own the less control she has over it. Indeed, her inner world becomes externalized. At the end of the film, the conflict between
the man and woman is made most explicit by a montage of shots that cut back and
forth between the man reading his paper at a professional meeting and the woman
tearing off the paper from her walls. What the woman wishes is to expose what
lies behind the patterns, to destroy the patterns themselves, and to free the
woman who is entrapped there. The
climactic scene occurs when a hand comes out of the wall and a mysterious woman
in a yellow dress kisses her and the two become one.
Tomorrow: Ambrose Bierce's
"Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
No comments:
Post a Comment