The Portrait of a New Woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Résumé ou Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in the Forerunner, in 1913, and it aroused a lot of controversy among the readers. Those who read the story were totally confused and unable to understand the author’s intentions.
As Gilman writes in her essay Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” : “[A] Boston physician made protest in the Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” [Gilman 1913:1] Why was the doctor so affected by Gilman’s story? What was so extraordinary about it?
First of all, the story was written at the time when women’s roles were solely defined by men. At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were mainly supposed to be devoted to the needs of their families. As stated in The Changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Deborah Thomas, men created:

(…) an ideological prison that subjected and silenced women. This ideology, called the Cult of True Womanhood, legitimized the victimization of women. The Cult of Domesticity and the Cult of Purity were the central tenets of the Cult of True Womanhood. [Thomas 1998 :1]

Women attempted to reject the traditional model of behaviour their fathers and husbands imposed on them. However, most of their endeavours were doomed to failure. Thomas quotes Welter who states that: “If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex virtues which made up True Womanhood, he was dammed immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic.” [Ibid]