SOURCE: Thomas, Heather Kirk. “‘[A] Kind of Debased Romanesque with Delirium Tremens’: Late-Victorian Wall Coverings and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, pp. 189-206. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses the motif of the wallpaper in “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a feminist critique of popular ideas regarding gender in relation to the textile arts and domestic space.

I would like to suggest a rereading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), one that utilizes the medium of wallpaper in a markedly dissimilar manner from how scholars have traditionally interpreted this enigmatic signifier. Gilman, as we know, had a keen sense of irony regarding domestic matters and throughout her literary career displayed a penchant for subverting her culture's conventional advice to women. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin asserts, “One of Gilman's...