Johnson is an American critic, short fiction writer, and novelist. In the following essay, Johnson argues that the narrator's breakdown in "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be viewed as the result of many years of suppressed rage.
In the autumn of 1830, shortly before Emily Dickinson's birth, her mother made an unusual request. At a time when her pregnancy-or as it was then called, her "confinement"-might have been expected to absorb her attention, Mrs. Dickinson abruptly demanded new wallpaper for her bedroom. Apparently dismayed by this outburst of feminine whimsy, her stern-tempered husband refused, prompting Mrs. Dickinson to her only recorded act of wifely defiance. Though "the Hon. Edward Dickinson would not allow her to have it done," a neighbor's descendant recalled, "she went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper.....
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