Writing Assignment on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"


Writing Assignment
on
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

There is a Study Guide to this story. You should work your way through it before even reading through this Writing Assignment.

You may also wish to review the general instructions on writing assignments.

The wife's condition deteriorates through several distinct stages. (These may or may not correspond to the divisions in the story punctuated in the text by the device of the horizontal line. You may see more than one important stage at work in a single one of these demarcated passages, or you may see several of these passages as articulating a single stage in the progression of the protagonist's "case.") Briefly describe each of these, in a fashion that enables us to appreciate what makes each distinct from those that precede or follow it.

Note that it will not do to simply tell what happens in the successive stages of the story: mere recounting of the main explicit facts of the successive segments does not involve you in the particular sort of analysis that is called for here. Instead, to engage the assignment as described above you need to
- settle upon the appropriate points of demarcation between the successive phases, and
- use comparison and contrast to pull into explicitness the implicit traits that distinguish successive phases from each other.
  - To do this latter, it's not sufficient to note that each stage differs from the one preceding in that it is "more serious than" its predecessor. This is of course true (at least by and large). But your job here is to spell out some relevant qualitative difference between successive phases -- what it is that makes successive phases progressively more serious (this latter is a quantitative difference).

Conclude your discussion of each with some causal analysis.

Could you, for example, explain how the story invites us to understand that the assumptions behind the husband's diagnosis of what the wife's symptoms mean are themselves at the bottom of what is really the wife's problem? This would constitute a neat irony, but whether we're entitled to say the story in fact supports it depends on how clear and plausible are the specific inferences we are able to make from specific details.

You don't have to work your causal analysis into the main body of your description of the succession of phases. But in arriving at what you formulate at the end, you may find it useful to review what you will have captured so far, with the following questions in mind:

What are we to see as the event (or events) that precipitates the most important change in constituting a passing from one stage to another?

What are we to see as the most important assumptions on the part of the agents involved (chiefly the wife and the husband, but perhaps more) in bringing about this event, or in causing it to have the effect that it does on the protagonist?

Are some of these assumptions shared? Do they end up at odds with each other? If so, can you detect when they begin to diverge, and how this divergence proceeds? Or are we instead confronted here with a case in which the same shared assumptions end up having completely different outcomes for husband and wife?

An obvious source of ideas of what the protagonist's assumptions (stable or changing, conscious or unconscious) may be is what she sees in the wallpaper.

Seeing what these assumptions are puts the reader on a footing to tune in to what Gilman may be putting forward in the way of a critique of the culture at large within which the story is set. It invites us to ask how those assumptions came to be formed in the minds of these agents, and to notice that this is probably not best understood as a matter of personal idiosyncrasy or whim, but as a phenomenon of cultural transmission. We are led to wonder: in what ways are these notions likely to have been communicated to the individuals, and reinforced, by social environment?

Notice that these questions are not addressed, just raised by the story. This is one important function of ethically engaged fiction: it need not undertake to suggest an answer to every important question it raises. These questions may be of an ethical sort, or they may not. The questions just mentioned, in fact, aren't themselves ethical ones. They are more "sociological" or "anthropological." But they are of ethical relevance so long as their answers would help to determine our decisions about what we want to work for or against in our own lives and in the arenas in which our choices affect others.

(Can you detect any genuinely ethical issues that are raised by this story that the reader is left to his or her own devices to decide, on the basis of the kinds of factual possibilities that we are asked to imagine in the story?)

In the essay you are going to write, however, you need not take up these issues raised by the facts (explicit and implicit) that the story asks us to imagine. Rather, you are to gear your analysis (of the distinct phases of the wife's deterioration) towards clarifying a certain kind of implicit facts of the story. Your job in the conclusion of your essay is to detect what the assumptions are that are revealed by the characters' ways of experiencing and responding to what they are confronted with.

Give yourself enough time!

A "searching and well-organized essay" on what is revealed about the culture within which the story takes place by this set of changes will require plenting of tinkering -- and more than one draft! It will also probably take at least a full single-spaced page of typed text.

Consult the Study Guide to this story before attempting this writing assignment!

You may also wish to review the general instructions on writing assignments.

Suggestions are welcome. Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

This page last updated 25 April 2000.