From: frantz@bvc.edu
Newsgroups: alt.horror
Subject: Re: Marriage as Hell: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on TV
Date: 8 Sep 92 12:04:51 CDT
Organization: Buena Vista College, Storm Lake, IA

In article <1992Sep7.180554.5975@grebyn.com>, fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster) writes:
> Just in case it's not too late to catch a repeat showing: last night
> Masterpiece Theatre featured a very good (if not quite excellent)
> 90-minute film version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story
> "The Yellow Wallpaper."  For those of you who don't know of her,
> Gilman (1850-1904) was an American writer and feminist.  "The
> Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the most reprinted of all psychological
> horror tales, and is viewed by critics as comparable in quality
> to those by Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe.  Here's what Jack
> Sullivan (editor of _Elegant_Nightmares_, among other such antho-
> logies) has to say about it:
> 
> 	Narrated from the disintegrating point of view of 
> 	its heroine, this story [portrays] "mere ordinary
> 	people" trapped in deadly marriage roles.
> 
> 	Rather than being a blatant oppressor, the narrator's
> 	husband is a condescending one.  When his deeply depressed
> 	wife talks of her pain, he reassures her that it is
> 	only "a slight hysterical tendency"; when she tries to
> 	express anger, he gently counsels "proper self-control";
> 	when she wants to work, he forbids it until she's
> 	"well again."  The brilliantly conceived "horror" in
> 	the tale is the wallpaper in the heroine's room, which
> 	has a "recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a
> 	broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside
> 	down."  The fundamental horror, however, is a marriage
> 	that requires the heroine to stay home and stare at 
> 	the wallpaper day after day, until she begins seeing
> 	"a faint figure behind"--the image of a woman (sometimes
> 	"a great many women") behind bars.
> 
> 	To the reader, it becomes clear that the wallpaper is
> 	a metaphor for the heroine's marriage, the only way out
> 	of which is the madness that gradually engulfs the tale.
> 	But Gilman's subtlety and her use of dramatic irony are
> 	consummate: the story never for a moment seems like a
> 	crude allegory.
> 
> According to Alistair Cooke's concluding commentary, Gilman's
> portrait of a woman writer whose husband wouldn't let her write
> was drawn from her own first marriage--which she (fortunately)
> managed to escape literally, rather than through madness.  After
> this marriage she became an outspoken feminist, and gave lecture
> tours throughout the U.S. and Europe.  "The Yellow Wallpaper"
> is her only tale in the horror genre.  It certainly proves the
> point that horror literature need not, as is often alleged, be
> socially conservative.
> 
> The film version is well worth seeing--if a bit vague and desiccated
> in the usual Masterpiece Theatre fashion.  Much better is the story
> itself, anthologized (to name one source) in David G. Hartwell's superb
> _Dark_Descent_, currently being re-released in three mass-market-size
> volumes.  ("The Yellow Wallpaper" is in Volume II, _The_Medusa_in_
> _the_Shield_.)  
> 
> I was reminded of another feminist film about oppression within
> marriage, one with imagery much more familiar to the baby-boomer
> generation: "Dancing in the Dark."  This movie, out on video and
> available at Blockbuster's, is a no-shit-disturbing portrait of
> the classic 50's marriage with the woman's life entirely wrapped
> up in her husband's concerns.  "Dancing in the Dark" helps you
> realize (if you hadn't already) how much of that "happy wife" schtick
> presented in, for example, "The Dick Van Dyke Show," was pure
> brainwashing.  It's also an engaging, suspenseful horror flick.
> 
> 
> 						--Fiona Webster


> 						  fi@grebyn.com

Fiona, since you appear to be up on the latest in feminist horror 
literature and film, perhaps I should aim this question at you.  I have 
heard reference to a piece called (I think) "The Madwoman in the Attic" 
which seems to vaguely resemble the story line you outline for "The Yellow 
Wallpaper."  Do you know if they are one in the same?  If not, do you know 
anything about "The Madwoman in the Attic?"  Who wrote it?  Is it fiction 
or non-fiction?  When was it written?  If you don't know, perhaps one of 
the other netters can help out.

Andrea @ BVC