From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Marriage as Hell: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on TV
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 18:09:21 GMT

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 Blockbusters, 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.

Both of these films (and Gilman's story, of course) would make
excellent material for a course on the history of sexism, presenting
as they do viewpoints from the Victorian period and then more recent times.

Catch the films.  Read the story.  Revise (I hope!) some of your likely
prejudices against the horror genre.

						--Fiona Webster
						  fi@grebyn.com