I read the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman before listening to the podcast because I wanted to see my first impressions of the story without context. After listening to the podcast, I was pleased to find that several of my first impressions were correct, though I read a much darker tone into the short story than I might have. From the very first two pages, I saw indicators that this was horror, with words like the horror of superstition, dead paper, ghostliness, artistic sin, suicide, plunge, and destroy. Since I picked up on these indicators of tone early, I was bracing myself for something horrible to happen and expected some form of death or suicide before the end of the story. There is no literal death at the close of the story, however, I think that there is an implied or at least figurative death. The narrator’s perspective shifts from watching the woman in the wallpaper to being a woman in the wallpaper. Combined with the references to suicide on pages 655 and 656, and the language of being freed and released, I think that she committed suicide as a way to escape her life, but that her soul or ghost remains in the wallpaper. The husband faints at the sight of her dead body or ghost. This reading is still open to feminist interpretation on the oppressive nature of marriage as an institution and the sphere of domesticity but is also far more nihilistic and darker.
In an article I read, professor Gail Marshall adds a racial element to the Yellow Wallpaper. We know with historical context that Charlotte Gilman was not necessarily racially conscious or making a point about colonialism or slavery, but that does not necessarily mean that this reading is invalid. She points to the colonial mansion leftover from a slaveholding America and the shackles in the nursery room as clues that lend themselves towards a reading of The Yellow Wallpaper as an interpretation of the violent enslaving of Black people, especially Black women, in the antebellum era. In combining the feminist and anti-racist readings of the Yellow Wallpaper, the short story would not seem misplaced in a collection of Southern Gothic tales, despite Gilman’s northern roots.
I agree that I expected an element of suicide or death as I read this story for the first time. By the end, as you referenced, the language almost made me sure that we were going to have a scene of attempted suicide presented to us. Stetson’s word choice to allude to that even being an option for her case must have had a huge emotional impact on people back then.– that a rest-cure treatment really had the power to drive a woman to suicide.
I agree with your interpretation about her husband coming in and fainting as being a reaction to her committing suicide, because leading up to it she was talking about ropes and she ultimately references herself in the 3rd person, as if she is no longer the woman in the room, but the woman in the walls. I had not considered the racial element but I think that is an interesting perspective, but I would argue that it is a reflection of the time period rather than an argument of the story.
Interpreting the story as a reflection of the enslavement of black people is interesting, because although this is probably not the message the author meant to convey, a leader can present it that way. This is where the context in which a story is told, and the themes and ideas that are present in the moment can dictate what the audience gets out of a narrative.
You bring up a very interesting point about the racial element of the story. I had not considered the references to slavery and the antebellum period, but the connection between racism and feminist teachings is very important. Additionally, the narrators ultimate sucicide depict the struggles of living a life centered on solely domesticity.