Haunting or Hallucination? Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Contemporary Theories of Decorative Art and Psychiatry

Even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) has received a lot of critical attention, there have been only a few attempts at the visual analysis of the wallpaper. This article approaches it as a case of the intricate pattern – an optically unpleasant and complicated ornament that can be depicted. This motif is present in gothic narratives (Poe's ‘Ligeia’, 1838), films (Robert Wise's The Haunting, 1963) as well as outside the genre. With a connection to wallpapers, it was discussed publicly during Gilman's time. This article reconstructs this discussion with examples from the contemporary interior decoration manuals, guidebooks for nursing and medical literature. The aim is to contextualize Gilman's story and to analyse the ways in which her descriptions of the wallpaper are similar to the rhetoric of the guidebooks. This context can enrich our knowledge about the period, reception of the story and possibly even about Gilman's sources of inspiration.