How far "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be said to be in keeping with

How far “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be said to be in keeping with ‘ghost story’ tradition.

Ans.

The ghost story may be defined as a story which has the power of the dead to return and confront the living as its central theme. The fictional ghost. however, operate within a moral and physical universe that interpenetrates our own but are wholly inexplicable to us. Fiction ghost can take on many forms from human to the fearfully alien. They can be insubstantial wraiths, yet capable of inflicting gross, physical harm, with an ability to inflect and control the minds of the living.

The ghost story has a long past rooted in folk-lore and also classical and early modern literature. Literary ghost-stories, however, were mostly a product of the Victorian age. The ghost story’s immediate predecessor was the Gothic short stories and fragments, found in English magazines of 18th and 19th centuries. The settings of the Gothic fiction were castles, crypts, convents or gloomy mansions in a state of ruin and decay. In The Yellow Wallpaper too, there is an old mansion: ‘A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house’. The story was first written in 1890 and published in 1899, The period is rich in publication of ghost stories. Even authors of such repute like Walter Scott (The Tapestried Chamber’, 1828) and Dickens (The Signal man’, 1866) tried their hands at them. Many writers of magazine ghost stories were women. Amelia Edwards (1831-92) of ‘All The Year Round’ (1864), M. E. Braddon (The Cold Embrace’, 1860), Mrs. J. H. Riddle (‘Weird Stories’, 1882), Vermin Lee (‘Hauntings’, 1890), were some of the women writer’s of the day. It is thus very likely that C. P. Gilman might have been familiar and influenced with these writers as the elements of the ghost story is scattered throughout the story in the settings, visions and record of the narrator.

In The Yellow Wallpaper apart from the ‘haunted’ ‘colonial mansion’ the ambience of the ancestral halls with its surroundings presents a sense of uncanny presence, at least from the stand point of the woman:

“There is something strange about the house – I can feel it” “I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what is felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.”

As the story progresses, the woman sees moving figures, a woman behind the bars and such bizarre sights and goes on recording those impressions in spite of his practical, down-to-earth sort of husband forbidding her to indulge in such fancies. The absence of her husband due to his attending serious cases outside the town gives her in the desired break to pursue her fantasy with uninterrupted involvement the designs of the wall paper with ‘the sprawling outlines run-off in great slanting waves of optic horror’. Apart from the strange forbidding figures she sees, she also notices a smell pervading every corner of the mansion – it is an inexplicable ‘yellow smell’. The sight of the imagine woman behind the bars fascinates her.

“The front pattern does move- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” Sometimes there are several women, and the woman behind the bars crawls around fast.”

The doctor’s wife also feels like crawling and creeping even by day light by locking the door. She is now totally possessed by her hallucinations.

On the last day of their stay in the mansion, she pulls out a portion of the paper as if to free the woman behind the bars. Ultimately the doctor’s wife is so deranged mentally that she locks her inside throw away the key and pro cures a rope apparently to tie up the imagined woman in the wall paper. She peels off the paper and “All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and wad ding fungus growths just shriek with derision!” Her husband after much effort opens the door and finds her creeping all over the floor. This was too much for him and he faints.