The Yellow Wallpaper (Pontuti, 2020)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is so ubiquitous in the American classroom that it is a bit surprising that there is not yet a definitive film adaptation. Not that people haven’t tried. Scanning IMDB, I see over twenty shorts, television shows, and feature films attempting to visualize this literary classic.
I have always assumed the main reasons that “The Yellow Wallpaper” hasn’t yet translated well to film are its length and the differences between nineteenth-century Gothic and twentieth-century horror. The former is more psychological, the latter more visceral. The former is about imagined monsters, madness, and the perils that reside in our hearts and heads. The latter focuses more on real monsters, slashers, killers, and threats to our bodies rather than to our minds and souls.
K. Pontuti’s incarnation of the story is good; I recommend it. I don’t know that it is the definitive version of this horrific tale, but one feels as though it understands and appreciates the source material for what it is rather than for how it can be exploited or modernized.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is typically summarized as a story about a woman suffering from postpartum depression, but I have always inferred that she is suffering from postpartum psychosis. This distinction is not a small one. Any credible diagnostic will stress that a person suffering from psychosis is more likely to be a threat to herself or others (including, in this case, her baby). One of the first scenes in Pontuti’s adaption shows “Jane” (the name most often assigned to the first-person narrator of the story) throwing her crying baby out the window of the carriage. This scene, while not in the text of the story, suggests that Pontuti (who also wrote the screenplay) understands this key difference.
If that difference is often glossed over in modern classrooms, it may be because “The Yellow Wallpaper” works so well as a proto-feminist text. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” The temptation is to make the husband a villain, to make the narrator’s struggle a struggle to be heard rather than a struggle to be well. In the story (and the film) John is paternalistic and patronizing, but it is difficult to assess how much these traits are exacerbated by the fact that his wife is not well and that she does not appear to recognize it.
By comparing the husband of the story to S. Weir Mitchell, Gilman’s real-life doctor, “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers the rest cure as the definitive cultural symbol of the patriarchy. It’s a potent but problematic symbol because the certainty with which the men insist they understand women’s bodies certainly resonates with modern readers outraged by the lack of progress culture has made since the story’s publication in granting women equal autonomy over their own bodies. But it’s also a problematic symbol because it can make us lose sight of the fact that the underlying causes of psychosis in the story are predominantly (if not possibly entirely) biological. The rest cure may not help Jane, but it is not what causes her depression or her psychosis.
What the film does right — making the psychosis the antagonist — comes with challenges. The biggest one is that watching someone struggle with psychosis is not particularly dramatic. Pontuti’s film does what it can to use music and visuals to create rather than merely depict dis-ease and that works up to a point.
It also alters the ending of the short story, and how one feels about the film may finally turn on how one feels about that change. It worked for me because it underscored that whatever the root cause of suffering was, patriarchy or biology, the woman was the one who was doing the actual suffering. It insists that this is a tragic story and not just a horrific one, and tragic not because of the arrogance of men. When one is suffering, perhaps the only thing worse than not being understood by others is not understanding one’s own self.
