Group read: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

    If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression---a slight hysterical tendency---what is one to do?
    My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
    So I take phosphates or phosphites---whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
    Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
    Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
    But what is one to do?

Hello, all!

Welcome to the group read of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

This project is an offshoot of the previous Virago group read, of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, which (without wanting to get into spoilers for those who haven't read it) prompted conversation about medical practices in the 19th century, and societal and medical views of women and female behaviour.

It was suggested at that time that a discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper might be an appropriate way of further considering these themes.

As we are dealing simply with a short story here, this group read will be conducted differently from the usual process. This time, participants should read the entire work *before* joining the discussion. This thread is wholly for comments and discussion, and should be avoided by anyone who has not read or finished reading the story.

In addition to its Virago release, The Yellow Wallpaper has been very widely anthologised since its first publication in The New England Magazine in January of 1892. It is also readily available online and as a free downloadable ebook, including at Project Gutenberg; so hopefully no-one will have any difficulty in accessing a copy.

Background:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Connecticut in 1860, the second and last child of her parents after her mother was warned that more childbearing might kill her. Her father abandoned his family while Charlotte was still a baby, and she grew up in poverty---sometimes being cared for by her father's aunts, one of whom was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Her mother was able to afford for Charlotte only an erratic, incomplete education; and she supplemented this by studying alone in libraries. Despite her mother's discouragement, Charlotte kept in touch with her father. He encouraged her reading and, when she was eighteen, helped her to enroll at the Rhode Island School of Design. Subsequently she supported herself as a tutor and an artist.

While studying, Charlotte met Martha Luthor, with whom she formed an intensely close friendship and lived with for two years. There has been much debate about the nature of their relationship, though Charlotte in her autobiography later denied that the two were physically intimate. In any event, Martha left Charlotte in 1881 to get married, which devastated her.

However, Charlotte herself married in 1884. She hesitated very much over the proposal of artist Charles Walter Stetson, refusing his first offer and feeling, even when she accepted his second, that she was allowing societal expectation to pressure her into it.

Charlotte's daughter, Katherine, was born in 1885. Subsequently, her mother suffered a severe bout of post-natal depression, which saw her husband place her in the care of Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. The treatment offered by Mitchell was a so-called "rest cure", in which what was perceived as "hysteria" was handled by isolation and the removal from the patient of anything considered "stimulating". Charlotte was ordered to, "Live as domestic a life as possible...and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live."

Far from helping Charlotte, Mitchell's rest cure resulted in a breakdown and a long struggle with depression.

Upon her release, Charlotte left her husband, taking Katherine and moving to California. She and Stetson were legally separated in 1888, and divorced in 1894.

From this time, Gilman became active in feminist and other reform movements, while working as a journalist. She also began writing again, eventually producing novels, short stories, poetry and works of non-fiction.

The Yellow Wallpaper was written in 1890, but not published until 1892. It was rejected by Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who told Gilman that he did not want his readers being made miserable, as her story had made him miserable, and that he thought it "too morbid". (As Gilman later commented wryly, no-one had a problem with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but her work was "too morbid".) The story eventually appeared in The New England Magazine.

The importance of the story was recognised almost at once, even by those who disliked it. It has been anthologised more than one hundred times, and is considered one of the bedrocks of feminist literature.

I'll leave it at that for now; there is more that could be said, but hopefully it will come up apropos our discussion.

Please check in if you are planning to participate, and feel free to begin leaving comments.

I will participate! I read this a few years ago but will do a quick reread before joining in the discussion. Thanks for setting this up!

>5 japaul22:

Thank you for joining in. :)

I read this many years ago in college and re-read tonight.

My edition also has a short afterword "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" published by Gilman in 1913 in The Forerunner.

I'm in, too! I read it at the end of last month, so I'll just be giving the story a quick skim through again.

Hello to everyone and thanks to lyzard for organising this group read.

I first read The Yellow Wallpaper in late pre-adolescence in an anthology of ghost and supernatural stories! In that context it effectively creeped me out (possibly even more effectively because my childhood bedroom had old, patterned, and slightly peeling wallpaper... although fortunately the single colour wasn't yellow!)

Re-reading it now my reaction is more anger, and impatience (there's an interesting word in this context - "im-patient"). The other descriptive word that occurs to me, and that younger-me wouldn't have known, is "gaslighting".

Obviously this works as a skilfully written supernaturally haunted room story, but it's equally easy to read as an unstable protagonist driven insane by abusive gaslighting.

(I note that slow poisoning by green arsenic-impregnated wallpaper was also common knowledge by 1892, and the fact that when damp it could give off arsenical gas.)

The protagonist is the nameless wife of her husband John or Mrs John Surname as she would have been styled, and her husband has literally infantilised her by insisting she lives in the nursery which also confines her into a 19th century "madwoman in the attic" scenario (there is, of course, a long history of feminists and other ideological prisoners confined in psychiatric hospitals). There's also call back to the first Mrs Rochester: "I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell." Not surprisingly the protag objects to being confined in an attic with barred windows and damaged decor and dungeon-like rings set into the walls. Her gaslighting doctor/husband verbally assures her that he would move to any other room in the large house with her, but this doesn't happen because his preferences and "comfort" supersede those of his wife/patient who is led to believe her objections to peeling decor are "silly" "whims". Her doctor/husband insists, against her wishes, that she's unable to stand a visit to her sympathetic relatives, and that she's "his comfort" and "all he has"... apart from his live-in sister/housekeeper and his fulfilling career as an apparently successful doctor that he often prioritises over his family commitments. "silly fancies" are mentioned again. And he's doing this to her because he "loves" her, a gaslighting classic.

The pattern on the yellow wallpaper commits "suicide" in the very first description. The second has a "broken neck" and "bulbous eyes". Third: "delirium tremens" and "optic horror" and "wallowing seaweeds in full chase" and "interminable grotesques". Etc "strangles" etc.

The most obvious point of the story, without reading biographical details of the author into it, seems to be that an imaginative person should find a positive outlet for that imagination to prevent it turning negative.

Of course, the author also targeted a living and named medical professional (which presumably limited the jurisdictions in which it could potentially be published without risking possible libel action - I'm assuming it wasn't officially published in the British Empire, for example, until after the named doctor's death).

>7 kac522:, >8 Majel-Susan:

Welcome!

>9 spiralsheep:, >10 spiralsheep:

Thank you for that comprehensive response: you've touched on many points warranting discussion and also highlighted my own immediate reaction to this story, which was a kind of stunned realisation of how many different levels it can be read upon.

>11 lyzard:

So, yes:

One thing which struck me hard was how eminently quotable this story is---and how confronting many of its most quotable lines must have been at the time (and indeed still are): there's an extraordinary power in so many of its seemingly throwaway remarks. I mean, my goodness---

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

---that's a creepypasta right there.

The other thing that I've been going over in my own mind - and that I want seriously to put out there for broader discussion - is this:

Exactly what kind of story is this?

It's fascinating to me that it has been anthologised as a ghost story, or a story of the supernatural. As a horror story, yes, but that's different.

Do others find supernatural elements in The Yellow Wallpaper, or is its horror that everything going on here is real? - or at least, "real"?

spiralsheep has summed up my frustration with John's treatment of his wife between his gaslighting and infantalising, very neatly in >10 spiralsheep:.

One of the things, though, that struck me most about the story was the wife's gradual transformation into the woman behind the wallpaper. After a couple of weeks in unhappy confinement, she begins to amuse herself with the pattern of the wallpaper, remarking causally enough that "it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern"; and from there, the woman becomes more and more real by the day. The wife is obsessed with the woman whom she believes is trapped behind the wallpaper, and she starts to "see" the woman creeping about during the day; in fact, she sympathises with the woman so much that by the end, the "last" thing she does as herself is "free" the woman by ripping up the wallpaper, before making her final transformation and identifying as the woman herself.

I just thought that it was interesting how the woman was a kind of mirror of the wife. Both are trapped, particularly at night (when the husband is home to "enforce" his rules), and both only find some measure of space to "creep about" during the daytime. Obviously, one can take a lucky guess and say that things probably fared badly for the wife once the husband recovered from his fright, but how I felt about the ending was that it was a kind of wish fulfillment, in which the wife sought her own freedom by "freeing" this other woman, her own mirror image.

>12 lyzard: Reading The Yellow Wallpaper in the context of the previous discussions for Lady Audley's Secret, I never quite considered the story in the light of an actual supernatural phenomenon, although I see that it does make for a very creepy ghost type of story. It was more psychological for me---which reminds me: I read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James last year, and more than half the time, I felt that the governess was just being batty and paranoid about everything, and I was never sure whether what she said was happening was just in her head or not. It certainly didn't help her case that whenever she told Mrs Grose the housekeeper what she saw, there were very often extra details that she never remarked on in her first witness account to the reader!

>14 Majel-Susan:

And yes, thinking about it more, you can in fact interpret this as a ghost story. Despite what the narrator tries to tell us / herself, clearly the room is not a nursery at all but a place where someone has been confined; as has been suggested (>10 spiralsheep:), a version of the madwoman in the attic. But suppose that in this case, the madwoman never left the attic?

The comparison with The Turn Of The Screw is an interesting one; as is that the latter appeared six years after The Yellow Wallpaper. I think that's very suggestive.

Brr!---

...it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern...

...I don’t like to look out of the windows even---there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast...

...I kept on creeping just the same...

I didn't read it as a ghost story, but probably because I heard it described as an early feminist story about mental health before I ever read it. What struck me was that, yet again, a woman suffering from postpartum depression is made worse by male doctors. Treating her as a child, negating her experiences, refusing her all choice, isolating her - it's a familiar story.

It is creepy, and I can see how it could easily be read as a ghost story, but the horrors of it are too based in reality for me to view it in a supernatural sense.

>17 japaul22:

Me too, though the fact that you can get so many different readings out of it is fascinating.

I've now realised that "I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell" isn't the only call back to the first Mrs Rochester (who at least has her own name as Bertha Mason) because she also "crawls on all fours" as a sign of her madness.

>12 lyzard: "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."

In the 1926 novel Crewe Train, that I recently finished, which is about taming (or not) a young woman to domesticity, the denouement includes the attempted imposition of a 24/7 schedule outlined by the protagonist's mother-in-law, which is not so very far removed from the husband/doctor's "schedule prescription" in this story.

On whether or not it's a supernatural story: I think it would be easy for someone who didn't want to read any further implications into it to put it in a ghost story box. Would it have been published to mass circulation audiences if that wasn't an available reading, I wonder?

On what type of story it is: depends on whether the husband really fainted (effeminate weakness!) at the end or whether he was dead, possibly murdered by the protagonist. Remember all the hanging and strangulation imagery? Remember she says she has a rope? Remember she crawls over him, asserting her physical supremacy but also calling back to the first Mrs Rochester? Remember Mrs Rochester laying dead while Mr Rochester stands over her? Is this a hinted role reversal?

>13 Majel-Susan: Interesting about the mirror image. There are no mirrors or looking glasses mentioned in the decor. An odd omission. Is the protagonist not allowed to look at herself? She's certainly not supposed to look inwards, only outwards through the windows... and at the walls. Presumably readers would assume she had at least a hand mirror or dressing table mirror but it's never mentioned.

>15 lyzard: Hmm, I think it could've been a nursery then a playroom. Wealthy people did like to store their children in attics. But I think the ambiguity between an infantilised wife imprisoned in an old nursery, with barred windows and gated stairway, and a previous place of confinement is intentional by the author.

"Confinement" was also a euphemism for the process of having children, into which women were supposed to sink all their creative energies, not into art, but the protagonist has apparently failed at childbearing/motherhood. Which brings us to the other contemporary type of "madwomen in attics": the American women who escaped to Paris to study art and reputedly, though rarely in reality, lived bohemian lifestyles in garrets, i.e. attics. Is not being able to (re)produce children as heirs for your husband a sufficient excuse to turn one's creativity towards art? Is the story trying to assert this?

Sorry! - didn't mean to drop out; yesterday went a bit pear-shaped.

>19 spiralsheep:

The amount of damage done to the room - and the very fact that the narrator is so insistent upon it being a nursery and/or playroom - makes me think it wasn't.

That and her relief that the baby isn't being exposed to the room, which brings up another issue:

Was anyone else disturbed by the absence of the baby from the narrative?

    It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
    And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.

****

    There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper.
    If we had not used it that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.
    I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all. I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see...

>19 spiralsheep:

I agree that the story is much easier to take in its supernatural reading, and that may indeed be one reason why it was initially categorised that way.

I'm still wary of reading the room as a nursery but you may well be onto something with your suggestion that the wife is thus being infantilised.

Ah, yes - "confinement" as a double-edged sword. Of course it was often literally true inasmuch as women were forced to stay immobile after giving birth rather than getting up and around again as soon as they were fit for it.

That latter point brings me to something else but I'll make a new post---

I can't remember who it was, but I remember reading a piece by someone who taught The Yellow Wallpaper in a college class: the boys were willing to entertain the idea that the husband and brother were just misguided, that they were doing their best for the narrator according to contemporary medical practice; but the girls weren't having a bar of it. :)

As I said at the outset, this discussion came about partly through a consideration of attitudes towards women's physical and mental health during the 19th century, which is a scary topic in a number of ways including the way the medical profession was implicated in what feels like a last-ditch effort to prevent women from taking control of their own lives.

The myths that were propagated at this time about female physiology were absurd but very frightening in their implications. There was a real desperation to convince women - or if they couldn't be convinced, to act upon them as of - they were existing in a state one misstep from complete physical and/or mental breakdown.

Yet it's clear that even doctors who should have known better were looking for this sort of thing. When we were doing Lady Audley's Secret we were discussing how women were sometimes subjected to long-term institutionalisation due to for post-natal depression; something else I found at that time was a paper about so-called "puerperal insanity" - which was and is a real thing - but which at one point during the 19th century seemed to reach epidemic proportions...or was perceived as having done so, because it was treated as a first-cause and not a co-morbidity.

That is, the argument didn't go, "The new mother contracted an infection due to sloppy medical care, developed a high fever, and then became delirious"; instead it was just, "She had a baby and went mad." That's how it was recorded in the medical records. Having a baby could just naturally drive a woman mad.

I may say that the American manifestations of this sort of self-fulfilling medical response were even more extreme, I think because the fight for female emancipation was more advanced in America, particularly in the area of higher education. Thus you can find serious medical papers "explaining" how thinking too much will cause a woman's reproductive organs to shrivel up by diverting her blood-flow to the brain.

Of course when I say "women", one of the most notable things about all this is how classist it was: no-one ever suggested that these things applied to working-class women (and in fact one doctor challenged on this point basically argued that working-class women were a different species!). It was only middle-and upper-class women who were at such threat from their own minds and bodies---which of course highlights the fact that much of this was a pushback against the increasingly female struggle against confinement.

This is such a fascinating thread! I want to just say that I don’t think I ever at any point read the story believing it to be just a horror tale. It’s always been to me about the control of women and how men’s treatment of them can drive them insane, particularly in the vulnerable post-birth state. However that was probably pre conditioned by what I knew of the book in advance. I wonder what I would have thought coming to it cold at the time?

>23 kaggsy: I wonder what I would have thought coming to it cold at the time?

A good question! I probably wouldn't have connected it with anything post-natal, but seeing as the story was written by a woman, I might have assumed the implication that it was the husband who drove an already delicate wife to insanity. Not too far off, I think. :)

I reread The yellow wallpaper last night, and it is still as powerful as the first time I read it many years ago.

>20 lyzard: The damage to the room, including furniture that seems to have been gnawed, makes me think that while its original purpose may have been as a nursery, that certainly wasn't its only use and our narrator is probably not the first person to have been confined there.

I can certainly see a supernatural explanation for the story - those hints of violence in the room's past maybe haunting the current resident - but I feel that to interpret it that way is a cop-out. John and his medical colleagues, with their outmoded and harmful treatment of women, are to my mind the cause of the narrator's problems. The story is a powerful and fascinating commentary on women's health and male-female relations and power.

What strikes me as I read it is that the narrator's voice is so calm, articulate and rational even as her thoughts and actions spiral downwards, a contrast to her supposed over-imagination and tendency to "hysteria". I found I had followed her for quite a way before I thought "Something isn't right ..."

I think it's important to distinguish between the protagonist having been confined, by childbirth, by social norms, by her doctor/husband, and having been imprisoned. She clearly wasn't imprisoned until she chose to use the key, that was left fully accessible to her, to lock herself in to her barred and gated room. Of course, that's a pivotal moment of madness, which might or might not also be interpreted as an attempt at self-liberation by excluding what she now perceives as harmful interference from her doctor/husband and his social norms.

>20 lyzard: "Was anyone else disturbed by the absence of the baby from the narrative?"

Surely the silver spooned baby's been farmed out to a hired working wetnurse?

>26 spiralsheep: Yes, you're right, she can come and go within the house and garden freely. The lack of stimulation clearly leads her to feel psychologically and mentally imprisoned. I like your interpretation of her locking herself in as an attempt at self-liberation.

>25 Sakerfalcon: >28 Sakerfalcon: Ta. Your point that the protagonist is a surprisingly sympathetic unreliable narrator is important. The story would work much less well if the narrator didn't engage readers' empathy.

> I remain somewhat concerned about what it is the husband sees that causes him to faint. Maybe it's just the realisation that he's going to have to pay the bill for redecorating the room after all, lol.

>20 lyzard:, >27 spiralsheep: I believe that one of the symptoms of postpartum depression is for the mother to feel unconnected and/or overwhelmed by the baby, to the point of ignoring the infant altogether. In that light, I was not surprised that the baby was not part of the narrative.

I’ve found the discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper fascinating. I re-read it to make sure that my thoughts would be about the actual story, and not some conflation I’d concocted.

I’ve read (and listened to: they’re my favorite genre for audio books) lots of ghost stories. Somehow this one never struck me as a sort of ghost or paranormal horror. I was with the narrator from the get-go, accompanying her on what seemed to me to be a straightforward descent into madness.

I found on re-reading that I felt the same: this poor woman has gone right over a rather steep edge, nothing supernatural about it. So it was wonderful to see that other readers detected horror/paranormal elements. I’m a firm believer that no two people read the same book, and I think this discussion reinforces that belief.

Something that struck me: Virginia Woolf, who had periods of serious mental problems, was sentenced to this same sort of “rest cure” by her physician, and her husband Leonard let it happen. Personally I can’t imagine a worse punishment, or anything less likely to bring one back to reality, than a regimen of “total rest” with no intellectual stimulation allowed. To deny a woman her most vital means of expression and creativity seems completely beyond any sensible idea of helping.

With regard to the baby not being present: there are several possible reasons, which are not mutually exclusive. The upper-class habit of handing Baby off to Nurse and postpartum depression leading to maternal-infant disconnect have been mentioned. But it was probably also part of this abominable “cure”—
There, there Dear; you just rest and look out the window, or walk in the garden if you’re feeling particularly strong. We’ll take care of everything else.

It’s obvious that I have strong feelings about this. And Gilman’s story, which is emotionally provocative, validates those feelings.

You might think by all this that I hate the story. On the contrary, I love it.

After signing up promptly for this read, I went off on holiday in August, taking my copy of The Yellow Wallpaper with me. The holiday was excellent and I didn't get time to read it. Coming home, I couldn't find the book anywhere, and finally sadly concluded I had left it at someone's house.

Well, packing my suitcase again this month, I found it tucked away in a corner trapped under those bars that extend into handles. So... since I have been careful not to read this thread without reading the book, I now have a project for the new year; to read Charlotte and follow along on this thread!

>31 Matke:, >32 SassyLassy:

I am both embarrassed and deeply grateful that the two of you have opened this thread up again, because the sad truth is, I dropped the ball here: I got interrupted by one of this year's infinite number of crises and instead of doing something sensible like just jotting down points as they occurred to me, I kept putting it off until I could come back and do things "properly"...when I had time...when I had time...when I had time...

(I've just realised I left things hanging to the point of not even reviewing this on my thread: it has become a Missing Work!)

So thank you both for posting here and adding to the content; Sass, I hope you will return and add your own comments when you have finished the story.

Gail, to me the extraordinary thing about this story is that no reading invalidates any of the others: there's no point at which you can say, "This happens, therefore that cannot have done." Is she insane? is she haunted? is she simply furious? YES!! :D

I believe I mentioned up-thread one teacher's experience with the disparate reactions of her male and female students. Even here we find layers upon layers. It may well be true that this was the established medical practice and that the male characters here "meant well"; then again the exact opposite may be true. The rest cure may be based upon what was actually believed about female physiology and psychology; or perhaps it was just one more weapon in the male armory.

Either way it is impossible these days to be anything but horrified at the thought of this sort of sensory deprivation and the inevitable damage done.

I'm frustrated that I can't find my notes because I know I was in the middle of compiling thoughts about the baby and its non-appearance---and who is responsible for that: whether the baby is taken away either because of the narrator's "illness" or as the natural course of events; or whether she rejects it, also naturally---or perhaps as a form of protest.

One point I do remember is the thought that while the arguments made up-thread are perfectly valid, at the time the story was written the clash would have been, not between self-care and wet-nursing, but breast- and bottle-feeding: the latter was coming into its own but of course was hugely disapproved as a sign of mothers abrogating their responsibilities; ironically enough, the extreme opposite of the origins of wet-nursing in which babies were often forcibly taken away from their mothers to allow husbands to resume sexual access (which in the 18th and 19th centuries was tabooed while a woman was nursing).

I'm sure there was a lot more but none of it is coming back to me at the moment. Maybe I'll re-read if others continue to comment here?? :)

In the meantime, thank you both again for accessing this thread!

>33 lyzard: "at the time the story was written the clash would have been, not between self-care and wet-nursing, but breast- and bottle-feeding"

No longer owning Black slaves forced to neglect their own children to nurse white American babies made wet-nursing more expensive and logistically troublesome (imagine rich whites having to choose between housing a poor white woman and possibly also her baby in their home or farming their baby out to a poorer household). So there were definitely post-slavery changes in that form of exploitation of poor women by wealthy Americans.

>34 spiralsheep:

Yes of course you're right, in America that aspect of things added another permutation to the tensions around that particular situation.

Farming out babies was a common practice amongst the upper classes in Britain through the 18th century, after which a live-in nurse became the more frequent choice; but there was a shift back towards mothers nursing even from early in the 19th century. The whole Victorian image of family then made it more or less compulsory, until the option of bottle-feeding began to emerge---and that got caught up in the developing late-19th century controversy over women's roles generally: clothing, education, work options.

Here, that one oblique mention of "Mary" being so good with the baby leaves the nature of its care undetermined, though it is obvious the narrator is not nursing. A separate reference to "John's sister", and to just "sister", would suggest that Mary is the servant---general nurse or wet-nurse.

(It's suggestive that the servant gets a name but the narrator's sister-in-law does not. Is it because she is viewed as merely an extension of the husband, one more weapon in the armory of "confinement"?)

As we touched upon up-thread, it isn't clear whether the narrator has rejected the child because of her depression (though we do get that remark about the baby making her "nervous"), or whether it has been taken away from her as part of her "cure".

>35 lyzard: "that one oblique mention of "Mary" being so good with the baby leaves the nature of its care undetermined, though it is obvious the narrator is not nursing. A separate reference to "John's sister", and to just "sister", would suggest that Mary is the servant---general nurse or wet-nurse."

That's why I assumed the baby was in the care of a wet nurse, yes, because it's implied in the text both by the mention of the carer's name as a separate person and by the social customs of the time for that class of Americans (and, yes, many societies have had wet nurses, some with practices ensuring the health of the wet nurses' babies and some where the poor babies are excluded and mostly die, but I was talking about American history because the story we're discussing is very specifically American in context. And even within the US practices differed between classes and rural/urban and recent slave states/states where slavery was wound down earlier, because having many landless poor people desperate enough to abandon their babies causes different wet nurse practices with more extreme exploitation).

ETA: Just to add that there are reasons the author chose to frame this as a horror story. The outcomes are horrific. Nobody escapes damage: the wife, the husband, the baby, the (presumed) wet nurse, and the shadow of a sister-in-law. That's the point. Gilman didn't leave the servant out of sight and out of mind. She deliberately names her.

An aside re: wet nurses. In Northern states (such as Gilman's Connecticut, New York, etc.) during this time period, it was also quite common for affluent families to have Irish or other recent immigrants as wet nurses, nannies, etc. It was not exclusively African-Americans in these roles.

>37 kac522: I did mention that in >34 spiralsheep:, yes.