“I've got out at last,” said I “in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back!”
In Carpenter and Kolmar's essay “In Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women” the author's apply the realm of historical perspective, especially through the character of the oppressed woman, in a permeating way. The authors make the important distinction between the varieties of ghost literature written by men, and the varieties written by women. They make the distinction that within women's ghost literature, the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural are not “absolutely fluid,” meaning that a female author is more likely to draw distinct connections between different elements within her story. In ghost literature written by women, the characters are more likely to connect to the supernatural in a way that less constitutes “horror” or “terror” and has more to say about the character itself.
For example, in Perkins-Gilman's novella, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” there is an obvious connection between the main character, confined not only by the excuse of a “rest cure” but also by the emotional force of her oppressive husband and her own social upbringing and status, and the supernatural elements within the story. She is drawn by her own curiosity to the detestable wall-paper, which she describes using such language as “pointless patterns,” “not arranged by any laws of radiation, or alteration, or repetition, or symmetry,” and most notably, waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.” These descriptions clearly mirror aspects of the character's own life, her need to be shown order and stability, her feelings of incompetence and powerlessness as she has been forced into her current helpless position, and most importantly, her isolation.
In Carpenter and Kolmar's essay, the authors state that women's ghost literature often leaves something with which the main character can accept, connect with, reclaim and can possess a quality of familiarity. This is to say that in men's ghost literature, the supernatural presence of “ghost” is often a figure that is revered and there are not often attempts to understand and make sense of it, whereas in the women's genre, characters more often see something in the character of the ghost with which the main character can often identify and uses as a vehicle to express themselves or to propel towards a point at which they either realize a goal or reach some higher level of expression.
In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the force with which the main character identifies is the vague image of a woman that she visualizes in the patterns of the wall-paper. At one point during her hysterical and ritualistic observations of the wall-paper, the main character relates the point that sometimes she thinks “there are a great many women behind, and sometimes, only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard,” (Perkins-Gilman 30).
Carpenter and Kolmar express the point that the interchangeability of the term “ghost literature” with such dramatized and inaccurate titles such as “tales of horror” and “tales of terror” serve to diminish women's contributions to the genre. The authors theorize that because women's ghost literature often seeks to understand and employ the supernatural, that society neglects to characterize it properly. They go on to make the point that within such stories “horror and terror are rarely the most appropriate responses to such visitations” and that “women realize their commonality with the messages brought by those who haunt their houses.” This concepts of obscuring women's contributions to the genre, and perhaps women's contributions to the world of literature in general, can be easily be demonstrated by the immediate response of critics and society to Perkins- Gilman's story which was originally met with horror and disgust. The story was ill received and one physician went as far as to say that “it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it,” according to Perkins-Gilman's essay “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-Paper.” Perkins-Gilman defended her work in this essay by saying that “It was not intended to drive people crazy but to save people from being driven crazy and it worked.” This is a stunning and direct example of how women authors seek to relate their main characters to the supernatural for a specific reason, often for the purposes of understanding.
