http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1952/pg1952.txt
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is traditionally read from a feminist perspective, but I argue it can be read from a postcolonial lens as well. Ultimately, it tells the story of an Other without access to hegemonic power systems, as Spivak suggests in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. When read from this lens, John, the narrator’s husband, can come to symbolize the imperial structure rather than the patriarchy, while the Yellow Wallpaper may represent the imprisonment of the subaltern within the rules set up by the colonizer, which the subaltern will be unable to access and understand, just as the narrator cannot make sense of the wallpaper: “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream”(Gilman 9). I think this type of analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an interesting departure from the traditional reading, and calls attention to the intersectionality between feminism and postcolonial studies, as well as other discourses like disability studies and queer theory.