The Yellow Wallpaper

About

A physician treats his young wife’s postpartum depression and rents an old mansion during the summer months where he confines her to one room as part of her "recuperation." Here, separated from all others including her child, she is isolated and forbidden to write or engage in any other activity. Her attention turns to the hideous yellow wallpaper that cover the walls of the room, eventually becoming a kind of projection screen where her fears, horrors, and anxieties, as well as the deep frustration of her forced isolation, are all materialised.

The chamber opera "Yellow Wallpaper" was written based on the literary work of author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose eponymous, now iconic, short story quickly became a bestseller in the world of feminist literature. Since its first publication in 1891, it has appeared in many collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks. Its exceptionally powerful narrative, with its theme and broader implications, still resonates with many women around the world. The restriction of women's freedoms, the character of male authority – a domineering husband also serving as her doctor – points to the ongoing serious limitation of women's freedom and the right to freely control their bodies and lives in patriarchal society. The narrator of the story must do what her husband tells her to do, as he is also her doctor, thus representing a kind of dual authority, although his demands do not align with her actual needs. The element of the yellow wallpaper implies multilayered symbolism. One can regard the wallpaper as a symbol of the confinement of women, in which the main character perceives herself, and by extension, as a symbol of all women who are imprisoned in the concept of a patriarchal society. The yellow wallpaper, however, can also be understood as a symbol of another world and of a free space: a place where one can live, breathe, create, and exist freely.

The Yellow Wallpaper has been commissioned by The Opera Story.