Agnes Moorehead plays a wife overwhelmed with the stresses of life. Her doctor husband brings her to the country for a rest cure, but she distrusts him and his sister. During her stay, she becomes fascinated and obsessed by the wallpaper in her second floor bedroom. She talks herself into believing that a woman is trapped behind it. This belief and her action lead the story to a strange conclusion. Moorehead delivers another fine performance.
In the opening of the program, Paul Frees says the episode is "the famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.” This story was not “famous” in the way entertaining short stories are “famous.” It was, instead, a shocking and controversial story when it was published in 1892. It is about the social position of women in society. Much of those undertones were shifted to the background in this adaptation. Those who were familiar with the story prior to the broadcast were likely able to pick up on that. Some listeners may have been disappointed in its becoming not much more than a “horror” story.
The social background of the story should be considered in the context of society at the end of the 19th century. After the original publication of The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892, its writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, became one of the foremost feminist and socialist writers of that period. It was shocking because The Yellow Wallpaper took on the fledgling field of psychology and rattled many of the assumptions behind its early treatments. By the time the short story found its way onto Suspense, more than 50 years after its publication, general memory its social influence had waned. This was the only time the story was presented in US radio's golden age. It would not be on radio again until the 1980s in non-US productions Theatre 10:30 (CBC), Vanishing Point (CBC) and Fear on Four (BBC). Those, too, were horror stories.
In all of the times it aired, it was not presented as a work that questioned early treatments of psychological disorders, or as commentary about issues related to women in society. The episode was adapted by Silvia Richards, who was personally active in these issues in the 1940s and 1950s. She was likely one the few writers for radio who was familiar with Gilman's work and influence. Silvia was the ex-wife of Suspense writer and editor Robert L. Richards. They divorced in the early- to mid-1940s. Both became blacklisted writers in the Red Channels turbulence. In her Suspense work, Silvia worked mainly on adaptations, such as The Bluebeard Of Belloc, Nobody Loves Me, The Earth Is Made Of Glass, The Screaming Woman, Catch Me If You Can, The One Millionth Joe, Betrayal In Vienna, The Track Of The Cat, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Green and Gold String, and Escape's presentation of Something For Nothing. Her work was presented on other series, too, and the surviving ones can be viewed at RadioGoldindex https://radiogoldin.library.umkc.edu/Home/RadioGoldin_Records?searchString=Richards,%20Sylvia&type=Artists&count=21
Wikipedia has background and context for the original short story at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper
The complete text of the original story can be accessed at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm
An academic analysis can be found at SparkNotes https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/yellowwallpaper/summary/
The story remained controversial years after its publication. About 20 years later, Gilman explained her reasons for composing the story in a short piece in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner magazine, of which she was editor...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'
Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.
Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?
Now the story of the story is this:
For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.
The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.
But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
A current-day analysis of the story is at http://theconversation.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-a-19th-century-short-story-of-nervous-exhaustion-and-the-perils-of-womens-rest-cures-92302
There are two good recordings of the broadcast, network and Armed Forces Radio Service (#243). The network recording is the better of the two.
Performer and researcher Patte Rosebank adds this insight to the story background, posted at the OTRR Facebook page (2023-12-09):
It's also been suggested that the wallpaper contained arsenic (a common chemical in inks and dyes, in that era), which contributed to the woman's madness. Contrary to popular belief, arsenic wasn't just in green dyes, but in many colors of dye. I have an 1880s book about the arsenic problem, with tiny samples of wallpapers and fabrics. The most arsenical paper is bright magenta, and the most arsenical fabric is turkey red (as used in long underwear, in the mistaken belief that red was warmer than other colors).
Kenneth Narde at the OTRR Facebook page notes a 1977 short film of the story https://youtu.be/Uyy4vvA_KNA?si=M-Uche8bmFt4q9WN A search of IMDb shows many different film and video productions of Gilman's work.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP480729
THE CAST
AGNES MOOREHEAD (Pet), Bill Johnstone (John), Jeanette Nolan (Jenny), Paul Frees (Signature Voice)
COMMERCIAL: Bill Johnstone (Hap), Gil Stratton, Jr. (Ed), Frank Martin (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Girl)
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