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)
###
