Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 34:4 (Autumn 2020)
Article: The Yellow Wallpaper: Reflecting On Aimee Byrd’s "Recovering From Biblical Manhood And Womanhood"
Author: Bree Mills

PP 34:4 (Autumn 2020) p. 25

The Yellow Wallpaper: Reflecting On Aimee Byrd’s Recovering From Biblical Manhood And Womanhood

Bree Mills

Bree Mills is Senior Associate Pastor at Glen Waverley Anglican Church, near Melbourne, Australia. You can learn more about Bree and her ministry at https://BreeMills.com.au.

After reading the introduction to Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,1 I admit I put her book down to go and read The Yellow Wallpaper, a book that sparked Byrd’s thinking and prompted her to write. Only then did I return to reading Byrd’s book.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a profoundly disturbing novella by American social reformer and feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, penned in 1890 and published in 1892.2 It is the semiautobiographical story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression, in an era when this disorder was misunderstood. The woman is prescribed rest therapy, a complete removal of any mental, social, or physical activity. She is placed in a room with yellow wallpaper and bars on the windows while she is cared for by her husband and her sister-in-law, Jenny. The woman speaks well of her husband and his care for her, and while the readers can see her participation in her own oppression, the narrator cannot. She begins to see another woman in the wallpaper, desiring to break free, and over time tears at the wallpaper to free the woman trapped within. It ends in her husband finding her raving mad in the room, having freed the woman from the wallpaper, and the voice of the narrator shifts to become the voice from behind the wallpaper. The two women are one, and she has freed herself from the confinement in which she and her husband both participated.

Byrd’s aim in using Gilman’s book is clear. She is asking us to consider where we might be blind to the impact of our culture, our history or evangelical tribe, or worse, where we might be complicit in our own oppression. As followers of Jesus, it is time to peel back the wallpaper on the sisters of Christ. Byrd says:

Here I am asking you to look for the yellow wallpaper that has been left behind in your church. Maybe it’s been there so long that you have learned to live with it. In fact, you may not even notice it anymore. Or perhaps you do—it’s been nagging at you with all its confusing lines—but you know how hard it is to peel away old wallpaper. And you don’t want to lose church members over it. Heck, you don’t want to lose your own job over it. (227–28)

Tribal Responses To Calling Out The Wallpaper

Seeking to peel away the wallpaper in any church is a recipe for conflict, an...