The Quiet Presence of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in Todd Haynes’s Film [Safe]

In Far from Heaven (2002), filmmaker Todd Hayne’s mash-up of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows (1955), Haynes levels a contemporary critique of conventional notions of selfhood and identity that is in conversation with the Imitation of Life sequence discussed in the previous chapter. In this chapter I want to posit another of Haynes’s films, [Safe] (1995), as the “hideous progeny” of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a classic American text about selfhood and oppressive social institutions that anticipates by a century Haynes’s critique of cultural disciplines that objectify and repress human desire, especially that of women. Further, his film subverts the principle of ameliorative art, a shallow optimism that thinks a feminist position can only be imagined in terms of paradigms of role-modeling.