The voice of the woman in the wall: uncanny narration as domestic critique in the <i>Suspense</i> radio adaptation of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1948)

Abstract This article argues for the significance of radio drama to studies of adaptation and gender through analysis of the Suspense radio play ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (CBS, 1948). Far from the ‘lost’ story of legend, the radio play aired to a large audience with the imprimatur of a major network, its corporate sponsor, and broadcasting’s highest honours, providing an instructive case of what scholars of adaptation may miss should they fail to account for popular broadcast media. Through forms of narration and vocal performance that transgress established gendered categories, the play adapts the 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman story to a new medium and cultural context, demonstrating uncanny echoes between the ‘separate spheres’ ideology of the nineteenth century and the valorization of home and family life newly resurgent in the postwar years. Translating the story to audio adds to its existing narrative ambiguity and extends its critique to the medium of radio itself, by dramatizing for female listeners the difficulties of treading increasingly unstable boundaries between the private sphere of domestic life and the public sphere of work, commerce, and entertainment. The multiple senses of the term uncanny—the un-home-like within the heart of the home and the confusion between the animate and inanimate in which the boundary between life and death is blurred—demonstrate a larger state of liminality for postwar broadcast audiences. Through this example, I aim to demonstrate the possibilities of a method of close-reading broadcast media texts, influenced by both historical context and theories of narration and address.