Analysis Of The Book ' The Yellow Wallpaper '

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” we are introduced to a woman who enjoys writing. Gilman does not give the reader the name of the women who narrates the story through her stream of consciousness. She shares that she has a nervous depression condition. John, the narrator’s husband feels it is “a slight hysterical tendency” (266). She has been treated for some nervous habits that she feels are legitimately causing harm to her way of life. However she feels her husband, a physician, and her doctor believe that she is embellishing her condition. The woman shares with the reader early in the story that she is defensive of how others around her perceive her emotional state. This causes a small abrasion of animosity that

The Yellow Wallpaper represents the narrator’s life, the woman in the wallpaper is trapped behind a pattern and so is the narrator. “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (p.6). The woman who she sees that is trapped in the yellow paper is a reflection of herself, she herself felt trapped, she was crying for help and she felt like someone needed to come and save her from the life that she was living. The way in which she is describing what she is seeing in the yellow wallpaper is a representation of female language, she is describing her position in her marriage with John from her point of

It is difficult to discuss the meaning in this story without first examining the author’s own personal experience. “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives an account of a woman driven to madness as a result of the

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.

Not only does the yellow wallpaper represent how the narrator feels physically trapped by the room but also how she feels oppressed by society. Through out her

The vivid descriptions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” help to bring the reader along in the narrators decent into a kind of psychosis. It starts mildly, with her describing the color of wallpaper as “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 528). As more time passes she begins to see more things in the paper such as “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes start at you,” and for it have “so much expression in an inanimate thing” (Gilman 592). As the pattern and descriptions get more twisted, we get visual clues of the madness that is slowly consuming the narrator. The color of the paper even begins to become a physical thing she can smell descried as, “creep[ing] all over the house...sulking...hiding...lying in wait for me…It gets into my hair” (Gilman 534). In the end we get a graphic visual representation of her full psychosis

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

The description of the house by the woman is positively somehow. However, she is disturbed by some elements such as; “the rings and things” in the walls, and that the bars on the windows keep showing up. In addition, what was disturbing her the most is the yellow wall paper which is creepy with a formless pattern and that leads her to be totally insane. Readers are introduced to the woman’s desperate thoughts and feelings, yet her husband came and interrupted her thoughts and she was forced to stop writing. Furthermore, she always complains that her husband John who is a physician belittles her illness, her own thoughts and that makes her more depressed. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a deep feminist story that shows the unequal relationship between women and men in the 19th century and uses the yellow

The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes haunted by the wallpaper in her room. The setting takes place in the room, she dislikes the room from the moment she sees it and fells suffocated by it. Her feeling of suffocation and being haunted by the wallpaper helps the reader become more aware of her motivation for tearing the wallpaper down.

The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is told she needs to rest constantly to overcome her sickness, so she is forced to stay in the old nursery where there is yellow-orange wallpaper with a busy, obnoxious pattern that she hates. She tries to study the wallpaper to distinguish the pattern, and as time goes on she believes she sees a woman moving around in the background of the pattern. Also, during this period of time the character’s condition is worsening, because her husband is causing her mind to weaken by not allowing her to exert herself at all; he says she is not to think about her condition, walk through the garden or visit family. All she can do is sleep and trace the wallpaper, and being cooped up in the room causes her to begin hallucinating. The narrator sees the woman trying to escape from the wallpaper throughout the night, and she ultimately completely breaks down and believes that she is the woman.

In literature, women are often depicted as weak, compliant, and inferior to men. The nineteenth century was a time period where women were repressed and controlled by their husband and other male figures. Charlotte Gilman, wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper," showing her disagreement with the limitations that society placed on women during the nineteenth century. According to Edsitement, the story is based on an event in Gilman’s life. Gilman suffered from depression, and she went to see a physician name, Silas Weir Mitchell. He prescribed the rest cure, which then drove her into insanity. She then rebelled against his advice, and moved to California to continue writing. She then wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is inflated version of her

Similarly, “The Yellow Wallpaper” symbolizes the trapped narrator with an urgency to escape from her dwelling. Like Elisa, the narrator finds a task that would keep her boredom away as “life is very much more exciting than it used to be” (443). By staring at the wallpapers pattern constantly all day, she is no longer bored. In addition, the narrator believes that in order to escape she must free the woman behind the wallpaper. The narrator turns insane by visioning a woman in the wallpaper and trying to escape. The narrator is imprisoned, and the bothersome patter of the yellow wallpaper begins to straighten out to her. The narrator finds a channel of hope outside the windows, through the bars, wanting to leave the room and depart into the real world. Both Elisa Allen and the narrator feel a need, a desire for an escape from their current lives.

As the protagonist suffers from her “nervous condition”, the isolated environment causes her to only get worse. Being trapped in the bedroom with yellow wallpaper contributes her emotional distress to become overpowering. The inability to verbally express her feelings of loneliness causes her to write in a more creative way about her relationships with objects in the room, specifically the yellow wallpaper. She begins to write about the yellow wallpaper as if it is suppose to have some sort of significance, in which it does. In the beginning of the narrator’s isolation, her attention is focused on the details of the yellow wallpaper’s pattern that are “dull enough to confused the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study” (438). The wallpaper’s characteristics become hard to

Covered in wallpaper, the room is plagued by yellow, but not just any yellow, “a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (Mays 528). The picture painted by the narrator is a dull, mustard yellow that not only looks bad, but also is described as foul-smelling (Mays 534). Knowing the shade of yellow is crucial to analysis because every color and every shade of color has an impact in our emotions. Yellow is a color known for making the brain active in a number of different ways, depending on the shade, for example bright yellow makes promotes happiness and productivity. In contrast, dull yellow can promote depression and, “… can induce states of anxiety because it is considered to be such a rapid moving color,” which is interesting since it amplifies the narrator’s anxiety and depression, but opposes her lack of energy (Dena 2016). Also to point out is the relation of the narrator’s inner conflict with the cracks on the wallpaper: “It is obvious that the wallpaper’s ‘outrageous angles’ and ‘unheard of contradictions’ reflect [the narrator’s] own inner turbulence” (Mcdona 2016). The same cracks in the wall that end up driving the narrator mad also resembles the struggle going on in her mind, which was also aided by the color of the wall the cracks found themselves on.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story that I feel could be interpreted in many different ways. It is narrated by an unnamed woman who says she suffers from nervous depression. A common perspective of this story is that the woman is driven crazy by her husband because he kept her locked in a room and surrounded by hideous wallpaper. We can interpret that she saw herself inside of the yellow wallpaper and tries to escape. When she does escape, she crawls over her husband John’s fainted body. Does she actually suffer from nervous depression or is it something else? Should we believe everything she says in the story or does her mental illness cause her to see things for what they are not? How do her feelings toward the wallpaper change throughout the story?