Character Analysis: The Yellow Wallpaper

comes John, and I must put this away,­­ he hates to have me write a word.”(Gillman 3), The fact

Many of the passages concerning the husband can be interpreted as containing sarcasm, a great many contain irony, and several border on parody (Johnson 528). It is true that the husband’s language is exaggerated at times, but dismissing the husband’s character as caricature seems extreme. He is instead the natural complement to the narrator’s madness and uncontrolled fancy: the character of John is control and “sanity” as defined by Victorian culture and is therefore the narrator’s opposite. Greg Johnson notes that John exhibits a near-obsession with “reason,” even as his wife grows mad. He is the narrator’s necessary counterpart, without whose stifling influence her eventual freedom would not be gained. And he is also transformed at the end of the tale—in a reversal of traditional gothic roles—because it is he, not a female, who faints when confronted with madness (529).

If she was free to express her feelings, she wouldn’t have had to shove them aside and try to find other things to occupy her mind with. She finds greatest comfort when she writes, but her husband believes that it is bad for her to do so because it is too stimulating. She makes comments many times expressing how writing makes her feel better, that it would “relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (349) and that she “must say

John attempts to control even her inner life, her writing. She says that "he hates to have me write a word" (482). He says the writing is not good for people who are sick. He tells her that it will slow down her healing. Writing is the only thing that’s keeping her sane, but she is unable to do it freely. She has to hide her words so John does not find them. This shows that John has mental control as well as physical control.

    The narrator finds herself economically and emotionally dependent on her husband, John.  Many times she questions to herself why she stays in the room all of the time.  She then answers herself by saying, " John says it is good for me" (Gilman, 665).  She thinks of her husband as much wiser and more important than she, which is the way that society treated males during the time period the story was written.  During this era, women were discouraged from joining the work force and were thought to be better suited as a mother, and wife rather than an employee.   This is the common stereotype that women tried to overcome during the women's movement.

Not only did he refuse to take her illness seriously, he also refused to take her seriously. While on her vacation, he is in complete control of the things she does and says. She was forbid to write or engage in any stimulating activities, or even receive company from family or friends. She believed that “excitement and change” would help her, yet he firmly believed in the opposite. He would dismiss her complaints or worries, for they went against what he believed was right for her. Gilman’s message to her society was that women’s complaints and worries were valid, and that they were deserving of being listened to. They were to be taken seriously, especially when they were discussing their own health, physical or mental. John would not treat her as someone deserving of respect, instead he treated her like a child. He would call her diminutive names such as “little girl” or “blessed little goose”, and would speak to her as if she was delusional. John found her worries irrational, and that they were getting the best of her. With no one to believe her, the narrator found her writing to be her only confidant. She writes in secret, in fear John will find out and take what little she already

John attempts to control even her inner life, her writing. She says that "he hates to have me write a word" (482). He says the writing is not good for people who are sick. He tells her that it will slow down her healing. Writing is the only thing that’s keeping her sane, but she is unable to do it freely. She has to hide her words so John does not find them. This shows that John has mental control as well as physical control.

An example of the way John treated his wife is, “And after John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.” (Gilman, )

Analysis: The above quotations clearly display the similarity between John and the Narrator’s relationship to that of a father and a daughter. John controls the majority of the Narrator’s behavior to the point she feels an overwhelming sense of guilt for her incapacity as John’s wife. The Narrator is restricted in her actions and is therefore unable to fulfil her wifely duties, forcing her to consider herself as a burden. When is reality, John treats the Narrator as his daughter and does not permit her to complete her duty. For instance, the Narrator dislikes the yellow wallpaper and wishes to have it removed; however, John does not allow her to do so and acts as if it would feed into a child’s stubbornness. His continued belief in his superiority disregards the Narrator as is wife and instead infantilizes her. He believes her identity exists only through him, which merely encourages his paternalistic

The first similarity between these two characteristics is that they have limited views of their wives. Throughout the story John constantly thinks of the narrator as a child. First he puts her in a child’s

John, the narrator’s controlling, but loving, husband represents the atypical man of the time. He wants his wife to get better and to be able to fill the role of the perfect wife that society expected from her. John, being a doctor, did not quite believe that her mental illness was out of her control and insisted on

In Gilman’s story, we see the narrator’s point of view of her husband as she characterizes her husband as faithless which causes him to use a treatment that is not helping his wife. In the beginning, we see the narrator’s description of her spouse, John, as a practical thinker, preferring the facts instead of faith, for example, “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (Gilman, 2016, p. 60). This quote is the perfect example of John being faithless or having “no patience with faith,” it also states that John is a practical thinker in the “extreme,” only believing in what can be seen, felt, or put as a figure. With John having this mindset he doesn’t want to hear his wife’s point of view and his profession prevents him to hear

John is characterized by Gillman as being very analytical, very scientific in thought. As such, so when he fails to find anything physically wrong with his wife he attributes it to fatigue, almost refusing to entertain the idea that it might be an emotional unsoundness that afflicts her. There also appears to be an immense lack of communication between the narrator and her husband John. "I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper", says the narrator, referring to her husband, "he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away"(Gillman 583). This paucity of interchange and inability of John to truly listen to his wife's needs are the ultimate sources of conflict in the story.

seems that John is very controlling and doesn't pay true attention to his wife. The illnesses of both the

She also has to hide when she is angry with him. The narrator says, “But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. ”(Stetson 648) Her husband symbolizes the confinement of the narrator’s personality. She can’t get angry when she feels like it or write when she wants to, because her husband has a leash on her