Critical Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wall-Paper," does more than just tell the story of a woman who suffers at the hands of 19th century quack medicine. Gilman created a protagonist with real emotions and a real psych that can be examined and analyzed in the context of modern psychology. In fact, to understand the psychology of the unnamed protagonist is to be well on the way to understanding the story itself. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in first-person narrative, charts the psychological state of the protagonist as she slowly deteriorates into schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality).

Gilman's female narrator, who either chose not to fight this tradition or was unable to do so, loses her sanity at the hands of an oppressive male-dominated American society. The narrator feels certain that the

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a woman who writes about personal experience, and in her short, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we learn exactly who our author is based on the language and communication that appears throughout the story. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a captivating tale, largely because the language and communication between characters translates to a feeling of near madness for the reader. The man, the dominant character in the story, has much to say about his wife’s mental condition and practically refuses to permit her feelings. Gilman explains how this story wasn’t made to drive people insane, but rather to save people from insanity. She realizes she has the power to create a powerful effect within literature and that is the thing that

To begin, Gilman reveals very early on in the short story that the main character, Jane suffers from a mental illness that her husband john, who is also her physician fails to acknowledge is real. John along with other men in Janes family downplay her depression by attempting to convince her that she is not

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a first-person narration of madness experienced by an unnamed woman in the Victorian era. The madness is exposed through a “nervous condition” diagnosed by the writer’s husband, a physician, who believes the only cure is prohibiting all intellectual thought and to remain in solitude for a “rest-cure”. The act of confinement propels the narrator into an internal spiral of defiance against patriarchal discourse. Through characterization and symbolism, “The Yellow Wallpaper” exhibits an inventive parallel between the narrator’s mental deterioration and her internal struggle to break free from female oppression imposed on her through her husband and society.

Gilman uses indirect characterization in revealing the narrator’s private thoughts and feelings through the narrator’s secret journal. Since the narrator is diagnosed with nervous depression, – “conventional women’s disease of the nineteenth century” – her husband John, who is also her physician, recommends that her treatment be a rest cure, where she is not allowed to do anything active, especially reading and writing (Treichler, 1984, p.61). Treichler writes that during that time, doctors dictated this therapy because it was believed that too much intellectual stimulation would cause women to experience this illness (1984). But, because the narrator insists that the freedom to read and write would improve her condition, she decides to keep a secret journal as an outlet for her thoughts and imagination (Gilman, 1892).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the life and mind of a woman suffering from post-partum depression in the late eighteenth century. Gilman uses setting to strengthen the impact of her story by allowing the distant country mansion symbolize the loneliness of her narrator, Jane. Gilman also uses flat characters to enhance the depth of Jane’s thoughts; however, Gilman’s use of narrative technique impacts her story the most. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses interior monologue to add impact to Jane’s progression into insanity, to add insight into the relationships in the story, and to increase the depth of Jane’s connection with the yellow wallpaper it self.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression, undergoing the sexist psychological treatments of mental health, that took place during the late nineteenth century. The narrator in Gilman’s story writes about being forced to do nothing, and how that she feels that is the worst possible treatment for her. In this particular scene, the narrator writes that she thinks normal work would do her some good, and that writing allows her to vent, and get across her ideas that no one seems to listen to. Gilman’s use of the rhetorical appeal pathos, first-person point of view, and forceful tone convey her message that confinement is not a good cure for mental health, and that writing,

Towards the end of the story the narrator has a complete mental breakdown and goes insane. The story ends when John, the narrator's husband, faints when he enters his wife's room, because he is greatly disturbed when he finds her "creeping" around and becoming one of the figures behind the wallpaper. The Yellow Wallpaper can be interpreted on a personal level by associating it with the author. Gilman suffered from nervous breakdowns and depression because she was told to live a very plain life as best as she could by a specialist in nervous diseases.

The actual state of the narrator's sickness throughout the story is also symbolic of the narrator and more generally, women breaking free from society's stereotypes and expectations. Although she may only be breaking free through hallucinations and craziness, it is important because she is making a stand against the norms and expectations put upon her. Her insanity, for Gilman, represents feminist anger at society's rules and restraints for women. She is saying that women during the late 19th century were expected to be domestic housewives and that was it. That was their identity. But through this woman, Gilman began the idea that even if insanity was the only escape from the dumb, doting, docile domestic that women were supposed to be, she would rather take that than be

During the nineteenth century in the United States, woman was on the bottom of society. They had to follow the rules of society. Gilman was married to a doctor whose name in the short story is John. She had “nervous depression” which now is known as postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is where a female gives birth and has it because she has trouble attaching to her baby and the symptoms are appetite loss, anxiety and different moods. In that time females who had some sort of mental illness were kept away from society, especially when their husband was in high society. The story was "inspired partially from the way

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells a story about the main character who seems to be in touch with her sanity at the beginning of the story, as she obsesses over her room she is pulled further and further away from sanity. The husband believes he can help his wife, but in the end, it just makes her worse.

     Throughout the story, Gilman holds us attentive and sympathetic due to the specific positioning of the narrator; the narrator confides in us and us alone. The whole story is told as journal entries and personal thoughts. In reading the journal entries we fell privileged and intimate. Yet it is the personal thoughts that actually hold us captive in the realm of lunacy, a literal invitation into an insane mind in which we have no other option rather than actually "seeing" the twisted world that she sees, through her own eyes.

Mental illness is a pressing condition that requires a doctor’s acceptance and understanding to be treated. One must respect the disorder and be aware of its side effects and characteristics in order to comprehend what is happening to the affected individual. In today’s society, most people are accepting of people’s handicaps and take into consideration their limits, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people were unaccepting of impairments and were quick to misjudge individuals leading them to be wrongly diagnosed. No piece of American literature better demonstrates this concern than Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Gilman uses her background filled with her own struggles with mental illness and

Through a woman's perspective of assumed insanity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman comments on the role of the female in the late nineteenth century society in relation to her male counterpart in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman uses her own experience with mental instability to show the lack of power that women wielded in shaping the course of their psychological treatment. Further she uses vivid and horrific imagery to draw on the imagination of the reader to conceive the terrors within the mind of the psychologically wounded.