Perkins Gilman aptly used narrative voice to shape the meaning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by writing a first-person narrative about a woman who slowly loses herself to madness. This voice is one of a woman who may possibly have post-partum depression or some other form of manic depression, and her unheard cries for help. She slowly draws within herself, and allows the insanity to take over. Within the first few paragraphs we learn general characteristics about the narrator: she is middle class, as indicated by the phrase “mere ordinary people” (354); we also learn that she is married, suggested a statement about John laughing at her, something she says is only expected in marriage. Though we are never given her name, these generic aspects …show more content…
Early on, she openly admits that she may be ill, which quickly lends some reason to doubt when it comes to some of the things she talks about. Are there really women hiding behind the wallpaper? Surely not. Is there a woman lurking in the bushes outside? Unlikely. Are the patterns and shapes on the wallpaper interesting and thought-provoking? Probably so. That is all she thought of the wallpaper when first confined to the room—yellowish in color, with strange shapes woven into the texture. However, as her condition worsens, the way she looks at the wallpaper grows more and more distorted. The textures and strokes take shape and form; they turn into living beings, women who are confined between the layers of wallpaper. The narrator begins to feel sympathetic for them, feeling trapped and confined as well. The narrative slowly shifts from first- to second-person, with the inclusion of a “you.” Instead of simply describing her feelings, she then begins to say “this is how such a thing would make you feel.”
The narrator’s descriptions of the room itself change with each entry. At first, it is merely irritating. She describes the color as “repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning light” (356). Any reliable, sane person would be irritated by an ugly yellow on their walls. By the second entry, she admits she has a growing fondness for the room, aside from the wallpaper. She starts to pick out
Central to the story is the wallpaper itself. It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual damnation/freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the long-empty “ancestral estate,” a typical gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commit[s] every artistic sin”(426). The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she
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
The wallpaper is beginning to take on the role of controlling her life. As the days proceed on and she continues to sit in this isolated room, she begins to notice objects incorporated throughout the patterns. Every day the shapes become significantly clearer to her until one moment it appears to be a figure trapped within the walls (734). This aversion to the color completely shifts at this point toward hallucination. The wallpaper now has complete control of the narrator’s mind and sanity.
In the “Yellow Wallpaper,” the point of view inside the mind of a woman who has recently given birth and is experiencing a mental breakdown. Through the narrator’s eyes we can see vivid imagery as she describes the wallpaper. The room that they decide to stay in is the large nursery upstairs, which is covered in hideous yellow wallpaper, “I never saw a worse paper in my life... The color is repellent, almost revolting...” (8). As she is writing the narrator continues to describe the yellow wallpaper in more gruesome descriptions. The more the narrator describes the wallpaper, the better readers are able to understand what she was going through. The narrator starts to see shapes in the
The yellow wallpaper in the room shows, symbolically, the narrator was being oppressed. The narrator hated the wallpaper because she saw herself as a prisoner of her own husband. Spending so much time in the room, the narrator studied the wallpaper in details and found the wallpaper somewhat represents her. "There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other" (pg280), "Such a peculiar odor, too" (pg 285) etc. The confusing pattern, the bar, the woman behind the bar, and the yellow color of the wallpaper allowed her to feel so helpless, as if she was a bird
The purpose of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to tell the reader that you can have negative effect on someone’s mental health if they are denied their freedom of expression. This is because the narrator (Jane) was kept in a room that had yellow wallpaper, which she did not like. Soon after being unable to work or write Jane began to see creepy figures in the wallpaper and everyday it got worse, she soon began to see a women trapped in the wallpaper. This began to feed her hallucinations and paranoia that someone else is going to find out about this women, and help her escape the yellow wallpaper. This made Jane insane, she would see women walking around outside, and she soon became addicted to the room and writing about the wall in her journal.
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.
The surroundings which one is placed in can drastically contribute to their mental state. Deterioration and a lack of stimulation will be reciprocated within the mind of the inhabitant. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, depicts a young, unnamed woman who is suffering with post-partum depression. In this time period, the treatment of mental illness typically did more harm than good as electroshock therapy, and the rest cure were the classic treatments of choice. Similarly, William Faulkner, the author of “A Rose for Emily”, written in 1930, gives the reader an inside look upon an elderly woman experiencing mental distress. Although there are major signs of an issue being present within Miss Emily’s old, southern house, the town chooses to ignore and cover them up as to not disrupt the elderly woman who buys poisons without a reason and sleeps next to the dead corpse of her lover. Theme and setting play two very distinct and important roles within each of these stories allowing the reader to have a more complete understanding of the message the author is trying to convey.
By comparing both stories together, and the characters within them, it is clear that neither the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Harrison from “Harrison Bergeron” agree with the way they are being treated caused by their social, political and economic standpoint in society. In both stories they have opposing forces trying to dictate their life, and telling them who they are supposed to be. Within the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is being authorized by her husband john and in the story “Harrison Bergeron”, Harrison is being oppressed by his government system. In both societies of the stories, the characters are treated differently for who they are. The people to have more power in their lives, decide who they are and what they can be. The ultimate outcome of their life is up to the forces controlling them. Both characters have no way to escape the labels given to them, without going against the people restraining their potential. The characters have many good attributes to them, but are confined to being what others tell them to be. The narrator has wonderful writing skills and an active mind which allows her to be creative and have an artistic personality, but her husband will not allow her to write or be who she wants to be because he has the capability to control who she is. Harrison is a genius and an athlete who could build upon his abilities to better himself as a person both mentally and physically, but the government will not allow him to
However, due to the narrator’s “imaginative power and habit of story-making”, her husband tells her, “a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency, so I try.” (439). Being forbidden to have an imagination leaves the narrator emotionally distressed and irritated with feelings of oppression, but she ignores her husband’s ideas and occupies her imagination with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds the room, developing some sort of relationship with it that allows her to confess her suppressed feelings.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman begins the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” with the narrator and her husband John going away to the mansion, which the narrator describes as “the most beautiful place!” (552). The narrator is describing the whole mansion with such happiness, until she began to speak of the walls in her bedroom, she says “it is dull”, “the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” (552-553). The wallpaper will come back into play as the story continues on. Gilman portrays the state of insanity through her character, the narrator, which is why they ended up in this “hereditary estate” (551), because she was not well enough to stay around so many people. As you read above, the description of the wallpaper, which makes
In the short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," by Charlotte Gilman, the setting contributes to the narrator's insanity. When she first sees the house, she loves it. She thinks the house will be a perfect place to recover from her "nervous condition," but that does not happen because her husband confines her to the bedroom so that her health will improve. The narrator's mental illness deteriorates to the point of insanity due to her isolation in the bedroom, with only the yellow wallpaper to look at that she considers "repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow,strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight" (106).
As a woman, the narrator becomes almost imprisoned in this room. Metaphorically, her and other women are imprisoned in the yellow wallpaper. The narrator sees different patterns of movement in the wallpaper everyday. Eventually, the reader sees the wallpaper as a prison for women, “The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Towards the end of the story the narrator starts seeing the movement of the woman in the wallpaper clearer. “The front pattern does move- and no wonder! The woman behind it shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind it, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over” (654). The narrator’s wild imagination leads to her strange obsession with the wallpaper.
with a rest cure. The doctor in the story is much like the doctor that