The Yellow Wallpaper

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.

The "Yellow Wall Paper "by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a chilling study and experiment of mental disorder in nineteenth century. This is a story of a miserable wife, a young woman in anguish, stress surrounding her in the walls of her bedroom and under the control of her husband doctor, who had given her the treatment of isolation and rest. This short story vividly reflects both a woman in torment and oppression as well as a woman struggling for self expression. The setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the driving force in the story because it is the main factor that caused the narrator to go insane.

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, was secretly written because her husband John didn’t allow her to write. As told by male doctors, Charlotte found out that she had a temporary nervous depression. Therefore, no matter how many doctors tell her she is sick, her husband John will not believe her. John made Charlotte and their child move to an old abandoned house, where Charlotte has always felt that something was weird about the house, as if the house was haunted. John was not like most husbands, he treated her like she was stupid and would not allow her to do anything. Charlotte felt as if she was a nobody because of how he treated her; also, how he always downed her. John treated her as if she wasn’t important.

The yellow wall paper was written in the 1800’s during that time women were vastly expected to serve their husband as housewives, not given the right to vote, make decision for themselves, work and even make enough money to support themselves. The husband is a doctor, while the wife suffers from severe mental illness. This is a husband who loves his wife and taught he was doing what was right to get her in a stable condition but unfortunately he made her become crazier, due to lack of stimulation. The Yellow Wall Paper symbolizes slowly tearing the walls of freedom for women.

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

Her loving husband, John, never takes her illness seriously. The reader has a front row seat of the narrator’s insanity voluminously growing. He has shown great patience with the recovery of his wife’s condition. However, the narrator is clear to the reader that she cannot be her true self with him. In the narrator’s eyes she feels he is completely oblivious to how she feels and could never understand her. If she did tell him that the yellow wallpaper vexed her as it does he would insist that she leave. She could not have this.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, already suffering with Post-Partum Depression, is further constrained when her husband John prescribes her resting treatment for her illness. John clarifies that she must lie in bed in the same, enclosed room, refrain from using her imagination and especially abstain from writing. This, in turn, forces the narrator deeper into her

The narrator has a natural creativity that when left idol drives he insane. She is forced to hide he anxieties and fears which ultimately drives her to insanity. Even though she keeps a journal writing is in particularly off limits. Creativity was forbidden to her, John constantly reminds her to keep it contained. She even writes: “He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” She longs for an outlet for her repressed mind, going as far as to keep the journal, the one the audience is now privy to. She often refers to the journal as her only source of solace. As her sanity deteriorates, her mind starts to imagine things. The wallpaper becomes her outlet for this creativity. She begins describing the mansion as haunted and starts seeing a woman in the walls. She describes this saying: “The dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder-I be­gin to think - I wish John would take we away from here!” Her natural eventually becomes so repressed it drives her

The recurring conflict in the short story, leading to the narrator losing her insanity, can be seen in the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, with the narrator’s point of view illustrating her restricted, mundane life and the misunderstanding of her condition that causes her mental health to deteriorate. The narrator clearly depicts the heavy constraints limiting her from expressing herself through her very first diary entry, in which she says “John is a physician, and perhaps-- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? Personally, I disagree with

There are multiple concepts that the author was trying to expose in her story about insanity like the role of women during this specific era. In the beginning of “The Yellow Paper”, it does

    "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.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story, The Yellow Wallpaper was attention grabbing and goose-bump inspiring. The tone quickly shifts from uncomfortable and stifling to eerie and chilling. The narrator begins by passively complaining about the yellow wallpaper, but by the end it drives her to absolute madness. The extremely descriptive imagery of the wallpaper is an important part of this story as it helps to unveil the deeper meaning behind the story. The choice of the color yellow is especially significant as it is repetitive not only in the title, but throughout the story, and adds to the overall perception of the narrators increasing insanity.

“He told me all his opinions, so I had the same ones too; or if they were different I hid them, since he wouldn’t have cared for that” (Ibsen 109). As this quote suggests Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Henrik Ibsen, in A Doll House dramatize that, for woman, silent passivity and submissiveness can lead to madness.

For quite a long time before the past century, the female gender had been a race characterized by limited opportunity and the widespread belief of inferiority to the male gender. It was not until the women’s rights movement took off in the 1920’s that women began to enjoy having the same opportunities as men and playing an active role in society. Before that time, women were perceived as being inferior to their male counterparts and received less respect than men. This resulted in devastating effects on the female psyche, including debasement of character and even catastrophic mental illness. Countless tails of woe written by the women of that terribly oppressed time period convey the isolation, humiliation, and

The combination of the protagonist’s insanity and the setting of the nursery with yellow wallpaper identify a theme of imprisonment of females in a domestic world. The anonymous wife is taken by her husband to a country mansion to recover from a state of hysteria. The narrator then takes it upon herself to actively study and decode the wallpaper, and through her downward spiral into insanity she untangles its confused pattern to reveal a woman trapped in the depths of the chaotic outlines. As time passes the narrator begins to relate to this encaged woman and believes that she too is trapped within the wallpaper. During the last few nights the narrator tears down the wallpaper in an attempt to escape from her cage. The use of the yellow wallpaper as a symbolic gesture to the entrapment of women shows how setting can directly relate to the theme of a short story.