The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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 abstract pattern of the wallpaper interests her and forces her to interpret the wallpaper as a message. She is being forced by John to see this horrendous wallpaper while she stays in this house to cure her illness. Her having no choice but to stay and see the wallpaper shows John’s superiority over her and her succumbing to his wants for her. She states “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?”(648). The narrator does not stand up for what she thinks is right for her physical and mental health, but she lets her

An anonymous author once said, “What consumes your mind, controls your life.” In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is suffering from severe depression, at the very least and constantly tries to get better. While trying to get better she becomes increasingly fixated on the yellow wallpaper that encompasses her in her room. It gets to the point where the wallpaper is all she thinks about and slowly, it starts to control her life. The yellow wallpaper in this story is a representation of the narrator’s relationship with her disease.

But John would not hear of it” (Gilman 308). – “I wonder – I begin to think – I wish John would take me away from here” (Gilman 314). She said she would hate herself if she had to live in the treatment room long “the paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is tripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life” – “the color is repellant” – “a smoldering unclear yellow, strangely faded by slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly Sulphur tint in others.” – “I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long” (Gilman 309). The treatment doesn’t help reduce her stressful and depression. She feels worse than before. She doesn’t feel like writing before since she moved into the yellow wallpaper – a nursery room. Besides, she is abandoned because her husband away all day. The lonely feeling make her “nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing” (Gilman 309). Preventing from moving and working treatment and focusing on resting and being alone is a wrong treatment method. The narrator gets tired and tired every day and is more nervous because she just feels like “a comparative burden” to her husband. One more time, the husband rejects her feeling – she want get out of the house to feel the fresh air and meet people around which makes she feels relax and happy – “I’m

She seems to express how she feels She has a journal that she writes her experiences from day to day despite her doctor’s orders. She feels as if the journal relieves her mind and is an escape from the way she is being treated. She is forced to hide her journal because her husband would not approve of her activities because they were contradicting his orders of rest. In her journal, she expresses how the yellow wallpaper is bothersome to her. Her husband threatens to send her to another doctor (Mitchell?) who she has visited before and who seemed to have tortured her more than help, after she is visited by family and is constantly fatigued. Due to being confined to her room for excessive amounts of time

The constant act of avoiding the worth women have in society spirals down to the core fact how women are envisioned inferior to men. In The Ways We Lie by Stephanie Ericsson, the simple declaration, “We lie. We all do. We exaggerate, we minimize, we avoid confrontation, we spare people’s feelings, we conveniently forget, we keep secrets, we justify lying to the big-guy’s institutions.” Depicts how far lies have come to fit in the spectrum of society, which has inevitably caused women to lose their voice in established lies – mistaken as truths – into thinking that the unfair treatment they receive is what they deserve.

The longer she is alone, the more insane she becomes. She can see the environment around her becoming worse. The wallpaper progressively deteriorates as she does. It goes from being “torn off in spots” to becoming a “faint figure.. wanting to get out.” By her change in perspective of the wallpaper, the reader can tell that she is losing her mind. The wallpaper begins to look alive to her, demonstrating her madness. The longer she is isolated, the more the wallpaper seems as if it is trying to escape. Representing her own self, who wants to escape from the room. She feels trapped and it causes her to become more insane the longer she is left alone. Because she has no other choice and nothing else to do. She has nothing to take her mind off of what she is dealing with. All she is able to do is stare at the wallpaper and think about her life situation. The doctor and her husband think they are bettering her by taking her away from her life, and giving her time alone, when really they just made her illness worse by forcing her to fix it on her

Hysteria is mentioned almost immediately in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi- autobiographical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. We encounter the narrator through epistolary-like entries that she tells us is in a journal. The main character is a well off, married woman who is suffering from, what we now know to be, post-partum depression. She is taken by her husband to an isolated country house where she can rest, and upon their arrival to the house she is placed in a former nursery covered in a hideous, yellow wallpaper; which slowly drives her insane.

Humans are flawed individuals. Although flaws can be bad, people learn and grow from the mistakes made. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, gives one a true look at using flaws to help one grow. Gilman gives her reader’s a glimpse into what her life would have consisted of for a period of time in her life. Women were of little importance other than to clean the house and to reproduce. This story intertwines the reality of what the lives of woman who were considered to be suffering mental disorders were like and elements that make one as a reader feel as though they are living the hell that Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived herself. This story can be interpreted several different ways, yet one can ultimately realize that Gilman’s goal was to show the horrors she faced. Looking at the life that Gilman lived, one better comes to understand what “The Yellow Wallpaper” is truly about.

She is diagnosed with this illness and shows her symptoms throughout the story. For example, the way she obsesses over the wallpaper is not in any way normal, “…when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (239), since her mind has nothing else in the world to focus on, she is driven to an obsession with the wallpaper. Here she is still in her normal mind but her brain soon fixates on the wallpaper to an unhealthy degree to where she believes there is a woman inside the

Her husband keeps wants her to put down her pen and paper, relax and stay in one room as she is stressed. The doctor and her husband agree that this is the best cure for her depression or mental anguish. All though not really on board with this plan, as she wants to live, she goes along with her doctor and husband’s blessing, holding her feelings inside “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” (Gilman, par. 26). In her husband holding her to this room, which has torn yellow wallpaper, she fades more and more into the faded torn walls “I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wall-paper. It dwells in my mind so” (Gilman, 94). She wants to get to any other room for the longest time, then subsides into blending into the wallpaper and what it possesses in its designs. Eventually, her husband went checking on her, found her creeping around on the floor, and was so astonished that she actually digressed that he

The next day she sees the woman struggling from inside the pattern and puts more effort into tearing the paper to let her out. The narrator believes she was also trapped in the wallpaper and thinks she finally set herself free. Lastly, her husband enters the room and after seeing the result of her insanity, he faints blocking her path from the wall, so she had to “creep over him every time” (Perkins

At some point, her husband was also one of the reasons of her mental condition. Also, the narrator said that “So I take phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again” (Gilman 151). It means that her own opinion is that what she needs is precisely the contradictory activity and stimulation. However, the narrator decides to write a secret journal, in which she describes her mandatory inactiveness and expresses her aversion for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gently deepens into mania. Indeed, her inner thoughts and concerns about the wallpaper lead to her mental collapse. The narrator said that “there are things in that paper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will” (Gilman 159). The importance of this quote is that the narrator discovers that another woman is trapped behind the wallpaper in her room, something that only she can see. Also, she feels miserable for that woman that is behind the paper and tries to help free her by peeling back her

Throughout the book, she describes disturbing things like seeing bars on the windows, and she was very disturbed by the yellow wallpaper. The narrator describes the wallpaper as “revolting”. As the summer progresses, she becomes better at hiding her journal causing her to write about more things, mainly about the yellow wallpaper. Her husband John starts to notice her fixation of the wallpaper. At one point she asks for him to change the wallpaper but he refuses because he still thinks that she still trying to get attention. After a good amount of time, the wallpaper is the main thing on her

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.