Use Of The Unreliable Narrator In 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

            “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an example of how stories and the symbolism to which they are related can influence the perspective of its readers and alternate their point of view. In the “Yellow Wall-Paper”, the unknown narrator gets so influenced by her surroundings that she starts showing signs of mental disorder, creating through many years several controversies on trying to find the real causes of her decease.

Many children often bring inanimate objects to life with their imagination. The narrator is introduced at the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a woman who is recovering from what other appears to be a mental illness. The woman is with her husband John, who is a physician. The narrator and John stay in the nursery where there is yellow wallpaper covering the walls. Slowly, the narrator forms a childish obsession with the wallpaper to the point where it seems she is losing her mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has a very unique use of literary technique throughout her short story. Gilman uses the literary technique of diction to show how the narrator is being treated like a child, and how she acts like a child.

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.

The unreliable narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a compound character, the most compound character I’ve encountered in any story. Not only is she unreliable, she is also said to be, by some, the insane character of the story. Contrary to the popular opinion, I presume she was just more herself by the end of the story and just held back by her husband, John and his overprotective and maddening tendencies of keeping her from being who she really was. Throughout the story, you begin to see that this is obvious she was held back from who she was because her husband wanted her to be something she wasn’t. Was the wall-paper a being of who this actual person, the narrator, was? Or was she simply just insane and the woman in the wall-paper was a figment of her imagination? By the end of the story she ended up being truly herself and the woman she was seeing in the wall-paper was a version of herself that she couldn’t show John. That she couldn’t show anyone, until she finds that little inspiration from a yellow wall-paper.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the narrator, being the main character, as an ill woman. However, she is not ill physically. She is ill in her mind. More than any chemical imbalance that may be present; the narrator's environment is what causes her to go mad.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” we are introduced to a woman who enjoys writing. Gilman does not give the reader the name of the women who narrates the story through her stream of consciousness. She shares that she has a nervous depression condition. John, the narrator’s husband feels it is “a slight hysterical tendency” (266). She has been treated for some nervous habits that she feels are legitimately causing harm to her way of life. However she feels her husband, a physician, and her doctor believe that she is embellishing her condition. The woman shares with the reader early in the story that she is defensive of how others around her perceive her emotional state. This causes a small abrasion of animosity that

“The Yellow Wallpaper” provides an insight into the life of the narrator- a woman suppressed and unable to express herself because of her controlling husband- leading the reader down her fall to insanity, allowing for her inner conflict to be clearly expressed. The first person point of the view the author artfully uses and the symbolism present with the wallpaper cleverly depicts the inner conflict of the narrator, losing her own sanity due to the constraints of her current life. However, while it seems that the narrator in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” succumbed to her own insanity, the endless conflict within herself and her downward spiral to insanity is seen through a different light, as an inevitable path rather than a choice taken as the story develops.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," a nervous wife, an overprotective husband, and a large, dank room covered in musty wallpaper all play important parts in driving the wife insane. The husband's smothering attention, combined with the isolated environment, incites the nervous nature of the wife, causing her to plunge into insanity to the point she sees herself in the wallpaper. The author's masterful use of not only the setting (of both time and place), but also of first person point of view, allows the reader to participate in the woman's growing insanity.

It has been shown throughout history and much of the nineteenth century, women were to be rated as second-class citizens. They are oppressed by the inversed sex to be known as “feeble.” In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the narrator as the protagonist, to depict how women were represented during this period and time. The narrator, who is unnamed, starts off the story by telling of her husband in their summer home. Her husband is also a physician, who attempts to cure her nervous disorder by restricting her into a room which she is not allowed to leave. In spite the fact that the narrator struggles to fight her nervous disorder she, ultimately, tries to find a way to break free from her husband’s control. The

Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is centered on the deteriorating psychological condition of the female narrator. As a woman in a male dominating society in the 19th century, the narrator has no control over her life. This persistence eventually evolves into her madness. The insanity is triggered by her change in attitude towards her husband, the emergent obsession with the wallpaper and the projection of herself as the women behind the wallpaper. The “rest cure” which was prescribed by her physician husband, created the ideal environment for her madness to extend because, it was in her imagination that she had some freedom and control.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story told from the perspective of a woman who’s believed to be “crazy”. The narrator believes that she is sick while her husband, John, believes her to just be suffering from a temporary nervous depression. The narrator’s condition worsens and she begins to see a woman moving from behind the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom. The wallpaper captures the narrator’s attention and initial drives her mad. Charlotte Gilman uses a lot of personal pieces into her short story, from her feministic views to her personal attributes. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written from a feminist and autobiographical standpoint and includes elements, like symbols and perspective that the reader can analyze in different ways.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story told from the first person point of view of a doctor's wife who has nervous condition. The first person standpoint gives the reader access only to the woman’s thoughts, and thus, is limited. The limited viewpoint of this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the wife feels throughout the story. The point of view is also limited in that the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no benefit of hindsight, and is never able to actually see that the men in her life are part of the reason she never gets well. This paper will discuss how Gilman’s choice of point of

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.

What makes a narrator unreliable? According to The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, an unreliable narrator is a character whose interpretation of events is different from the author’s. (Meyer,2014,195). It is a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value. This may be because the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons. ("What is an Unreliable Narrator? ," 2016, para. 1). In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” there is an unreliable narrator. What makes the narrator unreliable in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman is her mixed views on what is happening around her, her trustworthiness, and her mental health issues.

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.