Preview

The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1172 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis
The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

As I started reading this short story, it clearly introduced who the characters are and where it took place. The narrator is a woman; she has no name, remains anonymous throughout the story. She lives with her husband John in a house. This house is isolated from society, since the short story indicates that it is far from village, roads or any means of communication. It also contains locks and gates throughout. The woman is ill and this illness has placed her in a weak position with her husband and everything around her. We know that she likes to write, but her husband doesn’t let her, so she does it in secret. Although this type of writing is mainly to show mild personality disorder in dealing with life, at the same time I believe it shows how each person expresses their illness and how it builds up with certain outcome. Here the author shows how the woman expresses her illness through the circumstances of the yellow wallpaper such as dreaming and fantasying through the paper, which led to her breakdown. At first, the narrator describes the yellow wallpaper as ʺIt is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and 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 .ʺIt shows how the narrator dislikes the yellow wallpaper and she elaborates her feelings towards it. This quote explains a lot about how she feels, and also points out how suppressed and weak she is. When it said ʺfollow the lame uncertain curvesʺ it refers to the husband that may lead the narrator to commit suicide because of the way she listens and obeys him. Although he seems to say the things that would make her better and assure her that she is getting better, he is not really letting her do what would make her better, which is what she wants. As a physician who recognizes and

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    In the summer of 1855 a mentally ill woman moves into a secluded estate with her husband. She immediately voices her concerns about the eerie feeling she gets in the house and how much she hates the yellow wallpaper, but like always, her husband disregards her concerns and insists that he knows best because he is a doctor. She also believes that she was born to be a writer, but her husband forbids her from writing or communicating with other people and insists that she stay in bed to rest. Much like a prisoner in solitary confinement, the narrator starts to lose her mind. She begins to fixate her entire life on the wallpaper while she spends her days in bed. She started keeping a journal which he hid from her family, and in it, she writes about how she ‘discovered’ a creeping woman trapped behind the pattern. She centers her life on freeing this woman by locking the door and attempting to tear off all of the wallpaper. When her husband comes home from work, he breaks down the door, sees the mess, and faints. Then the woman crawls out of the room and the story seems to be over, but there has got to be more. This woman is not simply your Martha Stewart of the 1800s that doesn’t like her bedroom wallpaper. The job of the reader is to break down the roles of each character, analyze the major symbols, evaluate the theme and use them like the pieces of a puzzle to understand what the author, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was trying to say.…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a story around the narrator who is suffering from mental illness, which is internal. The narrator begins to explain how she knows something is wrong with her even though her high standing physician husband, John, and high standing physician brother don’t see anything except a temporary depression. John takes the narrator to a house over the summer to get her away from people and society, because John believes it makes her think of her condition, which is the worse thing the narrator should do. The narrator then explains the house as “the most beautiful place!” (Gilman, 552), the description is very personified and creates a bright, visible image in the readers’ head. The description…

    • 269 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The “The Yellow Wallpaper” story started off with a small family that moved into a new summer home to spend some time away. The narrator’s husband is her own physician, and he tells her that she needs rest away from people to recover from her mental illness. The main character’s favorite hobby is to write thoughts and ideas down on paper. She is also a mother, but she doesn’t mention her child that often due to the fact that she wasn’t able to take care of her baby. The narrator is a young woman, sometimes referred to as “Jane” who is suffering from severe mental illness; not being able to have freedom caused the narrator's health to fall into a worse pattern.…

    • 554 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrator in, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” suffers from depression, although her husband, who is a doctor, does not consider it an illness. Therefore, he keeps her on a strict rest cure. She is not allowed to do work of any form, not even care for her baby. All she allowed to do is rest in her room and breath in the air as prescribed by her husband. Because she spends most of her time in her room, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room and it drives her to insanity. The lack of creative stimulation and relationships with others causes the narrator’s obsession with the yellow wallpaper which leads her to believe she is trapped behind bars in this yellow wallpaper.…

    • 1141 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in 1892 after Gilman suffered from “a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” (Gilman, “Why I wrote”) and was placed under the care of Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell’s cure for women with Gilman’s affliction were told to “live as domestic life as far as possible, have but two hours’ intellectual life a day and to never touch a pen, brush, or pencil again” (Gilman, “Why I wrote”). While following Mitchell’s advice, Gilman’s condition slowly worsened and only after she returned to working did her health improve. Using the knowledge she gained from the experience, Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The short story features a woman by the name of Jane, who is…

    • 1417 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Yellow Wallpaper Flaws

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In Charlotte Perkins “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator, who is also the main character, has a mental breakdown. Her mental changes throughout the story make her a dynamic character and is caused by her being limited to a room and is forbidden to express her thoughts through her writing. She also has her husband/physician, John, who has good intentions but forbids her to do any work, makes all the decisions for her, and refuses to take her seriously.…

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On the surface, the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper simply shows an insane woman who began suffering from depression after the birth of her child. The narrator was placed into a house, which was in the middle of nowhere, where she received dangerous treatment and often gets belittled by her husband, who is also her doctor. Her treatment required her not to do anything active, especially writing. Although some would conclude that the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper is just about an insane woman struggling with post-partum depression and isolation, it shows the protagonists struggle with trying to break out of the mental constraints she has been placed under and her need for self-expression through her journal.…

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is written in the perspective of the narrator as her journal where she reveals her deepest most personal thoughts about herself and her life, yet she still remains a very mysterious character. Her name is never revealed, and the reason the author does not reveal her name is so the story of her struggle could represent the struggles of many other going through the same situation. It is clear from the beginning of the story that she is an unreliable narrator because it is mentioned that her husband who is a doctor has diagnosed her with temporary nervous depression with slight hysterical tendencies. She seems to be a very creative and sensitive person who is a writer, but she is forbidden from writing in her journal by her husband who thinks that too much mental stimulation will only make her condition worse.…

    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrator is suffering from an illness and her husband who is a physician takes her away to a vacation house to get better. While there he forbids her to do any mental or physical activity. While her husband is away she secretly writes in a diary telling the readers about her experience with the horrid yellow wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s character, the…

    • 677 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The protagonist, who is unnamed, struggles with postpartum depression, which is causing her to become mentally unstable. In her temporary three-month bedroom, the yellow wallpaper becomes more than just a sheet of paper on the wall. She envisions this imaginary woman (her shadow) on the paper struggling to escape some part of her life, but she struggles to become free from the lines within the pattern of the wallpaper. This character she is seeing is symbolic as it represents her oppressive life she is living under the supervision of her husband, John who happens to be a “high-standing” doctor (21). This projection of an imaginary woman eventually leads to the breakdown of the protagonists’ individual personality. Ironically, the narrator is…

    • 1114 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in her lifetime produced many short stories, novels, essays and poetry. She was born in 1860 in Connecticut, USA and was brought up by a single mother. After giving birth to her daughter Katherine in 1884 she fell into a deep, post-natal depression and was told to go on the 'rest cure'. This is a period spent in inactivity with the intention of improving one's physical or mental health. While it did arise her depression, this 'cure' almost drove Gilman mad. She wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper' in 1892 to show the horrors of the 'rest cure'.…

    • 663 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The main character in Charlotte P.Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, narrates her own life and describes her struggle with depression which by the end of the story evolved into insanity. Narrator’s husband, John, treats her like a small child, forbids her to express herself, and keeps her bound to restricted room. Due to her husbands actions she becomes physically, emotionally and socially isolated, which ultimately made her insane.…

    • 978 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper, it can be inferred that the woman’s state of mind is slowly worsening. The woman in the story…

    • 1874 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the setting took place at a vacation home. She describes the room as big and roomy and had windows with bars on them. “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” (Gilman, 1899). The narrator also stated the room was once a nursery, which can correlates for how John treats he wife like a child. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” (Gilman, 1899). Again, the author is showing how women had to take direction from their husbands who ran the household.…

    • 523 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    After reading many short stories I have decided that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the best example to illustrate narrator unreliability. There are many reasons why the narrator was unreliable in this story and one of them is because she lied about the way she was feeling. She would even lie to herself by saying she was getting better, however her condition was only getting worse. Although, this was her husband’s fault because he wanted the idea of getting better to get into her head. Another reason that has to be taken into account is that she is telling this story from the first person and the first person is always unreliable because everyone sees everything differently and they also depict the truth differently. She is very mentally unstable and disturbed and the amount of credibility she can give to the story is very limited. The reader knew that she was mentally unstable right from the start of the book when it is said, “but John says the worst thing I can do is think about my condition.” (Gilman 78) This is also ironic because the narrator can only help but to think about her condition throughout the story. She also left out information for example, “I have found out another thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.” (89) This shows that the narrator has found something on the wallpaper but chooses not to tell the reader because it cannot be trusted. Her condition is only getting worse to the point where she starts seeing a woman behind the wallpaper and it gives her excitement and tricks her into believing that she is getting better. A quote to prove this is, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.” (87) This quote goes to show that the narrator…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays

Related Topics