The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a woman is seen to descending into severe post-partum depression, and eventually madness. While this story and the woman herself can be analyzed through many different lenses of perspective, one lens which may not be seen often is how the woman is a hero, but a failed one at that. The narrator and main character of “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be determined as a kind of failed hero, if not anti-hero, through an archetypal lens of analysis which identifies her initiation, her quest, and the sacrificial scapegoat of the situation. Every hero needs some sort of start, with harrowing conditions, which metamorphoses them into an actual hero. Any hero’s initiation can be broken down into
The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” had all three of these factors before her which she needed to successfully execute in order to be the hero she was meant to be. The impossible task which she finished was having a baby. There are lots of factors which go into a pregnancy that could determine whether or not the fetus survives. Pregnancy takes a lot out of a person, and the woman triumphed over it by giving birth. “There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper.” (para. 119.) The woman battled a monster, the yellow wallpaper, but alas she did not win as a true hero would have. The wallpaper may have been the monster, but the woman was fighting it for the prize of her sanity. For the majority of the story, the woman and the wallpaper are locked in a holding pattern of basically staring each other down. “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (para. 66.) Then as the story begins its conclusion, the real fight begins. “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper. A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.” (para. 222 and 223.) Though the woman pulled off a lot of the paper by the end of the story, she did not win back her sanity, so in reality the monster hadn’t
To identify the sacrificial scapegoat in a story, three things must first be found: whose welfare needs to be saved, who must die to save everyone, and what is being restored through the sacrifice. The woman’s overall mental health is the welfare needing to be saved. “You see, [John] does not believe I am sick!” (para. 8.) The sacrifice in this case is the very thing which has put the woman is this situation: her mental illness. Her illness is the savior, but in order to save the woman it must be killed off. “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me—not alive!” (para. 229.) If the sacrifice had been made, then the woman would have recovered and been restored to her original state. Alas, as a failed hero, the woman does not get a happy ending due to many factors, one of which is the lack of restoration from the scapegoat not being sacrificed. Had the sacrifice of her mental illness actually gone through, the woman could have kept “[…] feeling ever so much better!” (para. 172.) The woman had many chances to turn into the hero she was meant to be, but her “temporary nervous depression” (para. 10) took over and sent her in a downward