The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story that was written by American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman and was published in 1892. The story is narrated through the journal entries of a woman who is confined to her bedroom in order to cure her “slight hysterical tendency.” Although this treatment was well intended by her physician husband, due to her isolation and lack of mental stimulation the woman’s mental state steadily deteriorates until the end of the story when she goes completely insane. In order to better understand this story it is helpful to analyze it through the lenses of the seven schools of literary criticism which include, formalist, biographical, historical, reader-response, deconstructionist, psychological, and gender criticisms. From a formalist perspective, one of the most important things to note about this short story is how it is composed from the entries in the narrator’s secret journal, which she keeps hidden from her husband. The result of this diary-like construction makes the story seem almost autobiographical even though the narrator is a fictional character. Because of this, everything is relayed in a very personal way and gives an in depth view of the narrator and her feelings. The reader gets very little information about other characters and there is an intense focus on the narrator and the inner workings of her mind as her mental state steadily declines. While formalists argue that there is one true meaning that can be derived from the formal qualities of the text, deconstructionists argue that as time passes, the meanings of words change and thus the meaning of the text also changes. One word whose meaning has changed since the writing of this piece is “nervous.” The author seems to use this word as meaning an affliction or illness. Back in the nineteenth century, the word nervous seems most frequently attributed to women as if it is an unavoidable characteristic of the female nature. Today these same connotations do not