"The Yellow Wallpaper" Analysis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” documents the first-person narrative of a woman slowly descending into madness, as a result of her obsession with the yellow wallpaper covering her bedroom walls and the woman that she sees hidden in it. The woman behind the wallpaper is essentially a reflection the narrator. The woman that the narrator sees trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper is “all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so.” Similarly, the narrator is trapped inside of her own thoughts. Because her husband insists that she rests and allows her no stimulation, she very seldom receives an outlet to escape from her own mind. Both women are both prisoners of their own worlds. The pattern that traps the woman in the wallpaper is like the social pattern that is trapping the narrator. She is defenseless against the will of her husband, who very much infantilizes her and scoffs at her feelings the way one might disregard the opinion of a child. This is shown in the setting, as she spends all of her days “resting” in a nursery with barred windows. Because of this isolation, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in the room, where she sees different patterns and shapes and can offer her some source of stimulation. Soon the narrator’s constant staring of walls makes her see a woman behind the pattern, trapped very much like herself. Because she identifies so strongely the woman, she starts to think of the wallpaper and the woman as living entities that belong to her. She becomes angry and jealous when her husband or Jennie even look at the wallpaper. Because of she develops such strong feelings, the line that distinguishes her from the woman in the wallpaper begins to fade as she begins to write as if she is the woman. It is the nail in the coffin between how the narrator and the woman in the wallpaper are similar – in the end, they are the same person.