The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay
The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay
Academic level: Master’s
Essay type: Memoir
Size: 2,5 pages ~ (1005 words)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story originally published in The New England Magazine in 1892. Initially, the story was perceived positively, with readers appreciating its sheer horror. Today, it’s still considered one of the best early works of horror fiction. However, when the tale was rediscovered in the early 1970’s, the audience found deeper senses in it. Now, it’s recognized as one of the important early works in American feminist literature. The story takes a terrifying look at the attitudes towards women and their physical and mental health in the 19th century.
In her story, Gilman shares her reaction to the barbarous treatment facing women of that time. Clearly, understanding the background of this work is crucial for making a thorough The Yellow Wallpaper analysis. One fact that shocked me, in particular, is that the work was created by Gilman after her own difficult battle with postpartum psychosis, making the story semi-autobiographical. Given this fact, Gilman’s critique of the “rest cure” treatment for postpartum mental conditions becomes even more powerful, offering us an eye-opening look at the experiences many women had to go through and their subjugation within patriarchal structures.
The plot of The Yellow Wallpaper revolves around a woman who appears before us as an unnamed narrator. The woman is married to John, a physician, who diagnosed her with a “temporary nervous depression” after she gave birth to their child. To cure her depression, John takes the family to a “colonial mansion” for the summer, where she gets locked in a room with yellow wallpaper, so disgusting for the main character that it becomes the most prominent symbol in the story. Staying in the room alone, the narrator writes a diary, telling the readers about her treatment, her feelings, how her husband treats her, and how she dislikes the room. She runs a diary secretly as John says that writing will only worsen her state of mind.
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The Yellow Wallpaper characters also play an important role in the story as each of them carries a symbol hidden deeper than what’s seen on the surface. The Yellow Wallpaper main character and, concurrently, the narrator in the story is the woman trapped in a room with yellow wallpaper. She is a young, upper-middle-class woman who has recently married, given birth, and is undergoing psychosis treatment, which she documents in her secret diary. As a part of her treatment, her husband forbids her to exercise her natural imagination and expressiveness, as a result, her negative emotions rebel and we can see them paint the descriptions of her surroundings as uncanny and sinister. She gets particularly fixated on the wallpaper and as her fixation progresses, she further loses her connection with the real world. The narrator in the story is a paradox–in the end, we realize that she needed to lose touch with the outer world to understand herself and her life better.
The narrator’s husband John is a physician who diagnosed his wife’s condition and decided to treat it with “rest cure.” He appears before us as an incredibly practical person who embraces bare facts and figures to fantasies, which makes him "scoff openly" in the narrator’s natural imagination–“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” Although he appears to love his wife and indeed tries to cure her, apparently, John doesn’t truly believe in her being sick and doesn’t realize the real impact of this “treatment” on his wife–“John doesn’t know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” Despite his love, he appears to be set into a traditional male role of the Victorian patriarchal society that doesn’t take female physical and mental health seriously.
Apart from the trapped woman and John, there are two other secondary female characters. Jennie, John’s sister, takes the role of a housekeeper for the couple as they stay in the mansion. Mary is the nurse who takes care of the couple’s baby while they are away. Although both these characters are only mentioned briefly, they both symbolize traditional wive, mothers, and domestic roles that women in Victorian society were expected to fulfill. As opposed to the narrator, Jennie and Mary appear as good housekeepers, and this realization breaks the narrator’s heart. Suppressed by standardized social constructs of her time, the trapped woman constantly feels guilt and sadness because of her inability to act as a traditional wife and mother–“It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby... And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.”
In my opinion, The Yellow Wallpaper theme pierced through the story is the deep harm and horror caused by the limited role of a woman in traditional patriarchal structures and, even more sadly, in their own families. One of the primary The Yellow Wallpaper symbols that confirm this though is the narrator–the woman who appears to be the center of the story, yet remains unnamed, unlike her husband. On top of being unnamed, we can see the narrator be restricted from self-expression, autonomy, and a voice in her own marriage.
Speaking about The Yellow Wallpaper symbolism, of course, I can’t go past the yellow wallpaper. Such a seemingly unimportant detail, gets the woman fixated on it for a reason. In my opinion, wallpaper carries a much deeper symbol–it represents society and patriarchy–ugly and faded. And the fact that the narrator starts seeing a woman in the wallpaper states that it’s also a symbol of women and how they are trapped and constrained in this society.
In a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper analysis, I find this short story to be an important representation of the suppressed role of women at that time. Having no voice in society and their own families, women suffered physically and mentally, that’s the terrible effect patriarchal society had on females, and the faded and torn wallpaper is a clear symbol of it–“This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!”
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