The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the story of a woman’s mental deterioration and its relation to the oppression she faces from her family and society. A creative and imaginative woman, our narrator does not want the life that has been forced upon her and is eventually driven to insanity.  

I found it interesting that her husband John treats her more like a child than his partner and how she is trapped within the nursery. When she tells him that she would rather be downstairs away from the hideous wallpaper, he refuses and calls her his “blessed little goose”. John doesn’t allow her to write or contribute to any form of work, taking away whatever small freedoms she has. When she expresses her wish to leave the house when she feels her health isn’t improving, he responds with “Bless her little heart…she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!” (82). To me, the way he speaks in third person and dismisses how she feels about the situation is belittling and further alienates her from him and those around her. Though he may have seemingly good intentions, John’s continued suppression only drives her inward and away from reality. I also found the narrator’s obsession with the woman in the wallpaper to be symbolic for her own imprisonment. She sees a woman that is trapped within the patterns she hates and whose only freedom is during the daytime which is when John is at work. In the end of the story as the narrator tears the paper off of the wall to free the woman, she loses her final hold on reality, freeing herself from her confinement.

In class I would like to further discuss the peculiar relationship between the narrator and her family and her final descent into madness.