"The Yellow Wallpaper" - A Look Into Insanity

The first person point of view used in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” creates a very personal feeling between the narrator and the reader. It is written in such a way that the reader feels the emotional roller coaster the narrator is on, and cares about what will happen to her at the end of the ride. Through stream-of-consciousness phrasing, Gilman invites us into the narrator’s mind, as she spirals further down into insanity. By the end of the story, as she is peeling the wallpaper down from the wall, she is filled with frustration and it is not clear if the narrator’s intention is to kill herself when she proclaims, “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise “ (377). This poor woman has come to believe that she has peeled herself out of the wallpaper, and refuses to let them put her back in. She tells John “I’ve got out at last [..]in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (378). The narrator’s insanity stemmed from a case of post-partum depression, and could easily have been cured but was only made worse with the cure of the times.

The reader can sense a real shift in the plot after the narrator has her talk with her husband one night. She tries to ask him to leave, as she can feel her sanity slipping away rapidly, but he is not sympathetic to her request, worrying instead that “our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can’t see how to leave before” (373). From this point on, the wallpaper seems to take over the narrator’s mind and soul, until she believes she is “feeling ever so much better, “ even if she does not “sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments” (374). It is at this point that her husband becomes less important to her, and the woman behind the wallpaper becomes part of her.

After reading this story, you would most likely come away with the belief that the house, the garden, and specifically her room is haunted. In reality, the house is just an old musty, the garden is a little overgrown, and the yellow, faded wallpaper is just rotting and possibly molding on the walls. Not a haunted house, but more like prison for Jane. As the story begins, she seems frightened by the wallpaper itself, watching as the pattern “suddenly commit[s] suicide – plung[ing] off at outrageous angles, destroy[ing] themselves in unheard of contradictions” (368). She loves the grandeur of the house, and the “delicious garden,” but she is unhappy with the nursery that will become her room (367). It is funny that by the end of the story, she will not leave the room she hated, and shuns the garden she loved.