The Yellow Wallpaper - a Character Analysis of the Narrator from Charlotte Perkin Gilman's "the Yellow Wallpaper"

The Yellow Wallpaper

A character analysis of the narrator from Charlotte Perkin Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" outlines a compelling story of a young wife and mother who is pushed into insanity by isolation and lack of physical, mental, and social stimulus. The story tells of how the young woman is isolated from the outside world within an old mansion that she is forced to reside in for several months. The short story pulls the reader into the narrator's situation of loneliness and despair, almost as if to make the reader experience her plunge into delirium and eventually a state of extreme psychosis along with her.

In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes her sense of helplessness when she is faced with having to spend several months on prescribed "rest". Her husband, John, is a physician who has diagnosed her symptoms of depression and anxiety as neurasthenia. In order to try and help her, John rents an old mansion for the summer so that she may rest and recuperate in solitude, and an old nursery in the mansion is made into the narrator's bedroom. The narrator expresses her wishes to be a better wife to John and mother to their baby boy when she mentions, "I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already", and "yet I cannot be with [the baby], it makes me so nervous." This also indicates that the narrator's prescribed rest is doing the opposite of curing her nervous tendencies. The narrator acknowledges this by saying, "[p]ersonally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good". She believes that if she were allowed stimulation from work and activity that she would better progress than being locked away and denied these wishes.

Gilman engages the audience with the emotions of the narrator by switching the thought direction of the narrator and by presenting the short story with the impression of an actual journal. Gilman changes the thought suddenly and without flow by leaving a thought process hanging and leaping into another. An example of this is when she writes, "I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad", and then suddenly she writes, "[s]o I will let it alone and talk about the house." Here, the narrator begins by considering and contemplating her situation, and then she forcefully changes the topic and begins to write about the house in which she is inhabiting. This sudden change of thought process is a tool that Gilman uses throughout the story in order to make the audience feel as neurotic as the narrator.

Two weeks after moving into the old mansion, the narrator begins to become obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that lines the nursery. She starts to find comfort in this new obsession with the chaotic pattern and colour, slowly moving away from the disgust and detest she had originally shown for the wallpaper. When she first describes the wallpaper she states, "[t]he color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." However, she begins to study the wallpaper intently trying to decipher a meaning or pattern to it. Evidence of this is when she says, "I