Puting a Period at the End of this Thought.

The Yellow Wallpaper has been my absolute favorite short story since I was in high school. Reading it every few years always sparks some new interpretation. This is the beginning of a final I was writing but never finished for lack of ability to express my thoughts. However, now that the pressure is off, I believe I have finally created a more cohesive thought.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is narrated by a delusional and insane narrator, through this bias narration, the imagery and diction contributes to the confusion and ambiguity within the story. The narrator’s conflict with the yellow wallpaper, which symbolizes her instability, pushes her towards a deeper sense of insanity and the imagery often symbolizes the elevation of her paranoia and confinement. Being narrated by the main character results in ambiguity in reference to her sanity until the end.

When the narrator discusses her condition, she remains slightly ambiguous., restating only what her doctor, husband says, then brushes it off, “So I will let it alone and talk about the house” (2). She does sometimes assert possible solutions to her problem but she never hypothesizes about the root of her problem. The quote above is also the first incident where she buries her problems by talking of the house, which ultimately begins to illustrate her madness.

The narrator speaks very often of her “husband” but due to some strange statements about him, it could be asserted that this “husband” could be her doctor with whom she has fictionalized some romantic connection with in order to cope with her presence in an insane asylum. Through the reading, we learn that he does not stay with her at night, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (4). It is highly coincidental that she married a man who happened to be an expert in mental disorders who has extreme “cases” (4). There is enough ambiguity to categorize his character as the doctor and her character as the patient. He talks to her patronizingly, the way a doctor who believed his female patient to be simply suffering “hysteria” would in the early 1900’s (4). The final moment that supports this assertion is during an episode between John and his “sister”, Jennie, “I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give” (17). This quote persuades the reader to also question whether Jennie is John’s sister or a nurse. The use of the term “report” insinuates that Jennie is literate in the diagnoses of “hysteria” and again questions the legitimacy of our narrator’s observations.

The images within this story are highly personified, adding a sense of the paranoia of our narrator. This imagery repeats the feelings of paranoia several times throughout the story. The narrator applies human aspects to the objects within the house, “All those […] bulbous eyes” in the wallpaper. The eyeballs insinuate her feelings of being observed by Jennie and John; she expresses her awareness of their watchful eyes by putting eyes onto the wallpaper. More personification of objects in her past perpetuate her personification of the things around her, “I remember what a kindly wind the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe” (7). Further personification of the furniture around her insinuates bother her desire for protection and her paranoia.

Images within her room insinuate her confinement (possibly unwilling confinement). This imagery is perpetuated by several different descriptions provided by the narrator. Her description of her room provides more insinuations of confinement, but to a stronger extent, it appears to be more of a prison. Her “bedstead is nailed down […] and the “bedstead is fairly gnawed” (18), she sees “bars” in the wallpaper (15), and the windows themselves have “bars” (13).

This short story contains an interesting use of pronouns. Gilman often changes her use of pronoun very quickly, without notice, to confuse and interchange the point of view and perpetuate our characters madness. One scene especially illustrates the narrator’s confusion with her use of pronouns, “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (17). The beginning of this scene approaches these two women as separate entities, ultimately bringing them together- insinuating that the woman is actually seeing herself within the wallpaper and the other woman is a mirroring vision of our narrator. Gilman uses pronouns to interchange the speaker and actor. The word “creeps” several times, which refers to someone crawling on all fours. Throughout the readers encounters with “creep” the “creeper” changes form. “it creeps” (14), “she is always creeping” (16), “you have to creep” (19), “I had to creep” (20). This use of alternating pronouns shows the narrator to slowly change from a depressed woman to an out of control, animal-like individual.

Conflict within this short story occurs in several different areas, her “husband” presents a sort of contingency, her writing serves as a conflicting exercise of coping, but the yellow wallpaper is what drives our narrator to her ultimate loss of control. She is obsessed with this wallpaper, it affects her directly, and as she interprets it, she puts herself into the wallpaper. This results in a fabricated vision of herself- running her wild. The use of pronouns in reference to, “she” the woman in the wallpaper and “I” the narrator is a representation of herself as she attempts to free herself from her imprisonment.