The Yellow Paper is a symbolic story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is a disheartening tale of a woman struggling to free herself from postpartum depression. This story gives an account of an emotionally and intellectual deteriorated woman who is a wife and a mother who is struggling to break free from her mental prison and find peace. The postpartum depression forced her to look for a neurologist doctor who gives a rest cure. The woman lived in a male dominated society and wanted indictment from it as she had been driven crazy by as a result of the Victorian “rest-cure.” Her husband made sure that she had a strict bed rest by separating her from her child by taking her to recuperate in an isolated country estate. The bed rest made her mental state develop from bad to worst.
The main character in The Yellow Paper was suffering from a severe case of postpartum depression. While in the confinement, the narrator takes the reader through her declining mental journey and how she is affected by the solitary confinement in a yellow papered room. She was psychologically affected by her mental state and the confinement away from everybody (Scharnhorst 15). Her mental state became a fanatical delusional survival situation for her freedom which led to her mental demise. She was talking to herself all the time thinking that she had company in the name of a woman behind the wallpaper walls (Carnley 76). She went through psychological stages until she became totally insane.
The wallpaper was one of the factors that influenced the narrator’s mental state. In her prison, the narrator becomes obsessed with the intricate details of the wallpaper in her bedroom wall. She says “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper, Perhaps because of the wallpaper,” the wallpaper was her only company and she had to live with it in her isolation. It dwells on my mind so!” (Gilman 760). Her attitude towards the wallpaper grew from bitterness to hate and she even felt that it smells. This symbolizes the hatred she had for the wallpaper because it highly contributed to her insanity. She hallucinates that there is a woman who is trapped behind the yellow wallpaper and at times, the woman is creeping around. This can be seen in her narration “It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight” (Hedges 12). She goes through different psychological stages in the story until she becomes insane.
The setting of the room symbolizes the loneliness the narrator is undergoing. The narrator has her mind encased that there is a woman struggling behind the wallpaper and in her solitary room, she feels its true and she is even seen fighting for her. The author used the room to symbolize what the main character was going through all alone in the isolated estate where she was brought by her husband. The yellow paper played a distinct reason for the narrator’s psychological development.
The narrator suffered psychologically because most of the time, she was just alone in the room with the wallpaper. She had no one to talk to until she started imagining that the portrait on the yellow paper was a woman and started to fixate more on the yellow paper. She is heard saying that she has become fond of the wallpaper as her only company and the pattern has become her only form of entertainment. As the intensity of her obsession grows, she begins to understand the pattern and interprets it as a woman “stooping down and creeping” behind the main pattern, which looks like the bars of a cage (Gilman 296). In real sense she was describing her declining mental state unknowingly. The yellow paper took over all her thoughts but her husband John was ignorant to her obsession and mistook it for improvement. Her mental state was deteriorating as days went by and she is even convinced that there is “a yellow smell” everywhere (Gilman 325) and that she sleeps less all the time. Her psychological state was going from bad to worst. She even thought that she could see someone crawling against the wall but in real sense, she was the one crawling against the wall.
The journal is another factor that also influenced the main character’s mental state. In her writings, she explains that the more she became insane, the more the wall paper became a big issue to her that is why she smudged it ultimately. The narrator secretly wrote her thoughts in a journal but her husband was against it and never wanted her to do anything (SparkNotes Editors). He only wanted her to have a bed rest, little did he know that the bed rest was not doing any good and writing the journal could have helped her. The narrator wanted to express herself through her writing but she was denied the chance making her very lonely and thus worsening her mental state.
The rest cure was another factor that influenced the narrator’s psychological development. The doctor prescribed bed rest for her cure but instead, the bed rest made her go insane. Eventually, due to her husband’s ignorance of her situation and forcing her into bed rest against her wishes, the narrator psychological state declined completely and she became hopelessly insane. She was in a room alone, he describes it as “not only ugly, but oddly menacing” (Gilman 321). Instead of having a bed rest, she ended up talking and struggling with an imaginary woman in the room which worsened her mental state.
She sees women creeping around the room and crawling on the wall and in actual sense, she is the one creeping and smudging the wallpaper. When her husband decides to break into the room, he faints in the doorway by what he sees, the situation was horrible as his wife was creeping everywhere smudging the wall paper thinking it is someone else doing it. Charlotte explains how she started “to creep over him every time” (Gilman 348). Her husband thought that by confining her in an isolated room would give her enough bed rest and she will be fine but he did the opposite, her psychological state deteriorated. The narrator was forced to bed rest in isolation which worsened her situation. The nameless narrator in her madness sees a woman in the pattern of the wallpaper all the time and this made her have sleepless nights because she was in isolation.
The treatment offered for narrator was the best but her husband’s confinement made it not to work. She was left in her own thoughts in the solitary room which intensified her insanity instead of healing her. The “rest-cure” facilitated her declining mental state and she became ultimately insane. John thought the house was a good place for his wife to get well but it was the opposite, it made things worse for his wife.
The narrator’s marriage was also another factor that facilitated her psychological state development. She was in a marriage whereby her husband dominated and treated her like a child. The narrator lived in a society where men dominated relationships and marriages and by struggling with the male dominated world, it contributes to her insanity. The narrator was confined in her home by the husband and this contributed to her insanity as she felt that she was being victimized and dominated.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is driven to insanity through her husband’s efforts of restraining, detaining and mainly controlling her. John’s action of confining her is the primary cause of his wife’s psychological sufferings, and she has been reduced to all that her husband has treated her like, a child with a serious mental disorder. The Yellow Paper story has interesting psychological levels beginning with the plot which explains individual’s repression. The main character in The Yellow Paper underwent psychological; stages in her life which turned her to total insanity. In the end, instead of being cured by the rest cure, the narrator her mental state deteriorated and she became totally insane.
Works Cited
Hedges, Elaine R. “Afterward” to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Old Westbury, NY. Feminist Press 1973. Print.
Scharnhorst, Gary. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume C. W.W. Norton, New York: 2002.
Carnley, Peter. The Yellow Wallpaper and other sermons New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Print.
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Yellow Wallpaper.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2006. Web. 30 Oct. 2013.
