The Yellow Wall Paper - Charlotte Gilman

David Belpedio

The Yellow Wall-Paper

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What comes to mind when one thinks about the color yellow: happy thoughts, stressful moments, certain insects or particular places? Before I read the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Gilman, the color yellow meant cheerful memories, soothing daydreams, and always the vision of the sun. However, after reading this short story, the color yellow represents a whole different meaning. From Gilman’s detailed narrative, the yellow wallpaper is described as one of the most repulsive things anyone has ever laid eyes on. Illustrated as “repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow”, the reader is able to piece together the unpleasant characteristics Gilman provides regarding the yellow wallpaper. A dirty, faded, incomplete collage of patterns with broken edges and incomplete pieces came to illustrate what I believed the yellow wallpaper to look like. Gilman even goes as far as describing the odor the wallpaper releases allowing her reader to smell the “yellow smell” of the wallpaper.

            Revolving around the yellow wallpaper, this short story holds many underlying themes and ironies. Diagnosed with nervous depression, the narrator shares her thoughts through journal entries. As one reads the story, it becomes very clear that there is in fact something unusual about the narrator. When first meeting the narrator however, she appears to be healthy and in many ways ordinary. I suspected that the narrator might not actually be “sick” at all. It may just be that under the imprisonment of her husbands “rest therapy” technique she slowly is forced to lose her mind and become insane. Slowly but surely we are able to see the narrator’s condition worsen and become more and more apparent as her husband continues to remind her of her illness.

            By restricting the narrator of activity of any sort, the narrator’s husband completely isolates her from the outside world. Denying her the company of her cousins and any persons at all, the narrator communicated little, and when she did communicate, it was primarily with her husband. Who wouldn’t go crazy after spending day after day alone with the only source of communication you have reminding you that you are in fact crazy and have an irregularity? A part of me believes that because the narrator had no one to talk to or interact with, she created the woman that lived behind the wallpaper. In order to entertain herself, I believe that the narrator trapped the women figure behind the wall and used her as a form of entertainment. The women figure becomes more and more clear to the narrator as the narrator becomes more and more insane and uneasy. The two ideas, the women figure trapped behind the wallpaper, and the narrator’s insanity both grow and intensify on parallel fields.

            One of the aspects of the story that really grabbed my attention was the unusual characteristics of the room in which the narrator stayed. Throughout the story, the narrator’s husband depicted certain concepts to appear normal and consistent with everyday life. By illustrating things as such, the narrator appeared naive and oblivious toward obvious irregularities. For example, the narrator’s bedroom, which if one looks in detail is not an ordinary bedroom if a bedroom at all, is rather unusual. While the husband shared that the room was once a nursery, the characteristics of the room tell otherwise. With no reason to know better, the narrator describes the bedroom as such: “I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” While I too thought nothing of the bars on the windows, or the gate at the door, or bolted bed, after revisiting the unusual characteristics of the bedroom, it appears to me as if the so-called bedroom is no bedroom at all.

            It appears as if the bedroom served as room for patients with mental illness and other related conditions. When one ponders the idea, the rings on the wall serve as the wrist clamps, the bars over the windows as well as the gate near the door restrict an individual from leaving the room, and the bed bolted to the floor appears strange for a multitude of reasons. It was most definitely surprising and interesting to reread the description of the room and understand how naive and immature it depicted the narrator to be. After understanding this concept, the rest of the story seemed easier to piece together.

            Overall I found this story to be very interesting and rather strange. The ending in particular threw me for a loop and provided for a variety of complex and unusual interpretations. The concept of “creeping around” was odd to me and by end of the story the narrator had become so infatuated with the women behind the wall paper that she had conformed to be just the same. Wanting to remain behind the paper in the yellow world, the narrator ends the story by exclaiming that she will not leave and will remain in the yellow. “For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.”