Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The plot begins when the narrator sees the house that her husband John has taken for the summer. She immediately feels as if something about the situation is weird. This then leads to her discussion of her illness, “nervous depression” and of her marriage. John her husband and her doctor belittles both her and her illness. Her treatment is prescribed as nothing active, including writing and working. This causes her illness to get progressively worse, and starts the writing of her secret journal in which she writes about the house until she is interrupted by John. The narrator then sneaks the journal again and writes that her family had just visited and left her tired. After this, her writing becomes obsessive with the yellow wallpaper and she writes that she sees a sub-pattern within the wallpaper. She says this pattern is a woman stooping down and creeping around the room. The narrator then goes to the point of ripping wallpaper off the wall to release the woman and when her husband comes in through the locked door, he sees her condition and faints so the narrator has to “creep over him every time” (SparkNotes Editors, 2014).

John is a static character who does not realize what his prescription is doing to his wife. Charlotte Perkins Gilman sets the story in a summer home that has been vacant for a while; the house is like an aristocratic estate that seems to be expensive. The point of view is first-person in which the narrator (Jane) is telling it through her experiences and as her illness grows. Gilman uses irony to tell her story and also a journal, which allows her to show the feelings of the character easier. John’s wife expresses her extreme paranoia in the quote, “I don’t like to look out the windows even-there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all came out of the wall-paper as I did” (SparkNotes Editors,