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Gothic Elements In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Gothic Horror is a unique style of writing that is “characterized by elements such as fear and death along with romantic themes such as nature, individuality, and extreme emotion” while realism is a writing style that “presents the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.” “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short, horror-filled story that vividly describes the mentally ill narrator’s experiences and emotional struggles of loneliness, anxiety, and uneasiness while being locked in a hideous room by herself for a long period of time. The story is definitely an example of realism, but the gothic horror writing style powerfully presents itself throughout the text with the use of eerie descriptions of the yellow wallpapered room, the narrator's …show more content…

Throughout the story, you start to notice that the narrator starts to become clinically insane as she develops childlike behavior such as demolishing the yellow wallpaper and biting some of the old nailed down furniture. The reader is able to tell how hysterical the narrator is getting as she describes how violently she starts to act towards the end of the story. Even the way the narrator starts to describe her dark thoughts and self-opinions show dangerous signs of how her mental health had gone downhill. “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.”(Gilman 801) Her transformation from being able to have self-control to eventually growing clinically insane correlates to characterizations such as horror, madness, and fear that are expressed in the writing styles of gothic

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Insanity is a deranged state of the mind. Not everyone has the same experiences nor the same symptoms which lead to their mental disorder. In her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a peculiar case of insanity. The main character is put on bed rest to overcome her temporary nervous depression. However, while being stuck inside the room, the unreliable narrator increasingly becomes more and more symptomatic.

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