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Personification In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces. The unsatisfying setting that appears around the ill woman unravels an understanding …show more content…

For instance, there is an understanding of the woman’s feelings as she describes “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” and the pattern looking at her “as if it knew what a vicious influence it had” (Gilman 437). The personification is symbolic in displaying how the woman felt as she was stuck in the lonely room with allowance of her husband and Jennie, their child’s nanny, keeping their eyes on her with the dependence of her healing. Additionally, the woman specifies that behind the yellow wallpaper she can see “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 438). As the appearance of the wallpaper is personified, the author taps into the hidden meaning that the woman’s sickness is taunting her as she is attempting to heal. In the end, readers are given the most significant piece of personification in the statement, “and then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared that I would finish it today!” (Gilman 445). This impactful sentence proves to the audience that when the day for the woman to leave the room came, her sickness was now in full control of her mind and she embraced it. The personification used in the short story followed the reactions of how the ill

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