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Role Of Darkness In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Only Darkness Cavemen could not defeat it. Pioneers would not venture into it. Every child fears it. Darkness has been captivating mankind throughout many centuries in attempt to convey the significance of it. Due to this, darkness has been imbedded with the connotation of fear, death, and evil. However, Charlotte Gilman takes a different approach in her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". She shows that darkness can not only take on the aspect of fear, but it gives us a certain freedom we are not allowed in daylight. It has the power to distort our vision and change perceptions. Her story is about the obsessiveness of a depressed woman to aged yellow paper in her bedroom. At night, her intense observation of the paper seems to change her very personality. She watches it as the patterns come to life to form the bars of her postpartum and her longing to be liberated. Darkness has the power to release the mask disguising human nature. In the story of "The Yellow Wallpaper", the main character is trapped by her sickness, constantly feeling as though she has no power to change the course of her life. Even her husband, John, feels as though the best prescription is staying clear of unneeded social intercourse, with someone watching over her during the day. "He asks me so many questions, too, and pretended to be loving and …show more content…

The main character is quiet, always following orders during the day, but at night she creeps; creeps on to the very edge of the wallpaper to converse with the women trapped inside, for "by daylight, she is subdued" (245). The protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" thoroughly describes how the absence of light changes the paper, claiming "it changes as the light changes" (244) though it is only her perception of it that is distorted. There is a quality to the wallpaper that disturbs her inner being, "things in that paper that nobody knows"

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In the Yellow Wallpaper, the Woman does not have this bond, and instead sinks further into her own nightmarish fantasy. As a child, the woman had an active imagination as she writes, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store” (Gilman 135). In her isolation, she is unable to do almost anything, and the only thing she can do entertain herself with her imagination. Her isolation causes her to see women in the wallpaper as she writes, “ The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”(143).

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The narrator is a woman who is imaginative trying to make her mind think and realize the meaning of the yellow wallpaper. She describes the wallpaper as, “repellant, almost revolting; smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (Gilman 641). This specific wallpaper makes the narrator feel a certain way. At first, she does not like the color or how it looks. But then not having anything else to do in the room, she starts examining the wallpaper.

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