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The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

502 Words3 Pages

Not nearly enough words can describe the eerie feeling of reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Throughout the short story, you are left to question whether the main character is living in a haunted estate or if her hysteria is getting the better of her. As Gilman crafted this short story, she highlighted the importance of focusing on a main character, with side characters also playing significant roles. The plot was left with the reader wanting more, and Gilman’s incredibly thought-provoking use of detail adds depth. In this letter, I am hoping to convince you to embark on this reading journey and experience the same compelling emotions I felt after reading this short story. We read this story from the perspective of an unnamed main character who is instantly described to have “a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, 580) due to her temporary nervous depression. Secondary characters, her physician husband and his sister, play crucial roles in conveying the deterioration of the main character’s mental health throughout the story. These side characters seem to possess knowledge that we, as readers, lack; they attribute her illness to her writing and exhibit a peculiar fixation with the wallpaper after convincing the main character that nothing is wrong with it. As we read the story from the main character’s point of view, it is difficult to determine what these side characters know about the situation of …show more content…

By the end of the story, we are almost completely convinced that our belief in the main character’s insanity is correct. In addition to the house being described as haunted, the side characters getting caught staring at the paper further questions what is really happening. Gilman has brilliantly constructed this story in a way that never quite satisfies the reader with concrete evidence of a structured ending or

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