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The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness

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"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. It is a powerful and haunting story that depicts the descent of the narrator into madness. The story's narrator is a woman who is confined to a bedroom by her husband, John, who is a physician. The narrator is suffering from what is described as "nervous depression," and John believes that rest and isolation are the best treatments for her. However, as the narrator spends more time in the room, she begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper, which becomes a symbol of her mental state and the oppression she feels. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a complex and unreliable character. Throughout the story, she struggles with her own mental illness and …show more content…

However, the reader quickly realizes that the narrator is not a reliable source of information. She is clearly suffering from some form of mental illness, and her perceptions of the world around her are distorted by this illness. This is evident in her obsession with the yellow wallpaper. At first, she is simply curious about it, but as the story progresses, her obsession with the wallpaper becomes more and more intense. The wallpaper becomes a symbol of the narrator's own mental state. She describes it as "dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." This description mirrors the narrator's own mental state, which is confused and erratic. As the story progresses, the narrator's mental state continues to deteriorate. She becomes convinced that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper, and she becomes obsessed with freeing her. This obsession is a manifestation of the narrator's own desire to break free from the constraints that society has placed upon her. She feels trapped in her role as a wife and mother, and she longs for the freedom to express herself and to be taken

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The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.

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Throughout the story we experience her life in the yellow wallpaper room through the journal entry she writes. This leads to the narrator to become an unreliable narrator, which is a narrator we can not trust because their account of events is flawed. One example of the narrator being unreliable is that she is mentally not stable. She becomes so fixated on the yellow wallpaper that all other notions going on become of no importance to her.

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The narrator can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. When the yellow wallpaper starts to reveal bars, the narrator truly feels trapped and secluded. The yellow wallpaper represents the narrator’s imagined world, especially when she finds the woman inside the wallpaper. The narrator states, “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Gilman). In her illusion, the woman inside of the wallpaper appears at night.

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In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader follows a woman who suffers from depression but can not seek help because her husband does not believe it. As the couple travels to a colonial-styled estate, the narrator discovers the yellow wallpaper, as mentioned in the title, and soon becomes fascinated with it. Gilman wrote this story to shed light upon the psychological disorders that many suffer from but get overlooked. The short story portrays the notion of Id, Ego, and Superego. Id is shown throughout the story as the narrator makes an effort to restrain it but eventually writes down her thoughts on paper.

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the Narrator tore off the wallpaper which was making her go even more insane. Her husband had always told her that there was nothing wrong with the wallpaper and she was fine, but the wallpaper made her feel like she was trapped behind it and she started to see things in the wallpaper. For her to get better she knew that she was going to have to go against the orders of her husband because what he was suggesting for her treatment was just making it worse.

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is experiencing

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The yellow wallpaper in the room the narrator despises, is a reflection of women’s status in society, being trapped under the power of males. The narrator lost all of her freedom to John. John has gotten to such a point of control where she cannot even pick who she can spend time with and where she can sleep. After John told her she could not, the narrator started writing down her thoughts and her mental illness was getting so bad to the point where there has been “things in that paper that nobody knows but [her].” The narrator is now completely insane because of her husband.

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The yellow wallpaper itself is a powerful symbol that represents the narrator's confinement and descent into madness. Initially, the wallpaper is a dull and unremarkable pattern, but as the narrator becomes more and more obsessed with it, she begins to see strange and disturbing images in the pattern. The wallpaper becomes a symbol of the narrator's own deteriorating mental state, and its transformation mirrors her own. As she becomes increasingly consumed by the pattern, the wallpaper begins

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In the story, the wallpaper symbolizes her sickness so if she's getting attracted to the wallpaper that means she's attached to her sickness which explains her mind is worsening. In addition, the narrator explains that the wallpaper has a “woman stooping down creep about behind that pattern.” (pg.463). This explains how she's starting to see something that is not physically there and that she is starting to imagine things. Also, the narrator states that the wallpaper is old foul yellow and has a peculiar odor (pg.465).

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The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as a classic feminist piece; written by a woman herself, Charlotte Gilman. The short story revolves around a woman forced into isolation and essentially a sensory deprivation routine titled the Rest Cure, due to her diagnosis of nervous exhaustion. This ultimately backfires and leads the protagonist to become obsessed with the yellow-patterned wallpaper in her confinement. Losing her sanity at the end of the story. Though it is deemed fiction, the story elements itself existed during the Victorian era, and the story was inspired by Gilman’s own experience.

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The vast majority of people wouldn’t give the wallpaper much thought, however the narrator becomes obsessed with it. To the narrator, the wallpaper is alive and becomes the focus of all her time. Her overwhelming lure to the wallpaper becomes obvious when she first provides a very vivid description stating “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (217-218). As she begins to lose her grip on reality, the narrator beings to see faces and eventually a woman within the wallpaper. At first, her description of seeing faces in the wallpaper seems like it could be her mind making since of the varying patterns or just part of her imagination.

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The narrator leads a fairly boring life. The only thing she seems to do all day is sleep, write, eat, look out the window and study the yellow wallpaper in her room. Evidence of this in the story is “I lie here on this great immovable bed - it is nailed down, I believe - and follow that pattern about by the hour” (Gilman 650). Another piece of evidence would be, “The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman 649).

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When the narrator is forced by her husband to stay where " the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the wall… It is stripped off -- the paper -- in great patches… I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin." The Yellow Wallpaper: (Charlotte Perkins Gilman page 2) she only keeps deteriorating. As the protagonist spends more and more time in the room with the Yellow wallpaper things only worsen as she starts seeing things in the wallpaper.

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To be trapped in one's own mind may be the worst prison imaginable. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator of the story is constantly at battle with many different forces, such as John, her husband, the yellow wallpaper that covers the walls of her room, and ultimately herself. Throughout the story the narrator further detaches herself from her life and becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in her temporary home, slowly driving her mad. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a major and dynamic character as she is the main character of the story, and throughout the story her personality and ways of thinking change drastically.

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Throughout Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character’s restrictions in life are represented by the yellow wallpaper. This story, first published in 1892, shares the difficulties in a woman’s life during this time period, and how they could ultimately lead to insanity. Perkins introduces the main character, a woman, vaguely at first. This woman’s name isn’t mentioned until it can be inferred as “Jane” by the end. Jane begins her first entry in her diary styled narrative by explaining her frustrations about her so-called “sickness.”

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