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The Yellow Wallpaper Research Paper

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The Yellow-Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the color yellow of wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper is described as being ugly and torn in the nursery. It is may meant to be ironic or that the wallpaper is past its prime as it has yellowed with age. The color of the wallpaper is probably chosen for a variety of reasons. Detailed descriptions of the wallpaper described to us as hideous. The narrator states that “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-tiring sunlight” (649). Her first impressions of seeing the wallpaper are her saying “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long” (649).
The color of the wallpaper promotes a counterintuitive reading. The color yellow is normally associated with happiness and light; therefore, in this case it is linked to a malignant source that drives the narrator insane. The reader expects the color yellow to be benevolent. The reader is then disappointed and is forced to question everything else in the short story, especially things that seem to come off as obvious. The color of the wallpaper may relate to illness or discriminated minorities of the time period. …show more content…

If she is not actually insane, then the mere confinement and inactivity could have been sufficient to cause a mental breakdown. Either way, whether she is actually insane or not, the yellow wallpaper does serve a purpose as an obvious catalyst for her mental deterioration. We do not yet know if it is merely a symptom of her insanity or the cause. The narrator, however tears up the wallpaper at the end, which shows that she does not want to accept how insane she has become. She attempts to find the “women” when tearing down the wallpaper. It shows the narrator struggling to regain her

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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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During her time in the room she felt the room “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 304). The narrator of the yellow wallpaper descends into madness to escape the cruel dominance of her society. As the story progresses the yellow wallpaper becomes a constant companion. She first dislikes the color and despises the pattern, but after closely studying the pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” and after obsessing over the painting she finds bars hidden.

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Comparatively, The Yellow Wallpaper’s attic has a dramatically dull surrounding which reflects the state of the main character’s mental illness. The odors in The Yellow Wallpaper and A Rose for Emily also echo a foulness in the moods of the characters alongside the smell. Unlike the other two texts, The Yellow Wallpaper contains an atmosphere of dullness and creepiness as achieved by the darkened portrayal of typically bright and happy colours. For example, the colour yellow is applied to the wallpaper which would typically be a cheery thing. However, the colour is described as “repellant” and “revolting” (P. 3) creating the sense that it is not actually

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It's yellow color symbolizes the way the narrator feels about her situation. "Unclean", "dull", "sickly" is how she may have felt deep down about her relationship with her husband and the life she lived under him. The wallpaper itself becomes a symbol for her. She uses it as a coping method and projects her feelings onto it and the woman she sees in it. The windows symbolize how she is trapped in this marriage and she can only view the beautiful outside through the many windows, reminding her of what she cannot have.

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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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It is also significant to note that the narrator describes the pattern as suicidal because it again emphasizes the narrator’s desperate, almost suicidal, need to flee the imprisonment of the nursery and from the oppressive, male-dominant society that the room and its wallpaper represent. Asides of the pattern, there are many probable connotations of the yellow colour of the wallpaper, for instance with jaundiced illness, and also the rigid oppression of masculine sun. While sickness can be associated with the colour yellow, its more established motif would seem be the conflict between the masculine sun and the feminine moon. In Gilman’s story, sunlight is linked with John’s

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Martin states that the narrator’s confinement in the upstairs bedroom fortifies her mental illness developing into “a frightening hallucinatory world constructed around the pattern of the yellow paper on the wall.” This shift in her identity happens as the shift in her disposition towards the wallpaper changes. The wallpaper is a visible metaphor that eventually becomes her identity. In the beginning of her stay in the bedroom she says the wallpaper is “committing artistic sin” (Par34) and can push anyone to “suddenly commit suicide” (Par35) These comments show her despise towards the wallpaper and the separation she originally has from it.

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At first the narrator just see the wallpaper as a unpleasant addition to the room as it’s a “repellent, almost revolting… unclean yellow” (Gilman 801), and the

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Secondly, there is also a sense of confinement throughout the story. The Yellow Wallpaper fits the winter or the anti-romantic phase of Northrop Frye's monomyth diagram as it, "tells the story of imprisonment … and fear." (Bressler 152). The narrator is imprisoned in the room which has yellow wallpaper. Basically, the room where the narrator is staying in is like a prison.

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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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(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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At first it is seen as nothing but an old ruined wallpaper with a “bad” pattern. As the story progresses she stares at the paper for hours and sees a sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. She hen sees a desperate woman trying to leave the wallpaper which shows how the women feel trapped. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol of the oppressive life that many women have today and back then.

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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.

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