Tone Of The Yellow Wallpaper

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a portrayal of a woman’s descent into madness and how the society around her contributes to her illness. As a matter of fact, the story was inspired and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own personal experience. Gilman’s use of a first person point of view and tone allows the reader to experience and understand the narrator's actions and situation. The narrator’s tone also plays a role in establishing her character and the theme through the paragraph structure, her thoughts and expressions and finally her ironic expressions.

To begin with, the narrator's tone helps establish character through her paragraph structure within the story. At the beginning of the story, the narrator's paragraphs are long

The woman is forbidden to have any sort of creative outlet as it would “help” with her recovery, although she continues to write in her diary to express herself and keep herself sane. Her tone in the diary entries clearly represent her change in character from the beginning of the story to the end. To illustrate, during the beginning of the story she is incredibly imaginative and envisions the beauty in everything she sees. For instance, she describes their hereditary estate as a “haunted house” which “reaches the height of romantic felicity.” Additionally, she imagines that her room in the attic with barred windows, destroyed wallpaper, and a nailed down bed was previously occupied by little children, when it easily could have been for an insane individual. The narrator had always despised the wallpaper in her room although as the story went, she began characterizing the wallpaper using human-like qualities which began her obsession with the wallpaper, and the extreme deterioration of her mental health. To illustrate, she stated the pattern looks like “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down.” Near the end of the story, her entries clearly describe her sinking into her own madness and her mental illness taking control of her. Some quotes she wrote explaining this include the following. “The front pattern does move- and now wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,-not alive!” “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise but the bars are too strong even to try.” All of these quotes establish her character at the end of the story when she descends into madness and allows her mental illness to take her