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What Is The Mood Of The Yellow Wallpaper

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the short story takes place in the diary of an unnamed woman in 1892; who is being driven crazy by improper medical treatment illustrated by the narrator’s increasing obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. Gilman reveals to the readers that the narrator struggles with a form of mental illness throughout the story; the narrator says she has ‘temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency’. In response to these mental struggles the narrator is prescribed the ‘resting cure’; also known as bed rest. As the story progresses the woman's mental health deteriorates while her mind twists reality creating an antagonist out of an inanimate object she can’t escape due …show more content…

This is important when analyzing the narrator's downward spiral because the variation in the narrator's tone throughout the story illustrates her descent into madness. In the beginning, the narrator uses imagery when describing the color of the wallpaper, she says, “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulfur tint in others”(Gliman). Similar to when the narrator personifies the wallpaper she begins the story by illustrating the wallpaper with a distasteful tone but eventually her tone when describing the wallpaper will evolve into a more aggressive obsession. Imagery is seen again when the narrator describes the ‘bad’ that the wallpaper brings, saying, “It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things”(Gilman). The wallpaper’s color has transformed from being ‘unclean’ to ‘strange’ and a reminder of all the ‘bad yellow things’ the narrator has ever seen. This change in tone when illustrating the image of the yellow wallpaper is yet another example of how Gilman uses literary devices like imagery and tone to emphasize the narrator’s deteriorating mental illness. Another example of this is when she has her mental breakdown at the end of the novel, “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper. A strip about as high as my head and half around the room”(Gilman). Personification, imagery, and tone are all used here to emphasize the woman losing her mind and all sense of reality because she and the ‘woman’ in the wall are ripping apart the wallpaper. Finally in the end the tone

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Together the themes of manipulation and mental illness will trigger a series of events that change their lives. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and seclusion from human contact. This was a cure that her husband John prescribed that proved detrimental to her mental health. As she spends more time alone in the room, she becomes fixated on the patterns and images, slowly becoming convinced there is a woman behind the wall that is trapped and that she must free, "The front pattern does move—and no wonder!

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The characters must figure out a way to atone for their sins, or else those sins might end up killing them. Similarly, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator's suppressed thoughts and feelings appear directly in the wallpaper as she spirals deeper and deeper into madness. The narrator states “There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern, the dim shapes get clearer every day” (Gilman 4). This quote is the author's example of creating suspense by progressively adding more detail to the narrator's hallucinations until finally, she snaps.

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The yellow wallpaper soon becomes sickening to the narrator which is expressed by, “it is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it!” (Gilman). Yellow is normally used to symbolize hope or positive thoughts which the narrator is unable to obtain due to the fact of being confined in the room. As time passes, the narrator becomes more and more obsessed with the wallpaper even believing there are people living inside which symbolize how she feels trapped and helpless.

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While the wallpaper, its pattern, and the woman could also represent the narrator’s mind and her feelings of being trapped. There are so many interpretations that you can not just pick one, but in this case I

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman who is mentally ill feels uncomfortable in her room due to the wallpaper. She dislikes it and explains it by saying: “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering

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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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This is seen consistently throughout the short story, as the narrator’s insanity heightens as the story progresses. One way in which the narrator’s madness is displayed is through her experiences with the wallpaper that decorates her room. From the beginning she holds great contempt towards it, despising its color and design. She writes that “I have never seen a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

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She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

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However, we later see a shift in her feelings towards the wallpaper as she states that she is growing “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” and comes to a realization that it may be “because of the wallpaper” (Par 94) As her opinions on the wallpaper begin to change, the progression of her mental instability becomes increasing visible. She begins to build a relationship with the wallpaper and claims that “There are things in that paper that nobody knows about” (Par 22) her. As this relationship with the wallpaper builds, her sanity begins to slip, and the hallucinations begin in a somewhat minor manor. In her first mention of “the woman” she says that the pattern on the

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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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However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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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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1155 Words | 5 Pages

Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

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The yellow wallpaper is not just the dreadful décor the narrator is stuck within the story but the most important symbol in the story. It symbolizes how women were not allowed to change or free to make their own decisions. The narrator once said that the wallpaper "sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it" (Gilman). She felt like the wallpaper stuck and not able to succumb to change she demonstrates this as well when she says "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out" (Gilman). The narrator herself became the women she saw in the wallpaper that she felt trapped in a life without change which manifested itself into the wallpaper further increasing the symbolism and importance of yellow wallpaper.

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