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Yellow Wallpaper Identity

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman seems like a story about a woman suffering from Post Partem Depression, and a popular but extreme cure at the hands of her husband who is also her physician. However, this story is truly about a woman facing an identity crisis when she is forced to ‘rest’ in a room that literally makes her crazy. The narrator sees an imaginary figure within the wallpaper that encompasses her room and believes that the bars in the décor are holding the figure, or shadow, in place. This is symbolic of the narrator’s experiences with her diagnosis and treatment at the hands of her husband. Her fascination with the wallpaper ultimately leads to a complete collapse of her own identity and merges it with the figure …show more content…

The narrator writes “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (Gilman). As the author of The Blume Blog points out, “she does not seem to waiver at all in thinking that the ‘thing’ behind the wallpaper is specifically a woman,” indicating that the narrator is, perhaps unconsciously, starting to recognize herself in the woman behind the bars of the wallpaper. It’s no longer just in the wallpaper that the narrator sees this other woman either. She sees her in the garden “on that long road under the trees, creeping along” and hiding “under the blackberry vines” (Gilman). The narrator even starts to act as the woman in the wallpaper does by ‘creeping’ around the room, and the hallucinations of seeing this woman outside suggests the narrator’s own desire to escape and “be free of the reformatory she has been living in” (The Blume). Near the end of the story the narrator writes that “she has a rope so that if the woman does get out, and tries to get away, she can tie her” (Gilman). This is a dramatic turn where the identity of the protagonist has switched to that of the woman that the narrator saw behind the wallpaper. It appears she is in the mind of the very hallucination that led to her insanity (The Blume) and she worries that

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The narrator convinces herself that there is a woman trapped in the paper who is trying to get out (Perkins 385). She also claims that the woman behind the paper shakes it in hopes to escape (Perkins 388). The narrator becomes obsessed with the ghostly woman, who is in the paper, and convinces herself that she too was once trapped in the paper and escaped. The narrator is determined to catch the creeping woman. She believes that there are others who are trapped in the wallpaper by night and are free during the day.

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