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Yellow Wallpaper Perspective

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) follows a women’s slow spiral into complete madness. The narrator and her husband rent a small house for the summer and the husband locks the narrator away because she is suffering with a mental illness. She slowly spirals out of control believing that the wallpaper in her bedroom is haunted and begs he husband to tear it down but he refuses. At the end of the story she is driven to complete madness and she takes and axe and proceeds to tear down the paper. The first-person perspective of the “Yellow Wallpaper” plays a critical role in the story because of its contribution to building suspense, the internal conflict between the narrator and her own mind and finally the indirect …show more content…

She feels constant fear for the yellow wallpaper that is in her room. Her madness drives her to think that the wallpaper is not all as it seems. She describes it by saying that, “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” (1036). This leads the reader to believe that there may be something more going on inside the house the couple has rented. “She has a strong belief that the paper is moving because someone is behind it; writing that, The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (1043). The narrator truly believes that there is someone behind the wall and it leads the reader to believe that the wall is not all as it …show more content…

Throughout the story the reader learns that she is certainly not fine and we learn this through indirect characterization. Her writing goes from “IT is very seldom that mere ordinary People like John and myself secure ancestral hall s for the summer.” (1035) This suggest that she was just a normal wife spending some time at a summer home but we soon learn she is struggling more than she lets on at first. Plagued with this mental disability she is locked away by her own husband who prevents her from doing any sort of work, especially the writing she loves to do. She is in constant fear that her husband might find out because as she says in her writing, “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal-having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition,” (1035). She often even has to put her writing away quickly saying, “There comes John, and I must put this away-he hates to have me write a word,” (1036). We see the evidence constantly of her madness and how it is getting even worse as the weeks pass by inside the

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