Commentary on The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

The Yellow Wallpaper

Published for the first time on 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper is written as a private diary from a woman whose desire to pursue a happy marriage or maternity is gone. She is obligated to heal from her nervous condition resting isolated. Her nervous condition is probably just a post-partum depression.

In this story, madness represents an escape from unbearable oppression caused by the privation of contact with society or external stimulus. This oppression also creates isolation. This separation from the world and boredom leaves the woman with no other choice than to overdramatize her condition, and to believe that madness is the only way to communicate her emotions.

Narrated with extreme precision psychologically and dramatically, The Yellow Wallpaper highlights the big imagination provoked by a womans madness and her emotional descension. Her emotional fall started from the very first day, when the woman and her husband were checking the house, and she is designated to sleep in a nursery, suggesting she is some kind of a little, powerless, useless girl that demands special care. The woman feels lonely and trapped at the same time. She completely lost her self-esteem and dignity, and her only exit from this captivity is to create a world of her own.

This gothic novel is a representation of the female imprisonment, when women are forced to play a limited domestic role. The woman sits on her bed all day, and although she enjoys writing, her husband, a famous and efficient doctor, forbids her to do it; instead he prescribes complete rest for her. Therefore the only escape of the boredom that Johns treatment created is to intensively examine the yellow wallpaper.

The woman, whose name remains unknown, is a prisoner of her husbands orders. John, the doctor, not only separates her from the world and any type of external stimulus; but also puts her eternally in a childish world and incapacitates her. He infantilizes her by calling her names like blessed little goose (Perkins Gilman, 2) and takes away the responsibility to take care of her own baby. By delegating the responsibility of the baby to Mary, the womans sister-in-law, John makes his wife feel even more useless.

Another important symbol of incarceration is the house. The house especially he location of her room, is a symbol of imprisonment, constriction, and a jail, almost like a mad house undercover. The bars in the windows and the gate at the head of the stairs are a clear example that the main character has been put in a prison-like place. This jail even has its own guard, Mary; her sister-in-law usurps her female role in the household. She chats with John, she is also in charge of the food, and she raises the womans baby.

The walls are covered with some disgusting and unpleasant yellow wallpaper that accentuates not only the womans oppressive feeling, but at the same time offers the woman an ambivalent escape from her own madness. The description of the wallpaper from her point of view is something that is smelling, infuriating, atrocious and flamboyant. (Perkins Gilman, 3) All these angry characteristics the woman sees on the wallpaper represent two things; one is what she feels while she is trapped, and her outrageous anxiety to live the life she wants to live; and the other one is the rejection of the womans silhouette that hides behind the wallpaper.

The figure of the woman trapped behind the bars in the yellow wallpaper is actually a deformed copy of herself. Locked up in her room, isolated and feeling more oppressed each day, the woman creates a distorted reality that goes beyond the hypnotic drawing in the wallpaper. The wallpaper is actually a symbol of the womans own reclusion.

The womans solitary confinement is a mix of anxiety, hallucination, madness and indecision. The impotent feeling is created by failing to express herself, not interacting with other people and the lack of stimulus she is not. These circumstances lead the woman to enter in a trance that blocks her mind to a world where she can feel for the first time power; her own mind. The most important thing about the womans testimony is the clear role that liberty and self-empowerment have in life, and how without those features on life people tend to go mad.

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Dover thrift editions, 1892.