Commentary on The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

The Yellow Wallpaper

In the The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader is thrown into the narrators journal. The narrator writes almost remedially to release the stresses in her life. For most people stresses are from having too much to do. In the narrators case, she is stressing from constant boredom and she is stuck in a routine set up by her husband. Her husband is also her physician and she is prescribed rest. I believe it was his way of hiding her becoming restless, and he did not want to deal with her or her nagging. John, her husband, controls her life, and she responds to the control by doing whatever he asks. He uses his power as a doctor to convince her that rest and isolation is needed to cure her illness. Instead of questioning him, she writes in her journal which is her little secret from everyone.

The narrator faces a major conflict between what she wants and desires and what she is told to do and act like. She finds herself constantly following the same routine, which her schedule is set by her husband, and the schedule is repetitive and does not allow her to go anywhere or do anything besides stay in the attic. The schedule is so dull, how could she not go crazy? She follows the schedule because she has a disease that she has convinced herself she has. She uses rationalization by telling herself a lie that she actually believes even though she may not actually be sick in anyway. Her treatment is rest and isolation, which, I believe, is just a way of her husband keeping her out of the public eye. The narrator has no power within this relationship and now she is a machine being told what to do. She follows her boring orders day by day believing she is being cured by this rest, however, it is only driving her to the brink of insanity and disillusionment.

The narrators husband is in complete control of her. In that time period it was common for the male to have full control and women had few rights. In this story, the narrator was controlled not only accurately to the time period, but also even more controlled because of the illness she thinks she has. This illness should be called control anxiety because her illness is from her husbands control and her lack of control. She has no control within her own life and relationships. When someone cannot socialize or encounter the same surroundings, they begin to act very talkative and get aggravated easily. For example, when the narrator says, I get unreasonable angry at John sometimes, (2). The narrator gets aggravated at everything quickly, such as her husband, the house, her brothers sister, and that yellow wallpaper. Especially when she says, I never saw a worse paper in my life, (3). She is really aggravated with being trapped in the room but projected her feelings toward the wallpaper.

The wall paper really becomes the focal point of the frustrations within her life. She uses it as a way to explain how she feels about her life subconsciously. She probably has no idea that she is explaining how she feels by saying she hates the wall paper because it is repetitive. This could mean that she is unsatisfied with her life because it has become very repetitious and dull. The narrator leads a very repetitious and controlled life and the only way she can cope is by having a so called illness. Her illness is a coping mechanism that allows her to deal with the actuality of her situation. She could be expressing her dissatisfaction with her current activities or feel like she is capable of more, lacking intellectual challenges, or she could possibly be depressed. She is depressed because she truly feels good and writes as if she is happy when she receives attention.

The narrators cure is attention. By not getting attention, she has begun to find ways to entertain herself. First, by focusing on the wallpaper so much she makes it sound like it is a big issue. Second, she focused on her relationship with John. She analyzed her marriage and how she was living throughout the story. She rarely mentions the baby, which I found to be strange. She may not have been that attached because she might not have wanted a child. She still cared, but did not focus on the baby in her writings. The narrator was more focused on the house and her relationship with her husband. By focusing on the same things and doing the same things, she found herself wanting more. When she could not figure out what to do, her mind became creative and she began having delusions. The author brought you on a journey that shows how a person can go insane from repetition and lack of control. She tells the reader to not get caught up in the same things day to day.