FREE ESSAY ON YELLOW WALLPAPER

YELLOW WALLPAPER

The Yellow Wallpaper" A major theme in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
is that solitary confinement and exclusion from the public results in insanity. The use
of imagery and setting helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The unnamed
protagonist in this story suffers from a nervous disorder which is enhanced by her
feeling of being trapped within a room. The setting of the vast colonial mansion and
particularly the nursery room with barred windows provides an image of loneliness and
seclusion experienced by the protagonist. Another significant setting is the mansion
connected by a "shaded lane" (66) to the beautiful bay and private wharf. It is possible
that in her mind, she sees a path which leads to the curing of her illness where
happiness and good health awaits at the end. The reason the lane is "shaded" is because
she is uncertain whether or not this path can be traveled. Upon moving into the mansion,
she immediately becomes obsessed with the nursery room wallpaper with "sprawling,
flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (64). Her days and nights are so
uneventful that she finds relief in writing a journal which becomes more tiresome as her
sickness progresses. In every few paragraphs in her journal, she analyzes the wallpaper.
Through the imagery she evokes from the wallpaper, it can be seen that she is really
analyzing herself and her illness subconsciously. For example, she begins to see "a
strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly
and conspicuous front design" (67). She describes her illness (as seen in the wallpaper)
as "not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or
anything else that I ever heard of" (68). In other words, she cannot make any sense of
what is causing her illness. A pivotal moment in the story is when the woman protagonist
is concerned only with the yellow wallpaper in her journal. In lieu of her obsession with
the wallpaper, she becomes engaged in the actions of the women she sees in the wallpaper
which, of course, is really her own actions. The women "is all the time trying to climb
through [the wallpaper]" (72). At this moment, she is desperate to escape her illness but
she is unable to because her confinement in the room has already affected her more so
than she realizes. The imagery of this situation is described when "the pattern strangles
[the women] off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" (72). In the end
or in her last day at the mansion, the isolation intensifies her illness to the point
where she is no longer curable and insanity takes over. The protagonist finally
recognizes the fact that the women she witnesses is really her own frame of mind and
proclaims "I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is
hard!" (75). She believes that she has at last gained her freedom from the illness when
in reality, the exact opposite has occurred. The incessant creeping is the final
summation to her insanity.