The Underlying Themes Of The Yellow Wallpaper

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the female protagonist veers from the majority of patriarchal societies because of her distinct feelings of frustration, alienation, and emotional and creative repression within this social formation. Ultimately, in order to escape this early twentieth century state of mind, the female protagonist goes insane. However tragic this may appear on the surface, the suggestion of deliverance from her restricted environment is one of freedom of the dominant culture. Although the narrator escapes the narrow restraints of mentality through insanity, the underlying themes of The Yellow Wallpaper help to shed light on the narrators’ delirium.

The Yellow Wallpaper was written in 1892 and is from the vantage point of a woman. This story was written in a time when women were not supposed to have individual thoughts or personalities. At this point in history, the social roles of women were very well defined: mothers and caretakers of the family, prim and proper creatures that were pleasant to look at, they were seen but not heard, and were considered unreasonable and emotional. Men on the other hand were the active workers of the family: they had jobs, knowledge and everything the women didn’t. This story is about a woman, known as the narrator, who is suffering from depression and a nervous breakdown. Her husband John is a physician who believes that she is not sick but is suffering from a temporary stint of nervous depression. He assumes that his own superior wisdom and maturity is at its climax but it leads him to misjudge, demean, and dominate his wife, all in the name of “helping” her. He decides to take her to an isolated country house to help her recover. Although his intentions might have been good, her recovery is not being helped by the fact that her husband has forced her to inhabit a room with irritating features, that is to say the wallpaper.

From the beginning, the most intolerable aspect of her treatment is the dormant and unavoidable silence of the “resting cure.” The mental constraints placed upon the narrator are what ultimately drive her insane. She is forced to hide her anxieties and fears in order to defend her marriage and to make it seem as though she is winning the fight against her depression. Ultimately, she is forced to become completely inactive. She becomes forbidden from exercising her mind in any way. The narrator thoroughly enjoyed writing. She mentions that she is “absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again” (Gilman 164). But she later goes on to declare, “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 164). John warns her several times that she must use her self-control to restrain her imagination, which he fears will run away with her.

The narrator is constantly longing for an expressive outlet, even going so far as to keep a secret journal where she says, “I must say what I feel and think in some wayвЂ"it is such a relief” (Gilman 168). Of course, the narrator’s eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not the expression of it. The narrator does not have a say in anything and when she finally mentions something to John, he always come up with an excuse. For example, “At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterward he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (Gilman 165). After he makes that excuse he continues on to mention “You know the place is doing you good and really, dear, I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental” (Gilman 166). What John doesn’t realize is that by not giving way to these “fancies,” he is making his wife’s condition worse instead of better.

As the narrator is slowly slipping into insanity her sentences begin to reflect the state of her mind. At the beginning of the story when we meet the narrator in the room with the yellow wallpaper, she is quite naÐ"Їve about her new surroundings. She seems to think that the room was originally a nursery by stating, “It was nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things on the walls”(Gilman 165). Her first impression is of the ugly wallpaper which she’s “never seen a worse paper in her life” (Gilman 165). By the second week of her stay, even more commotion manifest itself in her description of the wallpaper. While she admits that it is “inanimate,” she also mentions that she does not like its “expression.” To an ordinary person entering the room they would say that is looks like a pattern in the wallpaper. To the narrator, the wallpaper begins to look like a face with “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down” (Gilman 166). Soon she begins to see not one face in the wallpaper but many creatures. The wallpaper creatures anger her with their “impertinence;” this is the first time she mentions them crawling around the room.

Before long, the narrator states, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because