The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Tone and Style

In "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892 after she had a nervous breakdown. It follows a woman from seemingly perfectly sane to total insanity. I intend to show how the language used is a clear insight into her troubled mind. (Gilman)

We are walked through the story by the entries in a journal. This gives us an ideal of how her mind works. From the beginning, it would seem that we are reading about an educated woman by her use of formal language.

In the first few paragraphs, we learn that the woman thinks that she is sick, but her husband John, a Dr. doesn't think she is. He says she just has a nervous depression and wants her to get rest and solitude. He will not even allow her to write in her journal, but she sneaks around and writes anyway.

He has carried her to a house to stay the summer where she can get the rest that he thinks she needs. When describing the house she says it is "the most beautiful place"... with a "delicious garden", but then she says there is "something queer" about the house. She cannot explain why, but something just does not seem right. She even wonders if it might be haunted, but she doesn't dare mention that to John because he would laugh at her. (400)

She is put in a room upstairs, supposedly an old nursery. She said it looked as if it had been a boy's room. The wallpaper was "stripped off in places" and was "one of those sprawling, flamboyant patters committing every artistic sin".

Semmler 2

Of the wallpaper she writes, "I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before". She goes on to tell us that as a child she would entertain herself with the furniture in her room, calling a chair a "strong friend" that protected her. (402)

The next journal entry is two weeks later and she talks of her health, and how she hates not being able to do anything. It is at this point we learn she has just had a baby and a woman named Mary takes care of it. Johns sister Jennie helps tend to the woman when John is away.

From one of the windows in her room she can see a lane and she says that sometimes she imagines she sees people walking in them. John tells her it is not good for her to let her imagination roam.

She is obsessed with the wallpaper on the walls and is beginning to get angry at it,... "with its everlastingness, up and down, with eyes everywhere". She tells us that when the light is just right she can see a figure behind the front design. This is the first indication of how confused her mind has become.

John tells her if she does not start getting better he is going to put her in a hospital for extensive treatment. She definitely does not want that so from that point on she begins hiding even more of her thoughts and feelings from him.

By her next journal entry, she seems to have slipped even further from sanity. She cries all the time when she is alone and is tired all the time. She feels it is not worth the effort to do anything anymore.

She as laid and studied the pattern of the wallpaper until it has taken on a life of its