Isolation In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives the reader a window into the isolation and treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century by gradually showing the descent to madness by the narrator. The reader is able to witness the narrator’s development into madness, which is foreshadowed by her increasing paranoia and obsession with a mysterious figure behind the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. Through symbolism and point of view Gilman presents the horrendous story of a woman's downward spiral into depression and madness due to her isolation.

Gilman uses symbolism to represent different aspects of the narrator’s mental health.. The first instance of symbolism is the wallpaper representing the structure of family

and tradition in which the narrator believes she lacks.

As her mental state begins to fade, her husband takes her to a mansion he is renting for the summer to keep her confined away from everyone else. She begins to find comfort in her writing and begins to become fascinated with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in the room. While the wallpaper is symbolic to her family, the color represents her mental health. The narrator stated “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight.” When something has the color yellow it is due to decay like teeth. The wallpaper color showcases her mental state as she begins to go insane in this mansion. As the days go on, her mental state begins to decay and turn yellow, reflecting the color of the wallpaper. As the narrator begins to become mesmerized by the wallpaper, she notices a figure trapped inside it. After she spends days studying the wallpaper, the figure turns into a woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. This woman simply wants to be set free from the wallpaper just like the narrator wants to be set free from her metaphorical cage in the mansion. The next few

days past and the narrator believes she can free this woman from the wallpaper. This is when she starts to tear the wallpaper down. This was done to set the trapped woman free, but as she tears the wallpaper down she starts to believe she was the trapped woman. After all the wallpaper is torn down the narrator realizes she is the trapped woman and she freed herself from the scales of this mansion. Her sanity was finally lost after all the wallpaper was torn down and she finally accepted her descending mental illness and the reader sees how she perceived herself all this time.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was told from first person point of view to help the reader understand the narrator’s isolation and how it affected her.

As her mental state starts to descend, the reader gets an insight into how she felt and thought during this time period. The story allows readers to go along for the ride into madness and cultivates a certain amount of sympathy for the narrator and her situation. The constant use of "I" puts the reader in the narrator’s head and allows them to understand her. The reader however only gets access to the woman’s thoughts, which is limited. The limited point of view from this story helps the reader to experience a feeling of isolation, just as the narrator felt throughout the story. The point of view is also limited because the story takes places in the present, and as a result the wife has no say in what happens to her and is never able to actually see that the people in her life which is part of the reason she never gets well. Everything the reader learns or sees in the story is just through the narrator’s shifting consciousness and decisions. Since the narrator goes insane over the course of the story, her perception of reality is often completely wrong in comparison with the other characters such as Jennie or her husband. Not only does the reader sympathize with the narrator, they get to see why she began her descent into depression. The reader understands the narrator’s situation and how it caused her to become unaware of mental

grasp of the outside world.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates symbolism and point of view to help the reader understand the boundary of insanity and sanity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a well developed short story about a woman’s mental health and how she became the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper. Through the use of symbolism, the reader understood that she was the woman trapped, and the wallpaper was her mental health which gave an insight on her point of view. By using point of view the reader was allowed access into the mind of the narrator which allowed them to compredent the boundary between her sanity and insanity.