Short Story Analysis: The Yellow Wallpaper

586 Words2 Pages

What text will you analyze? The text that I will be analyzing is The Yellow Wall-Paper. What is the purpose of this text? Briefly discuss characters, setting, plot and provide your thoughts as to the importance of each in developing the story. The purpose of the text is to show how people tried to cure hallucinations in women. The characters in the story is the narrator, John the narrator’s physician, Jeannie who is John’s sister, Mary the nanny, and the woman in the wallpaper. The setting is a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate like a haunted house. The plot is that the narrator is sick and Mary thinks writing is the cause of why the narrator is sick. The importance of developing this story was to show how people tried to cure madness …show more content…

The first textual entry to help support my claim would be John who is the narrators husband. Within many of the passages in the story, John’s language toward his wife is sarcastic but also ironic. John’s language is exaggerated most times but John methods for that can be defined as extreme. Stetson describes, “John says I mustn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat,” (651). This shows that John wants the narrator to build strength with vitamins rather than the protein through meats. The second textual entry is about the wallpaper. The narrator finds herself within the wallpaper and her future freedom. The narrator becomes obsessed with the paper which consumes both the narrator and her story. The room that she was staying in used to be a nursery. Stetson explains, “It stripped off the paper in great patches all around the head of my bed as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down,” (648). This shows that the narrator did not like the way the wallpaper looked. The wallpaper was this ugly yellow and eventually sees what is hidden meaning behind the wallpaper was. The prison is a symbol of how all characters except the narrator are keeping watch over her. John concludes that the nursery used to be solitary confinement for the mentally

Open Document