The Importance Of Narration In The Yellow Wallpaper

Robert Leevarinpanich

Mr.Vasquez

ELCAP P4

05 April 2016

Step-By-Step

For many years, women have strived for gaining equality with men. They have been held back and their opportunities taken away from them because of the fact that they were women. There is also, generalized in western cultures, a stereotype that women are fragile and should be more dedicated to maintaining the home, doing feminine things, that they shouldn 't work, and be discouraged from intellectual thinking. In the Victorian period (1837-1901) aside from women 's suffragette movements the Victorian woman usually upheld this stereotype of a well-behaved wife, more or less a possession then an individual. However, there were a few who defied the odds and took it to heart

The narrator and her husband moves into an old ancestral hall for the summer, however, she immediately senses an odd feeling about the place. John scoffs at her superstitions and uses his position as a doctor to dissipate anymore thoughts of the sort. Gilman writes, “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind–) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster"(Gilman 16). Gilman has cleverly taken the reader into the innermost realms of a woman’s mind and experiences, yet the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper remains anonymous, a reflection of her status in society. The role of narration plays a very important role in developing the pathway the story is told. John is part of a patriarchal old-school ideology that relegated women 's feelings to irrelevant hysterics. John would have attributed his wife 's problems to "women issues" and stress. Her ultimate craziness would have been attributed to forces outside his control as a male. Gilman also highlights the importance of first-person narration by dealing with ethos. The narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper" appears credible as the story opens, but as her mental state deteriorates, so does her credibility. In the beginning, she writes

The narrator’s room is repellent, revolting, and an unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. When observing the room she realizes that the windows are barred and there are rings and things in the wall. She becomes anxious being in the room and slowly starts dwelling in her own fantasies. Gilman writes, “It is dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sticky sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. There comes John, and I must put this away.- he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 17). Gilman uses dramatic irony extensively throughout the story to leave hints about the growing distress in the narrator’s life. She deduces from bars on the window that her room must formerly have been a nursery for children and that they had been responsible for the large sections torn off the wallpaper. These tentative convictions cause her to leap, perhaps too quickly to a passionate conviction about their motives for doing so “the children hated it!”. However, early in the story, the reader sees an equally plausible explanation for these details; the room was used to house an insane person. John does not realize how severe his wife’s condition is and he insists that country air