The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is about a woman suffering from mental illness that came about after her baby. Her husband, John, who is a doctor, calls it nervous depression. The couple is staying in a mansion for three months due to the narrator needing to be bed rested. Within this mansion, John makes his wife stay in one of the rooms upstairs that is covered in an ugly, yellow wallpaper; John makes all the decisions for him and the Narrator. The Narrator completely hates the room because of the wallpaper. Soon, the Narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, especially the pattern of the wallpaper, and that their is a woman trapped within the wallpaper. The obsession continues to grow through out the story until the Narrator

starts to tear off pieces of the wallpaper off the wall to free the woman. The obsession with the wallpaper leads the narrator to believe that people are conspiring against her, like John and Jennie. So on, she locks herself in the room and finishes tearing off all the paper. As this is happening, John comes home and unlocks the room to find his wife telling him the lady in the walls has finally escaped; John replies by fainting.
The yellow wallpaper is associated with a variety of symbols that greatly affect the narrator. Throughout the story the narrator expresses her thoughts and feelings within her descriptions of the wallpaper. The narrator is trying to figure out the pattern of the wallpaper is parallel with her trying to figure out her illness. At first, both the pattern and the illness confuses her. So on, the trapped lady in the wallpaper resembles the narrator and how she is trapped by societies expectations. These expectations leads the narrator to become insane and to start creeping around the room, just like the lady creeps through the walls.