The Yellow Wallpaper Madness Analysis

In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator, whose name may or may not be Mary, struggles to express herself and unable to preserve her sanity in an environment that does not consider her a normal person, due to the fact that she is mentally unwell. She is forced to conform to a certain predetermined conviction of acceptable decency for a mentally disturbed woman set by her brother and husband John, and this assigned decency for her includes no place for her own liberty. She is forcefully assigned to a "schedule prescription for each hour in the day”(74) and require to “take pains to control [herself]”(74). The narrator is presumed to obediently admit the fact that her own thoughts are a “false and foolish

The initial factor that leads to the narrator’s following slip into the madness is John, her physician and husband. John’s definite dominant and highly respected figure generates a controlling relationship with her, taking away the narrator’s freedom even in the slightest aspect of her life. For instance, as simple as to write a journal, she is not able to do so because “John would thinks it’s absurd”(79). Her husband’s therapeutic process and opinions on how to handle and treat her mental sickness makes her not to trust her own thoughts doubting them instead, and restricts her to do anything in her will. At one point when the narrator tries to talk to John and said that she ”really was not gaining here” (80) and she “wished he would take [her] away”(80), he calms her by suggesting that she should not be having such worries and he replies “My darling, … There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours… Can you trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”(80). This demonstrates how John’s manipulative authority causes her to feel unfaithful and irrational. John does not notice that every instance that he refuses and shuts her out, her need to express her thoughts

As she spends more and more time isolated in her bedroom, with nothing else to occupy her mind, she gradually become fixated on the dreadful patterns of the paper and instantly foresee something else: the narrator eventually see a “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous design”(77). The narrator’s bedroom being a prison becomes more literal as from figurative when the loneliness and social negation intensifies her need for an escape from the pre-set nature of conduct created specifically for her (a mentally depressed and unwell women) by the people in her life especially by John. Throughout the story, the narrator’s psychological breakdown goes from a typical depressed mind and lacked awareness of identity, to a complete madness and reversed sense of self-esteem. She gradually changes the place she has in the physical world and fights back the social rejection she is facing by turning away from reality in exchange for a world where she has total control and can act according to her own will. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol for representing the phases of the narrator’s gradual deteriorating