Yellow Wallpaper Thesis

The Yellow Wallpaper” is a widely anthologized short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman was an advocate for women’s rights and a social reformer. This story was published in 1892, a time when women were often belittled and considered to be inferior to their husbands. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” also feels inferior to her husband because of the way he treats her and controls her actions. The woman believes she knows what is best for her mental and physical help, but her husband will not allow her to do what she wants. She has been diagnosed with postpartum depression, so she is forced to stay in the same room with very little interaction with other people. The woman, whose name is never revealed, becomes fixated and obsessed with

the infamous yellow wallpaper that lines the room she is confined to. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” shares some similarities with Emily from “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Faulkner tells the story about Emily in a southern gothic style of writing. Despite being from different eras, both women are forced into isolation by a male dominance, become fixated on an object, and eventually driven to insanity.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the woman is married to John, who just so happens to be a practicing doctor, so he believes he knows what is best for her and how to cure her post-partum depression.

The woman’s brother is also a doctor and tells the woman the same thing, because a male’s opinion was more important than a female’s in this context. They tell the woman she needs the “rest cure”, which means the person receiving the cure must be kept in isolation and free of distractions that could be harmful. However, John does not know what is best for his wife because even she claims “personally, I disagree with their ideas” (Gilman 376). She believes that instead of sitting around in a room all day she should be doing something exciting and riveting. The narrator, who is never given a name, is required to stay in isolation by the will of her husband; she is not given an option as to what she would like to do. The fact that the narrator is not named is a perfect example of the subordination of their marriage. Basically, the woman in the story is not important enough to have a name, only her husband and other male characters get names. Since Emily from “A Rose for Emily” is set in a later time period, Emily is credited with not only a first name, but a last name as well. In “A Rose for Emily”, Emily is also forced to be isolated, but she is forced into isolation by her father. When Emily was of dating age, her father would never let her go out with any suitors and made her stay

home. Similar to the woman from “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Emily does not agree with her father’s choice, but given the time period both women are dominated by males. Another similarity between the two is that even though they are told what to do, they both go against their orders.
Both females become fixated and obsessed on an object, almost entirely due to the fact that they were both confined to isolation. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” becomes obsessed with the wallpaper that is on the wall in the nursery she has been confined to for bed rest. This obsession with the elementary wallpaper comes about because “when her ability to express her artistic impulses is limited by her husband's prescription of complete rest, her mind turns to the wallpaper” (Shumaker 55). If the woman would have been able to occupy her time with mind-enriching ideas, chances are she never would have begun to obsess over something as insignificant as the yellow wallpaper. The woman sees a ‘faint figure behind that seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 381). In a way, the woman embodies what she sees in the pattern. The woman is anxious to escape the room with the yellow wallpaper, just like the figure she sees in the wallpaper is eager to escape the wall. As the woman’s obsession with the wallpaper grows, one critic, Asha Nadkarni, claims the wallpaper to be monstrous and “it is constantly multiplying and breeding—it has a life of its own” (Nadkarni 78). This critic makes a good point because in the mind of the woman the wallpaper completely fills her thoughts and she centers her whole existence on it. Emily from “A Rose for Emily” is not obsessed with an object, but instead she is obsessed with her deceased husband. In fact, she is so infatuated with his corpse, she keeps him in her house for many years after he is dead. Emily’s obsession with Homer is so psychotic that “She idolized and idealized Homer Barron, even to the point of endowing him with fictitious life beyond death” (Dilworth 256). Her obsession with Homer was most likely brought upon from her being isolated her entire life, so she likes the feeling of someone else’s presence around her. The readers can conclude that Emily has a case of necrophilia, confirming her insanity. Both characters develop their obsessions because of their male counterparts’ disapproval of their desire to make their own choices.
By the end of both stories, the readers can conclude that both women are indeed driven insane through their actions and words.

In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, “Gilman presents the narrator's insanity as a form of rebellion against the medical practices” (Quawas 2). From the beginning of the story, the woman in the “Yellow Wallpaper” was told she needed the “rest cure”, but she was in opposition to what her husband and other doctors said. She went against their wishes by writing in her journal despite being told she needed to rest her mind. The reader can confirm the woman’s insanity because she exclaims, “I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch along the wall…” (Gilman 386). The narrator had been crawling along the ground, rubbing up against the wallpaper so much that it was starting to fade from where her shoulder rubbed against it. That is a definite sign of insanity, which originated from being isolated in a nursery room day in and day out. The reader can confirm that Emily has gone insane when at the end of the story, the narrator says, “what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt has become inextricable from the bed in which he lay” (Faulkner 226). This also confirms that Emily was the one who killed Homer, and proceeded to keep his body on the bed for years after. The townspeople would have never suspected to be the one who murdered Homer because “the town thinks of her as an idol” (Rodman 118) so it was

fairly easy for her to get away with murdering him. Both women can blame their insanity on the men who isolated them and made them feel lonely and secluded from the rest of the world.
If the woman from the “Yellow Wallpaper” and Emily would have been in the same situations in the twenty-first century, the outcomes might have been different because women are no longer considered to be inferior or less intelligent to men. However, neither of these women are allowed to exercise their freedom and intelligence because of a male in their life, so they are unable to reach their full potential. The women are confined to isolation because of males in their lives, and because of this isolation they both become obsessed with an object that leads to the loss of their sanity.