Name: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Summary & Analysis
Uploaded: 2025-03-31T16:31:59.000Z
Duration: 10 min 2 s
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In the introduction of the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, it's the late 1800s and readers meet an unnamed narrator through her journal.

Adverbs of manner

She has recently given birth and doctors have diagnosed her with a nervous condition and prescribed a rest cure.

So she's isolated on a country estate where she and her physician husband John are living for the summer.

This rest doesn't simply mean taking it easy, but involves the near total elimination of all stimuli, including interacting with people, reading, writing, and even seeing her baby.

Two other women have come to help with childcare and domestic tasks.

Writing in secret, the narrator tells the story of her confinement in an upper room of the house, a former nursery that has barred windows.

In the rising action of the story, the narrator explains that the room has tattered yellow wallpaper with an intricate pattern that the narrator finds irritating.

Weeks pass, and the narrator finds that her anxiety and depression have increased and even the smallest tasks have become overwhelming.

She asks John if they can leave the house, but he doesn't think it's practical or reasonable to give in to this fancy.

The narrator continues to obsess about the wallpaper, finding it both appalling and mesmerizing.

She spends hours each day looking at it, tracking it with her eyes and trying to follow the pattern to its stopping point.

As time passes, she becomes more and more paranoid about the color and the smell and increasingly fascinated by the pattern of the wallpaper.

She becomes convinced that there's a woman trapped behind the pattern trying to get out.

Apparently hallucinating, the narrator feels better and more energetic as she becomes more interested in the woman behind the wallpaper.

Sometimes she sees many women, all creeping about behind the pattern.

As the summer draws to a close, the narrator begins to feel that she must help the women escape before she leaves the house.

At first, she peels the paper a little bit at a time.

But in the climax of the story, she locks herself in the room and begins to tear away the massive swaths of the paper.

In the falling action of the story, she completes this task and begins to identify herself as the woman in the wallpaper, creeping along the floor around the room, following the streak on the wallpaper.

And when John finds her in this state, he faints in her path.

In the resolution, the narrator keeps right on crawling and creeping along the wall.

Let's talk about the characters in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

The story is told through the journal entries of an unnamed narrator, a new mother suffering from what male doctors call a nervous condition.

They have prescribed total rest as her treatment, which means that she must do very little that is physically or mentally stimulating.

This kind of rest cure was thought to improve a woman's mental health.

However, the confinement and inactivity only deteriorate the narrator's mental condition.

She becomes obsessed with the color, smell, and pattern of the wallpaper in her room.

And her preoccupation with its twistings and turnings turn to hallucinatory delusion.

As she comes to see another world in the wallpaper, her view of other people becomes more and and she begins to behave erratically.

By the story's end, her treatment seems to have made her insane.

The narrator's husband John is a respected physician, and he comes to embody the rest cure and 19th century patriarchal oppression of women.

While he's depicted as confident in his wife's diagnosis, and he infantilizes and controls her, speaking to her like a child, installing her in the nursery, giving orders that she must obey, and restricting her freedom to an extreme degree by modern standards.

He seems naive about her need for intellectual exercise.

And in the end, he is shocked to the point of fainting by the extent of her mental deterioration.

John's sister Jenny serves as the couple's housekeeper.

The narrator calls her a dear girl, but she also says she must not let her find me writing, suggesting that Jenny's complicit with John in suppressing the narrator's need for a creative outlet.

Jenny herself seems rather dull, a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper who doesn't aspire to anything more.

The narrator describes caretaker Mary as so good with the baby, the very baby the narrator is too anxious to take care of.

The caretaker isn't mentioned again by name, although readers learn that the baby is well and happy.

Like Jenny, Mary is another part of the isolation that cuts the narrator off from her roles as mother and head of household.

Let's talk about some of the key symbols in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

The pattern of the yellow wallpaper symbolizes the narrator's confinement, and perhaps the social limitations of women in general.

The pattern traps and fixates the narrator's thoughts, such that her rest cure seems to drive her insane.

She comes to believe that the wallpaper's pattern consists of bars that imprison a woman, sometimes many women.

This woman shakes the bars, trying to get out.

At the end of the story, the narrator frees the woman by tearing the paper from the wall, an action that may represent her own desire to free herself from confinement.

The yellow wallpaper also symbolizes contemporary xenophobia, particularly fears of Asian immigration.

In this way, the wallpaper evokes a powerful combination of debilitating cultural anxieties.

The estate reflects the narrator's own isolation.

The boundaries of the gardens, house, and room symbolize the ever-smaller spaces of her physical and mental freedom.

The moon, with its monthly phases long connected to a woman's menstrual cycle, symbolically represents womanhood.

Moonlight first reveals the wallpaper's sub-pattern, making a symbolic connection between the narrator and the woman she sees trapped behind bars.

Both may be unnoticed and unseen during the day, but they move around freely at night.

Let's talk about some of the themes of Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

The theme of conformity versus self-expression can be seen in the relationship between the narrator and her husband.

John has decided that she must remain inactive and in her room, and because he is both her husband and a respected physician, she has no choice but to obey.

As a wife and a woman, she must be able to do both.

The narrator accepts her role with little outward dissent, but her need for freedom of expression reveals itself in her private journal.

She writes secretly and stays awake at night to have time to herself.

However, the overall trajectory of the story shows that her need for healthy self-expression goes unmet.

Instead of engaging meaningfully with those around her, the narrator comes to see a confined woman behind the bars of the yellow wallpaper and creeping women outside her windows.

Gilman, in this way, shows us how unhealthy forced conformity can be.

Confinement is a constant theme in The Yellow Wallpaper, seen in the setting, in the form of the secret journal, and in the narrator's overall descent into madness.

The narrator is physically trapped by her surroundings and her husband's directives.

The borders and walls of the estate isolate her.

Beyond these physical barriers are those set up by society to limit women.

Her journal sets the confines of her mental activity and proves inadequate to the task.

Confined also by her fixation with the yellow wallpaper, the narrator traces the pattern for hours at a time.

In this way, the pattern traps her mind, even as her physical self is confined.

Women's roles were certainly limited at the time Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.

With mother and house manager, the normalized domestic sphere for upper-class wives.

But the narrator in Gilman's story is much more limited.

At the mercy of male physicians who prescribe total inactivity of mind and body, she's already removed from her roles of mother and house manager when the story begins.

Her woman's identity is thus split off into other characters.

Mary takes on the narrator's role of mother, and Jenny manages the house, including taking care of the narrator.

The narrator thus loses all agency over her life, and she's treated like a child who must be cared for.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was herself of the strong opinion that women need meaningful work suited to their natural abilities and inclinations.

Her story intensifies the limitations put on women to show the mental decline that results.

Mental illness is shown in this story to result from the narrator's forced conformity, her confinement, and her limited responsibilities, making the question of insanity a kind of umbrella theme that encapsulates the others.

What kind of mental health can we expect from such cultural traditions?

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Summary & Analysis

anxiety

mental

apparently

depression