Analyzing The Yellow Wallpaper

Analyzing
The Yellow
Wallpaper
Debbie Barry

2 Analyzing The Yellow Wallpaper
Published by:
Debbie Barry
2500 Mann Road, #248
Clarkston, Michigan 48346
USA
Copyright © 2013 by Deborah K. Barry. All rights
reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without
the written permission of the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1490372365
ISBN-10: 1490372369

Analyzing The Yellow Wallpaper 3
Originally submitted as a college
assignment:
Ashford University
ENG380: Literary Research
Miranda Saake
August 21, 2012

Analyzing The Yellow
Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The
Yellow Wallpaper is a semi-autobiographical
American Gothic novel with vivid
psychological and psychoanalytical imagery
and a powerful feminist message. Gilman
uses the traditional Gothic literary devices of
the “distraught heroine, the forbidding
mansion, and the powerfully repressive male
antagonist” to frame her indictment of
patriarchal marginalization of women and of
women’s issues (Johnson, 1989, p. 522).
The narrator is distraught by the forced
inactivity of the rest cure for which she is
taken to a country mansion by her
authoritarian husband. In an article in
American Literature, Barbara Hochman
(2002) explains how The Yellow Wallpaper
represents contemporary concerns that
women read in order to escape their lives.

This escapism is illustrated in Gilman’s
book as psychological markers and feminist
themes in the story work together to present
a theme of escape from repression, escape
from imprisonment, and escape from an
unfulfilling life.
The Yellow Wallpaper is rich with
symbolism and imagery. The narrator of the
story seeks, and ultimately finds, escape
from physical imprisonment, from a forced
state of infantilism that is imposed by her
husband and by the patriarchal society of
19th
century America, from the perceived
scrutiny of the floral elements of the
wallpaper that gives the story its title, and
from her own identity.
The narrator experiences physical,
mental, and emotional imprisonment at the
hands of her husband, John, and his sister,
Jennie. Throughout the story, the upstairs
nursery bedroom is represented as a prison.
The floral design on the yellow wallpaper
appears, to the narrator, to be bars

imprisoning the woman the narrator
imagines to be behind the lurid, floral
design. “At night in any kind of light ... it
becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean,
and the woman behind it as plain as can be”
(Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.467). The
narrator, who is imprisoned by the male-
dominated culture of 19th
century, middle
class America and by the confines of the
isolated upstairs bedroom of an isolated
country estate, projects the image of a prison
onto the design of the wallpaper in the room
that serves as her physical prison. In her
furtive writings, the narrator states that “it is
the pattern that keeps her so still” (Kirszner
& Mandell, 2010, p.467). She imagines that
the design on the paper keeps the imaginary
woman behind the design still in the same
way that her husband imprisons her
intellectually by commanding that she be
still and not do any writing or work while
she experiences the rest cure. The patterned
prison does not keep the woman still,

however, as Gilman writes: “The front
pattern does move ... The woman behind
shakes it!” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010,
p.468). This reflects the narrator shaking
the bars of her intellectual prison by
continuing to write in secret.
The imprisoning bars in the
wallpaper mimic the actual, physical, metal
bars on the windows of the nursery room.
The bars are mentioned throughout the
story, reinforcing the idea that the narrator is
imprisoned and needs to escape. The
narrator reports that “the windows are barred
for little children,” and she later mentions
“the barred windows, and then the gate at
the head of the stairs” (Kirszner & Mandell,
2010, pp.461-462). John S. Bak writes: “By
placing her in this room, John, the narrator's
husband, resembles the penal officers of the
eighteenth-century psychiatric wards or
penitentiaries” (Bak, 1994, para. 10). It is
noteworthy that the narrator sees the bars as
a means of containing children in the room,

and not as a means of punishing a criminal,
making the nursery more like the psychiatric
ward than the penitentiary. Women in her
class and culture are treated as children by
their society, but they are not seen as evil or
as wrong-doers. Late in the story, Gilman
writes: “To jump out of the window would
be admirable exercise, but the bars are too
strong even to try” (Kirszner & Mandell,
2010, p.470). This suggestion of suicidal
thoughts again signals the unifying theme of
the narrator’s need and desire to escape from
the nursery room and, presumably, from her
life of repression under male control.
Just as the narrator seeks escape
from imprisonment in her physical
surroundings, she also seeks escape from a
kind of repression exerted by her
contemporary society. She experiences
enforced infantilism at the hands of her
husband, John. John does not infantilize the
narrator in order to be cruel to her; as Greg
Johnson (1989) writes, “he is merely

following the nineteenth-century equation of
non-maternal women ... with helpless
children” (p. 524). The narrator is seen to
be treated as a child because the room in
which she lives is meant to be a nursery.
She is kept in the nursery, but the baby is
not. Although John shares the nursery with
his wife, she is often kept there by herself
while he is away from the house on
business, so it is as though she is confined in
the nursery by herself.
In addition to placing his wife in the
nursery, John forbids the narrator to do any
work. This is a primary feature of the rest
cure, but it also casts the narrator in the role
of a child who does not work for the support
of her family. The narrator experiences
forced dependence on her husband and his
sister, who take parental roles in the
narrator’s life. These circumstances
reinforce the narrator’s need for escape; she
seeks to escape from the childlike role
assigned to her by her husband and by

society, and she seeks to escape from the
restrictions on her work.
The infantilizing of the narrator
progresses in her own mind until she is
reduced to crawling on the floor like a
young child. The narrator writes: “here I
can creep smoothly on the floor, and my
shoulder just fits in that long smooch around
the wall” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010,
p.471). Gilman describes a mark or smooch
on the wall where the narrator’s shoulder
has rubbed the design off the paper as she
crawls about the room (Kirszner & Mandell,
2010, p.468).
Gilman’s narrator
anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the
yellow wallpaper. These elements represent
the scrutiny society makes of lives of
women, and especially of creative women
and of women who are not obedient to their
husbands. The narrator is one such woman;
her writing informs her creative nature and
her surreptitious continuation of her writing

informs her marital and feminine
disobedience. While she is not scrutinized
by members of contemporary society while
she is sequestered in the country mansion,
her internal feelings of guilt at violating the
rules of her society cause her to imagine that
the wallpaper watches her. Gilman writes
that “the pattern lolls like a broken neck and
two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down”
(Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.462). Bak
(1994) discusses the scrutiny the narrator
experiences from the eyes that she perceives
in the wallpaper (para. 10). The narrator
seeks to escape the scrutiny of the wallpaper
and, by extension, the suffocating scrutiny
of society and the behavioral requirements
of society, when she systematically tears the
wallpaper from the walls of the nursery
throughout the story. The narrator expresses
how society’s scrutiny represses women
when she says of the pattern on the
wallpaper: “it strangles so; I think that is
why it has so many heads ... the pattern

strangles them off and turns them upside
down, and makes their eyes white!”
(Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.468).
The narrator’s anthropomorphizing
of the pattern on the wallpaper assumes a
darker aspect when the narrator writes:
“when you follow the lame uncertain curves
for a little distance they suddenly commit
suicide” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.461).
The word choice in describing the pattern as
committing suicide is significant because it
again reinforces the narrator’s need to
escape from the nursery and from the
repressive, patriarchal society that the room
and its wallpaper represent. “This paper
looks to me as if it knew what a vicious
influence it had!” (Kirszner & Mandell,
2010, p.462). Not only does the narrator
watch the wallpaper, the watches the
narrator. This indication of the narrator’s
growing paranoia indicates her declining
mental state. It also indicates that she feels
trapped by the scrutiny of the wallpaper and

that she recognizes that being trapped is
something undesirable.
The narrator experiences a break
with reality in the course of the story, which
represents an escape from her ordinary life.
She begins to relate to the woman she
perceives behind the wallpaper. “I can see a
strange, provoking, formless sort of figure,
that seems to skulk about behind that ...
front design” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010,
p.463). At first, she only perceives the
woman vaguely. At this point, the woman in
the wallpaper is a completely separate entity
from the narrator. As the narrator’s need for
escape increases, she begins to associate
herself more and more deeply with the
woman. “The faint figure behind seemed to
shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get
out” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.465).
The narrator knows on an unconscious level
that she is trapped by society and by her
controlling husband, but she is unable to
escape her physical reality. Instead, her

imagination starts to have the woman in the
wallpaper try to escape from behind the
floral design with its watchful eyes. The
woman shakes the pattern of the wallpaper
just as the narrator wishes she could shake
herself free of the patriarchal controls of
society. As the narrator entertains the
imaginary idea of escape, she becomes more
hopeful for her own escape. “I think that
woman gets out in the daytime! ... I’ve seen
her!” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.468).
The narrator projects her desire for escape
onto the woman, and the narrator imagines
that the woman has become free of her
imprisonment, if only for short periods.
This coincides with the narrator’s periods of
escaping her husband’s control by writing
during the day when he is away at his work.
“The wife in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
escapes by denying one self and merging
with another--physically safe, but insane, at
least for the moment, in her nursery-prison”
(Delashmit & Long, 1991, para. 3). While

physical escape from contemporary society
and from the constraints of her own life is
impossible for the narrator, she is able to
find escape in the imaginary woman in the
wallpaper. Bak (1994) writes that “the
madness to which Gilman's narrator is led ...
paradoxically frees as it destroys” (para. 20).
The narrator seeks freedom at any cost, even
contemplating suicide at times, and the
destruction of her sanity is a small price to
pay for her escape from imprisonment.
“I’ve got a rope up here ... If that woman
does get out and tries to get away, I can tie
her! ... I am securely fastened now by my
well-hidden rope” (Kirszner & Mandell,
2010, p.470). The narrator first claims that
she will tie up the woman, but she has tied
up herself instead. In fact, she has done
exactly what she says she will do, since she
has become the woman and by tying herself
she has also tied up the woman. This also
connects to the earlier suicide image of

jumping out the window and finding escape
from life by ending her life.
The narrator’s identification with the
woman in the wallpaper is complete when
she declares: “I’ve got out at last ... in spite
of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most
of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
(Kirszner & Mandell, 2010, p.471). In an
article in Women’s Studies, Barbara A.
Suess writes: “Jane is no longer Jane,
floundering in what she perceives as an
orderless world. Instead, Jane is the woman
who fought her way out from behind the
oppressive bars of the outside pattern”
(Suess, 2003, para. 37). Through her
complete identification with the woman, the
narrator has achieved freedom in her own
mind. Physical reality is no longer relevant
for her since she has succeeded in tearing
the wallpaper from the walls and releasing
the woman who was trapped behind the
paper. The narrator cannot remove the
constricting bonds of her male-dominated

society, but she has succeeded in
symbolically freeing herself by destroying
the wallpaper that represents, in her mind,
her imprisonment.
Shawn St. Jean (2002)
describes The Yellow Wallpaper as “a story
exposing patriarchal oppression” (para. 35).
The story addresses the feminist issues of a
woman’s status in society and of the
patronization of women and women’s
creative efforts by a repressive, male-
dominated society. “The story, then, is ... an
effective indictment of the nineteenth-
century view of the sexes” (Shumaker, 1985,
p. 598). The narrator in Gilman’s story is
controlled by her husband, John, who
iconically represents male-dominated
society in 19th
century America. Shumaker
writes that “the story does indeed raise the
issue of sex roles in an effective way, and
thus anticipates later feminist literature”
(Shumaker, 1985, p. 589). John tells his
wife where to live and what she may and

may not do. He suppresses her creative
urges by denying her need to write to
express herself. The control exerted by the
narrator’s husband becomes a prison from
which she must escape. “With its dominant
pattern, its subordinate pattern, and its
emerging image of a woman behind bars,
the wall-paper has often been seen to
represent the ‘patriarchal text’ in which
literary women —in fact, all women—are
trapped” (Hochman, 2002, p. 91). The
narrator represents all middle class women
in 19th
century America and her husband
represents all men in contemporary society.
When John controls his wife, the reader sees
that the patriarchal society of the time
controls the behavior of women, and that
women are trapped by that control.
“Woman is often seen as
representing an imaginative or ‘poetic’ view
of things that conflicts with (or sometimes
complements) the American male's
‘common sense’ approach to reality”

(Shumaker, 1985, pp. 589-590). The
narrator is forced to endure a rest cure,
presumably to combat the effects of
postpartum depression, which has not yet
been defined in this period. She is required
to desist from writing, and to be quiet and
undisturbed. Her creative and imaginary
impulses and expressions are dismissed by
the dominating male. “He laughs at me so
about this wallpaper! ... he said that I was
letting it get the better of me, and that
nothing was worse for a nervous patient than
to give way to such fancies” (Kirszner &
Mandell, 2010, p. 462). When the husband
discovers that the narrator is unsettled by the
pattern of the yellow wallpaper, he laughs at
her as a parent might laugh at a child who
fears a monster under the bed. By
dismissing the narrator’s ideas as fanciful,
the husband asserts his superior social
position and forces her into an inferior social
role. This creates the situation from which
the narrator must escape, as she is forced by

the conventions of her society to submit to
the superiority and the authority of her
husband.
“I ... am absolutely forbidden to
‘work’ until I am well again” (Kirszner &
Mandell, 2010, p. 460). Following the
pattern of social conventions, the narrator’s
husband treats her as a weak person,
incapable of making decisions. “John’s
view of his wife as fanciful serves his effort
to dismiss her ideas, keep her from creative
work, and confine her to domestic
functions” (Hochman, 2002, pp. 95-96).
John’s insistence that his wife not do any
work not only creates and reinforces the
prison from which she must escape; it also
provides her with the means of achieving
her escape. The narrator sees that her work
is dismissed as unimportant, something she
can just give up, but she resists this control
by her husband. She continues to write the
story of her imprisonment, chronicling her
own descent from depression to true

madness. This rebellion against the
patriarchal authority of her husband is the
first step in the narrator’s escape. It is a
model for women of her class to emulate as
they seek to overthrow, or to escape, the
yoke of repression in their male-dominated
society.
The Yellow Wallpaper uses vivid
psychological and psychoanalytical imagery
and a powerful feminist message to present
a theme of women’s need to escape from
imprisonment by their patriarchal society.
The narrator’s identification with the woman
in the wallpaper is also symbolic of her
identification with women of her class in the
greater society beyond the confines of the
country mansion. She experiences the
scrutiny of society through the perceived
scrutiny of eyes in the pattern of the yellow
wallpaper. Her isolation from social contact
and the forced cessation of her writing add
layers of repression to her life, forcing her to
find escape in madness when she is unable

to find physical escape from the nursery of
the country mansion or social escape from
male domination. The Yellow Wallpaper is
a cautionary tale against the subjugation of
women by men, against the repression of
women’s creative expressions, and against
the dangers inherent in the social isolation
associated with the 19th
century rest cure.

References
Bak, J. S. (1994). Escaping the jaundiced
eye: Foucaldian panopticism in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The
Yellow Wallpaper'. Studies In Short
Fiction, 31(1), 39-46. Retrieved from
EBSCOhost.
Delashmit, M., & Long, C. (1991). Gilman's
'The Yellow Wallpaper'. Explicator,
50(1), 32-33. Retrieved from
EBSCOhost.
Hochman, B. (2002). The reading habit and
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. American
Literature, 74(1), 89. Retrieved from
EBSCOhost.
Johnson, G. (1989). Gilman's Gothic
allegory: Rage and redemption in
"The Yellow Wallpaper". Studies in
Short Fiction. 26(4), 521-530.
Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Kirszner, L. G. and Mandell, S. R., eds.
(2010). Literature: Reading,

reacting, writing. (7th ed.).
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage
Learning.
Shumaker, C. (1985). "Too terribly good to
be printed": Charlotte Gilman's "The
Yellow Wallpaper". American
Literature, 57(4), 588-600. Retrieved
from EBSCOhost.
St. Jean, S. (2002). Hanging 'The Yellow
Wall-Paper': Feminism and textual
studies. Feminist Studies, 28(2), 397.
Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Suess, B. A. (2003). The writing's on the
wall: Symbolic orders in 'The
Yellow Wallpaper'. Women's
Studies, 32(1), 79. Retrieved from
EBSCOhost.

Debbie Barry and
her husband live in
southeastern
Michigan with their
two sons and their
two cats. The
family enjoys
exploring history through French and Indian
War re-enactment and through medieval re-
enactment in the Society for Creative
Anachronism (SCA). Debbie grew up in
Vermont, where she heard and collected
many family stories that she enjoys retelling
as historical fiction for young audiences.
Debbie graduated summa cum laude with a
B.A. in dual majors of social sciences with
an education concentration and of English in
2013.

Also look for these titles by Debbie Barry:
Books for Young Learners:
 Around the Color Wheel
 Colors and Numbers
Stories for Children:
 Bobcat in the Pantry
 Born in the Blizzard and Freshet
 Expressing the Trunk
 Gramp’s Bear Story
 When Mary Fell Down the Well
 Writing Competition
History and Genealogy:
 Family History of Deborah K.
Fletcher
 Grandma Fletcher’s Scrapbooks
 Nana’s Stories
 Property Deeds and other Legal
Documents of the Fletcher and
Townsend Families
 Property Deeds and other Legal
Documents of the Fletcher and
Townsend Families, 2nd Edition
with Digital Scans
 The Red Notebook

 The Red Notebook, 2nd Edition with
Digital Scans
 Zoa Fletcher’s Photos
 Zoa Has Her Way
Other Topics:
 A Journey Through My College
Papers: Undergraduate Series
 Advantages of Brain-Based Learning
Environments
 African Americans in Post-Civil War
America
 American Students Are Crippled By
Cultural Diversity Education
 Debbie’s Vision in Art, Volumes 1-4
 Debbie’s Writing
 Identity Within and Without
 Indifferent Universe
 Loss
 More Than Just Monogamy
 Nature in Early American Literature
 Picturing The First Writing
 Religion and Myth in English Poetry
 Responsibility to a Broader
Humanity
 Speech Codes in Education
 The Evil of Grendel
 The Heart’s Vision
 The Heart’s Vision in Color

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