The Yellow Wallpaper Literary Analysis Essay

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, the narrator is going through a nervous depression as she spends summer vacation in a house with her husband and sister-in-law. Even though her husband, John, seems to be taking care of her with good intentions, his means are to control her. Being trapped in her bedroom, she takes notice particularly to the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. With her imagination running vigorously, and no means of expressing it, she begins to lose touch with reality. Sigmund’s Freud theory of the uncanny is portrayed throughout the story as the narrator is mesmerized by the familiar and leads to the further feeling of confinement. The narrator spends her time in the bedroom because her husband, John, believes that it is the only way that she will get better from her …show more content…
The narrator’s feeling of repression symbolizes the uncanny in which is her quality being transformed into anxiety. This uncanny is described as “something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to the light” (Freud 148). This describes the woman in the wallpaper as the narrator’s oppression, which has come to the light because it cannot be concealed anymore. The narrator is at the point where she can not be controlled anymore, and her retaliation comes out in the form of the woman in the wallpaper. This uncanny is “nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind” (Freud 148), which means that even if she was unfamiliar with the wallpaper at first, she comes to find that it is very familiar to her because it represents her feeling of confinement and repression. She involuntarily realizes this and obeys her natural instinct to save the woman trapped in the wallpaper, because that woman represents her very own cry for help. In reality, she is attempting to save herself, as she is the one who is