The Yellow Wallpaper Ambiguity Analysis

The human mind is considered to be the most complex and convoluted thing in our universe. With its 10 billion neurons, each connected to another 10,000, it is a wonder that more of us do not get lost within our own minds (or at least more so than we already are). All of these different choice pathways that our impulses can travel must often create conflicting information, or maybe just more choices as to how we view/sense things; the human mind creates an endless amount of ambiguities, which is why no two people think the same way. We are all subject to different realities because our perception of things vary from person to person, never being completely replicated. Due to the power of ambiguity, no two people are alike because they are experiencing …show more content…
To the readers of this story, the narrator is most definitely in need of a bit of mental help, but in the narrator’s mind, she is just trying to do the right thing and help someone who needs it. It is true that she is only there on the secluded estate because her husband (a physician) and others feels as though she needs time to mentally recover, but in her personal opinion she is fine, and it is the others that simply just do not understand her situation. She speaks of the room she is in as a living thing, having never seen “so much expression in an inanimate thing before” (Gilman 3), and often in places where the sun hits the paper just right she “can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure...” (Gilman 3-4). The narrator becomes so entranced with the ‘woman’ in the wallpaper that she suffers physically in an attempt to ‘rip her out of it’. To the narrator, that woman is as real as her husband, and if her husband were in need of help she would give it to him, so in translation she should give it to the woman as well. Due to the realism of the figure, the narrator feels an emotional connection towards her. “The woman...creeps...it must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!” (Gilman 8). She relates on a personal level to the woman having to hide tendencies that aren’t socially acceptable, such as ‘creeping’, which helps to further the narrator’s characterization of her and makes the woman more practical in her eyes. Her husband, John, knows that the narrator must be imagining things, as does his sister, because she is “sick...in the...mind” (Gilman 1). After ‘freeing’ her new friend by clawing off the remaining yellow wallpaper, the narrator discovers that it is a version of herself whom she just let go. She feels