The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The yellow wallpaper” centers around domestic abjection, regression and in some ways, female castration. This short story is in large part biographical. Charlotte Gilman is diagnosed with a nervous breakdown, and Charlotte Gilman was told that she must never write again. Gilman started to feel like she was losing her mind without writing, so she wrote “The yellow wallpaper” as an act of catharsis and also to demonstrate that an idle mind is not necessarily going to fix anxiety and depression. The narrator in “The yellow wallpaper” first falls victim to domestic abjection. The narrator is depressed, although she may not have started out that way. At the start of the story it appears that the narrator is relatively reliable. She seems to be coherent, lucid and consistent. I believe that the narrator started out of sound mind at the beginning of this story. I think that the narrator most likely found herself in a position where she knew more than she should have, or she found herself with the upper hand in some fashion. I believe that she was placed in that room …show more content…
She starts out appalled by the wallpaper in the room, she wants it changed. Her husband, John, at first was willing to re-paper the room until he saw how much it bothered her. The argument for keeping the wallpaper was that “nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (Gilman 2).Re-papering a room hardly seems like the worst possible thing to do for a “nervous” patient. This paper was left in place deliberately to drive the narrator insane. The logic behind this is that first the paper will be irritating, but as the person in the room continues to question their sanity, the paper will become daunting. The act of questioning one’s own sanity is enough to drive a person completely insane. Eventually the parameters of reality started to blur for the