The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis Essay

The Yellow wallpaper is a short story written by the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935), and were originally published in 1892 in The New England Magazine. It tells the story of an unnamed, female, narrator, and is composed in a diary-like form, where we follow the protagonist on her journey into madness. As a consequence to the form, we see the world solely through the woman’s eyes, and are after a while we are forced to take in to question the reliability of the narrator. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist seems trustworthy enough. We are informed that she and her husband John have receded to a summer home, when she was diagnosed with a nerves depression, or hysteria, after the birth of her son. This was a common diagnosis for middleclass women in the 1800’s. Today she might have been diagnosed with postpartum depression. A normal cure for this sort of mental illness so fittingly called hysteria, was the rest cure, which essentially meant that the patient were required to abstain from any form of excessive stimulation, bout in terms of physical and mental exercise. The main characters husband John is a physician, and together with his unwedded sister Jenny and their …show more content…
The narrator is a so-called unreliable narrator, and it seems quite clear to the reader that the woman in the wallpaper is nothing but a vivid fragment of a broken mind. However, whether or not you look at the woman in the wallpaper like an own character have a lot to say for how you read the story. I myself, are inclined to say that if you do view as such, the story changes genre. Is she is a fragment of fiction, and you see her as an extension of the protagonist, thereby not a separate character, the story can be viewed as a psychological thriller. However, if you read her as independent, the story takes a turn for the supernatural, and becomes more like a work of