The Yellow Wallpaper Character Analysis

Improved Essays
Characters in every story obviously play a huge part in the development of other characters and of the plot itself; in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, her characters especially play major roles in the evolution of Gilman’s story. Each represents an aspect of the kind of society that the narrator lived in during this time and they all gave the main character expectations for herself that she felt she needed to live up to to become a good wife or even a good woman. Furthermore, those characters and even their expectations led to the worsening of the narrator’s depression and some even helped prod her into that final descent into insanity. This story took place during a time when a wife epitomized the term “submissive”. Wives …show more content…
The narrator knew that her relationship with the Wallpaper was not healthy or normal, and this most likely led to her condition getting worse and worse. She was not able to accept her illness because not one single living person throughout the story would listen to her or believe that she was truly seeing things, and by the end of the story when John and his sister Jennie finally start to believe something is truly long and try figuring out what it is about the Wallpaper that the narrator was so entranced by, it was much too …show more content…
The narrator was faced, day after day, with expectations, loneliness, and boredom. Her husband did not allow his wife to visit her friends or even get a hobby while at the house. “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious” (Gilman 771). He himself was often gone from his wife, for reasons up to debate. He claimed that he was working, but the narrator must have wondered if that was what he was really doing, especially at night. Throughout the story, the readers only see her obsession with the Wallpaper, but who’s to say she didn’t have other things to obsess about during her time alone? Like the fact that her husband may be cheating on her or that no one tried to contact her during her time at the house. The narrator has many things to focus her schizophrenic nature upon, and the characters in The Yellow Wallpaper in no way eased up her

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In the critically acclaimed short story, The Yellow Wallpaper(1982), Charles Stetson explores the theme of mental health throughout the story using the narrator’s character. He portrays the change of Jane’s mental health by employing the aspects of symbolism, perspective and traditional gender roles. Jane’s temperament in the beginning is very calm and she is happy to be married. Through the course of the story, during the rest cure treatment, her mental condition deteriorates as she becomes insane. Her increasing paranoia of her surroundings makes her start imagining figures, leading to a disastrous consequence.…

    • 750 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “That’s where you came in. To take words like “Asian” and “American” and race and nation and..and mess them up so badly that no one even knows what they mean anymore because that was Dad’s dream. A world where he can be Jimmy Stewart and a white guy can even be an Asian.” (Hwang 68-69). “Passing”, according to Harvard professor, Randall Kennedy, is the “deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards” (Kennedy 1).…

    • 1347 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the story, The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman the story is told through a series of journal entries belonging to the main character. She along with her husband John, who is a physician, are on a holiday trip residing in a colonial estate that is described to be a beautiful place with marvelous gardens yet, the narrator states that the home possess an eerie aura that leaves her with an unsettling feeling that her husband claims is due to her illness., which is the reason for their trip. The main charter is being treated for a,” temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency,” (Gillman, 1999, pg. 74) that requires her to be in constant rest as well as a scheduled medical prescription that requires her to take pills…

    • 1021 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” utilizes imagery, characterization, and personification to show the struggle of a mentally ill woman during the 19th century. The first and most obvious literary device used by Gilman is imagery. From the beginning, when the couple arrives…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1.What psychological stages does the narrator go through as the story progresses? The narrator goes through a rollercoaster of emotion throughout this story. In the beginning of the story she is suffering from postpartum depression so her husband locks her away in the attic. Being bored out of her mind and stuck in the room for 3 months she starts to be intrigued by the specific most minor details of the room like the pattern of the yellow wallpaper.…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The yellow wallpaper is completely abstract; it has no pattern or meaning. No matter how terribly she wants to make sense of the wallpaper, she never will. It seems as though the narrator begins to make friends with the wallpaper, or at least submit to it. Towards the end of the story, she finds that she grows a connection with the room (750). The wallpaper is one of the main reasons that the narrator’s insanity escalates so…

    • 759 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the late 1800’s, the dynamic of men and women made it so women were inferior to men. Women were looked upon as having no impact on society other than to have children and take care of the home. It was difficult for women to express themselves in a world controlled by men. The men held the jobs, received educations, and ruled society. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator experiences this kind of control from her husband, John.…

    • 1001 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Once again, John only insists that she do certain things because he cares about her. He does not want her to write or imagine things because he feels like it will worsen her condition, he asks that she exercise so that she can maintain her strength, and he keeps her mainly isolated in a room at the top of the house so she will focus on getting better. This makes John seem tyrannical, but in reality, he does everything out of his longing to help his…

    • 820 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When someone tells you a story you are expecting to hear what actually happens. That is not always the case. We have certain characters from stories whom we encounter that they way the story is told is so believable, even though is not true. But there is always the case when story is told unbelievably, and we end up believing the facts that are presented to us, as readers. Two stories that come in mind about main characters or narrators whose stories are told in different aspects – believable and unbelievable – would be “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Cathedral.”…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a commentary on the empowerment of women. Beaten down by a society that is ruled by men, the narrator decides that she has had enough and takes matters into her own hands. During the time the story was written, woman struggled to find a sense of individuality. They spent their lives being suppressed and could do little about it. The narrator challenges this suppression and evolves into a woman who will not be dominated by men.…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    While John is in town, she tries to tear down the wallpaper and hides it from her husband, but the wallpaper, the yellow wallpaper is what helped her. The woman stuck in the wallpaper is what helped her get through “an illness” that wasn’t an illness in the first place. Towards the end of the writing, the narrator says, “I’ve got out at last, despite you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Gilman…

    • 1068 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    To distract herself from thinking about her sickness, the narrator turns to the wallpaper in the room, which “pronounces enough to constantly irritate and provoke study”, foreshadowing an obsession with the wallpaper. In the first entry of the narrator’s journal she continues to doubt her husband’s treatment. Being isolated with no one to talk to and nothing to do does not lessen her anxiety, in fact, it only feeds into it. The narrator personifies the wallpaper using a simile comparing the pattern to “a broken neck and two bulbous eyes” (“The Yellow Wall-Paper” 492). She also thinks she’s able to see “a formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind” the “front design”…

    • 1225 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    John, who is also a physician, decides that she needs rest and will be confined to an attic room in the rented house, but to her it feels and looks more like a prison. The narrator spends…

    • 1054 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Her Doctor and husband decide to cure her, she is to be left alone, do no physical labor, and avoid anything that could cause stress. When she’s left inside a large room she eventually starts to lose her sanity and see a woman inside the yellow wallpaper. The narrator becomes obsessed with the woman inside the wallpaper; slowly growing more insane she finally loses her mind and believes she’s the woman inside the wallpaper. The woman fears she will be placed back behind the wallpaper and confronted her husband, only for him to…

    • 1612 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman utilizes characterization to demonstrate how men abuse their power to ensure women are perceived as incapable beings, and how this abuse becomes internalized within women, resulting in complicity of oppression and deteriorated mental states. John employs his patriarchal and doctoral standings to diagnosis his wife as mentally ill, thus restricting her in misogynistic gender roles. Through John’s actions, his sister Jennie becomes complicit in confining the woman, as she sees that when women do not stay within the parameters of typical femininity, they are given detrimental treatments that generate and worsen mental illness. The woman internalizes John and Jennie’s actions until her mental illness takes over and she completely rebels. John is characterized as an aggressive man who abuses his power to ensure his wife is marginalized.…

    • 1246 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays