The Yellow Wallpaper
The narrator, a newly-married upper class woman who has a big imagination and is a natural storyteller, is depressed after the birth of her baby and she has been advised to follow the ‘resting cure’ to recover. This resting cure involves her forcing herself to be inactive by lying in bed and not exercising her imagination/thoughts at all. For example, she is not allowed to write.
She believes that ‘congenial work, with excitement and change’ would help her more and do her good.
Women were oppressed in marriage and treated like their opinion didn’t matter by their ‘superior’ husbands. They had no say in matters, just like the narrator here is not allowed to protest against the rest-cure her husband forces upon her. Her ideas or complaints are dismissed as ‘silly fancies’ by him and he always seems to know better, treating her patronisingly. Women’s individualities were repressed and their roles were restricted. They weren’t allowed to have any creative expression. For example, the narrator is forbidden to write as it is a manifestation of her illness, her husband claiming that her ‘imaginative power and habit of story-making is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that (she) ought to use (her) will and good sense to check the tendency’.
The narrator feels that the house is peculiar from the start. It has been inhabited for so long and the renting price for it was very cheap. It sounds like nobody really wants it. Perhaps the house has an unpopular reputation? The narrator shares the reader’s opinion, saying that there is ‘something queer about it’ and contemplating that it might be ‘a haunted house’. The room in the house that the narrator is confined to, also has peculiar, disturbing features like nailed down furniture, bars on the windows and the torn wallpaper. The reader feels alarmed. The house could be used to house ‘sick’ people on rest cures who eventually succumb to madness. Why else the strange design/features and its lack of use? Perhaps, it is indeed haunted by the spirits of those people who became insane while also on a ‘rest cure’.
The narrator warns of her husband’s arrival and says she must put ‘it’ away because he ‘hates to find her writing a word’. This suggests she is writing in a journal, which she wishes to hide from John.
Her husband believes writing will interrupt her rest cure and distract her from focusing on recovery. In his opinion, she should lie in bed and do absolutely nothing to recover. Writing would prevent this, ‘leading her to all manner of excited fancies’.
The narrator means that if she wrote more, she would be able to channel some of her emotions or imagination into her writing, which would clear her mind and help her relax. She’s hinting that a creative outlet would be easier and more effective than the prescribed rest cure.
Her fear is taking the shape of ‘a strange, provoking formless sort of figure’ that she notices ‘seeming to skulk behind’ the yellow wallpaper’s pattern.
She thinks she is being deceitful by not sleeping when her husband insists she rests after each meal and not telling him about it.
She begins to think John and Jennie have also noticed the woman and are pitted against her. She seems convinced they are trying to steal the wallpaper from her in some way and then try to ‘sound innocent’ when she catches them studying it. She is determined that no one else ‘shall find out the pattern but herself’. She also fails to realize the yellow stains on her clothes and the smooch on the wall were caused by her brushing against the wallpaper. This fail to be logical and irrational cynicism towards her husband and sister-in-law is quite alarming and shows she is losing sense.
The author uses negative connotations and personification to make the smell sound frightening and sinister. She represents it like a monster or hostile person as it ‘creeps’ ‘hangs over’ ‘hovers’ ‘skulls’ ‘hides’ and even ‘lies in wait’ for the narrator. By personifying it, she is emphasising its presence and how overpowering it is. Also, the verbs are quite frightening ones, painting an almost supernatural, chilling image of this smell sneaking around malevolently, hunting for the narrator as if it had bad intentions. It seems to follow her everywhere, even when she is out riding. It is further described as ‘peculiar’ and ‘awful’, showing it is a unique and unpleasant smell. She links it to the yellow wallpaper, describing it as ‘a yellow smell’. We already feel the potential ‘danger’ or ‘hostility’ of the wallpaper; she seems to be morbidly captivated by it and the fact that the smell is following her, even outside, and shares the same effect as the wallpaper on her shows she is obsessing even more over the wallpaper and literally cannot escape its haunt. She is slowly becoming insane and the smell is a symbol of this further descent into madness.
The narrator now sees the woman trapped behind bars and moving. She sees her crawling behind the bars, shaking them and trying to climb through them. But she then discovers that other women have tried to escape but they were strangled by the pattern, turned upside down and their eyes turn white. She now sees movement and death in the wallpaper, both very unusual and terrifying things.
She no longer thinks her husband truly loves her, accusing him of ‘pretending to be very loving and kind’ ‘as if she couldn’t see through him’. This shows she believes he is actually hostile and is only faking his affection for her. This contrasts with her initial thoughts on her husband: ‘Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick’. I believe the action of tearing at the wallpaper is one of anger against the oppression she feels and both the final descent into madness. She wants to free herself and the other women represented by the caged woman she sees in the pattern, from the patriarchal system the yellow wallpaper represents. She’s also losing control, letting all her inner frustration vent out onto ripping the wallpaper off. This shows she has finally lost all sense and is now in a sphere of insanity and emphasises the main message of the story: To gain freedom and escape the oppression in a male-dominated wall, the only possible way was through insanity and losing all mental sense. This reflects how women struggled to be free and independent.
She believes she is now one of the women who were stuck behind the wallpaper’s bars and that she, just like them, has escaped to creep during the day. She reminds herself she has to go back behind the pattern when night comes, just like they do.