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Madness in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

The structure of The Yellow Wallpaper creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy. The

story is written in a journal-style, first-person narrative which includes nine short entries, each

entry indicated by a small space between it and the last. The journal entries span three months

during which John attempts to cure his wife’s “nervous condition” through the rest cure of Weir

Mitchell, which assumes that intellectual stimulation damages a woman physically and

psychologically. In the beginning of the story, the narrator appears sane and believable, but as

the story continues, the reader realizes that she is unreliable because she withholds and confuses

information. By the end, the structure—short paragraphs, fragmented and disjointed thought

patterns— reflects the narrator’s mental disorder. Through the revelations contained in the

journal, the reader is allowed an intimate view of the narrator’s gradual mental breakdown.

(Gilman, 2-50)

The unequal relationship between the narrator and John is a microcosm of the larger

gender inequity in society. Gilman makes it clear that much of John’s condescending and

paternal behavior toward his wife has little to do with her illness. He dismisses her well-thought-

out opinions and her “flights of fancy” with equal disdain, while he belittles her creative

impulses. He speaks of her as he would a child, calling her his “little girl” and saying of her,

“Bless her little heart.” He overrides her judgments on the best course of treatment for herself as

he would on any issue, making her live in a house she does not like, in a room she detests, and in
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an isolated environment which makes her unhappy and lonely. John’s solicitous “care” shows

that he believes the prevailing scientific theories which claim that women’s innate inferiority

leaves them, childlike, in a state of infantile dependence. (Gilman, 2-50)

Gilman makes John the window through which readers can view the negative images of

women in her society. In Gilman’s lifetime, women’s right to become full citizens and to vote

became one of the primary issues debated in the home, the media, and the political arena.

The journal begins when John and the narrator move into a temporary home John has procured to

provide the narrator the break from routine that he believes necessary for her rest and recovery.

She, on the other hand, doubts the necessity of such a move and wonders if the mysterious house

is haunted. John reveals his superior attitude toward his wife by laughing at her “fancies,” a

response which the narrator finds quite natural because, as she explains, one must expect such

treatment in marriage. She even suggests that his indifference to her opinions on the house and

her illness keeps her from getting well faster. Her suggestion turns out to be a fateful prediction.

Against her wishes, John decides that he and his wife will sleep in the attic room of the

house, which at one point may have been a nursery. Actually, the room seems to be more of a

prison than a place for children to play. The windows have bars on them, and the bed is nailed to

the floor. There is even a gate at the top of the stairs. Even more disturbing to the narrator,

however, is the yellow wallpaper, peeling or pulled off the walls in strips. In the beginning, the

paper’s pattern jolts and annoys the narrator’s sensibilities, but later her attitude has a bizarre

change.

The narrator’s morbid fascination with the yellow wallpaper is the first clue of her

degenerating sanity. She begins to attribute lifelike characteristics to the paper, saying that it

knows how it affects her and that its eyes stare at her. She even begins to believe that the paper
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has two levels, a front pattern and a shadowy figure trapped behind its bars. The narrator betrays

the progression of her illness when she begins to believe that the figure behind the wallpaper is a

woman, trapped like her.

The woman behind the wallpaper becomes an obsession. The narrator begins to crawl,

like the woman behind the paper, around the edge of the room, making a groove or “smooch” on

the wall. The narrator begins to catch glimpses of the woman out the windows, creeping around

the garden on her hands and knees. She also starts peeling off the wallpaper in an effort to

completely free the woman (or women, as she soon believes) trapped in that second layer. John

and his sister, Jennie, begin to suspect that something is terribly wrong, and yet they are pleased

with her apparent progress. She appears more normal to them at times because she is saving her

energy for nighttime, when the woman behind the paper is most active. Her apparent normality is

merely a façade. (Gilman, 2-50)

The story’s climactic scene occurs as their stay in the rented house is coming to a close.

On their last night, John is once again in town attending to a patient, and the narrator asks Jennie

not to disturb her. Left alone, the narrator locks herself in the nursery to allow uninterrupted time

for peeling wallpaper and thus freeing the shadowy woman. As the narrator works, she identifies

more closely and intensely with the trapped woman until; ultimately, she loses her sense of

individual identity and merges with the woman behind the wallpaper. John breaks down the door

to find his wife crawling amid the torn paper, proclaiming that she is free at last, and no one can

put her back behind the wallpaper. John faints, and his wife continues her creeping over his

fallen body. (Gilman, 2-50)

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Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Revised Edition. 1996. 2-50