Analysis of The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Essay Example

Throughout the story, she addresses the journal and moans that her husband doesn’t believe that she is sick. Her husband is a highly repute physician by profession constantly ignores her and never believes that she is sick (Jeffrey, 1985, p.64). He calls it a "temporary nervous depression” and explained that it is a kind of mild hysteria that she was going through. He communicates the same thing to all their relatives and friends and Gilman’s brother himself was a renowned physician who agrees with his brother-in-law. Thus everyone believed that she is fine and doesn’t require any further treatment.

She used to lead a confined life. She was never allowed to work until she gets well again. She spent her days in the company of tonics, exercise, and journeys. She wished to take up some work and firmly believed that if work gives pleasure and satisfaction to a person then it also aids in the fast recovery process of a person. But Gilman was not allowed to work. The narrator further mentioned that she didn’t like her room which had a single window rather she liked a room downstairs, but her husband paid no attention to her.

Gilman started to feel obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room. The wallpaper made her depressed and she was gradually drifting into psychosis. It was evident from her words when she says, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over”. Her thoughts connected her to the wallpaper in a strange way. She hated the patterns of the wallpaper but still, she felt attracted to it. She even mentions in her journal her child’s nanny Mary who took perfect care of their baby.

The narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper grows and at a certain point in time, she starts discovering the faint and creeping structures behind the wallpaper’s pattern. During the night she could see a lady behind the bars within the patterns of the wallpaper. She didn’t inform anyone about those images and structures she could see. She had become paranoid and believed that neither her husband John nor his sister Jennie would be able to find out the images which she can see as they are not deeply interested in the wallpaper as she is.

Her hallucinations made her think that the woman behind the bars is shaking those bars strongly to get rid of the obstacle. She started seeing several other women behind the pattern of the wallpaper. These images made her strip down the wallpapers. Gradually at the end of the story, we can find that the narrator turns into an obsessed person affected by psychosis. She refused to recognize her husband even and crept all over the ground (Stetson, 1892). The entire story is a tragic narration of events experienced by a confined woman.

From the standpoint of a woman, it can be stated that the entire journal is an outcry of Gilman where she constantly strives to be free and to go outside of the boundaries. In other words, Gilman’s journal represents the American society of those days which considered women as an object which has got no wishes, desires, or ambitions. Women were treated during those days as a showpiece to be presented in front of outsiders and then again to decorate and place within the showcase.