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