Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper “is a short story about a woman who loses her mind. The narrator of the story is suffering from mental illness, and her treatment involves her being whisked away to an ancestral hall for the summer where she must stay in a single room. The room is decorated with hideous terrifying yellow wallpaper, and the narrator’s obsession with it drives the plot of the story. Gilman uses all the conventions of a psychological horror story to critique compulsory idleness, the position held by woman in the institution of marriage and the domestic sphere in general. She uses these ideas to illustrate what the narrator needs to escape from and to emphasise the necessity for escape from these unfortunate realties The narrator views the domestic symbol of the wallpaper as a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that effects her directly. She becomes obsessed with trying to discern the meaning of the wallpaper, studying it “by the hour” (79). The evolution of the wallpaper provides several metaphors for the oppression of women. The narrator initially describes the wallpaper as “yellow. Strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (77). In this passage the wallpaper is described as merely unpleasant, however she becomes so horribly fascinated by its repulsive coloring and formless pattern, that she becomes obsessed with it. Later on in the text, she describes the pattern further saying, “there is a recurrent spot where the pattern looks like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes that stare at you upside down.” (78) This description of the wallpaper characterizes the wallpaper as unsettling, rather than unpleasant. The next development in the wallpaper the narrator sees “is like a woman, stooping and creeping about behind that pattern.” (81) The stooping and creeping of the woman in the wallpaper is much like the narrator herself. They are both trapped within a suffocating domestic pattern from which By providing commentary on the compulsory idleness of the rest cure, the position of women in marriage and the domestic sphere, Gilman illustrates the importance of escape from this patriarchal pattern for both the narrator and women like
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