The Yellow Wallpaper

As the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" descends into madness, her descriptions of the wallpaper change. The color and the appearance of the wallpaper...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" takes place in a colonial mansion in the countryside. The narrator describes it as beautiful but isolated. Thus, she states, it is quite alone, standing well back from the...

The woman behind the wallpaper represents the narrator herself, which is why she comes to identify with the woman. Over the course of the story, the narrator gradually sees this woman in more...

The narrator of Charlotte Gilman Perkin's celebrated short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is considered an unreliable narrator. Initially, the narrator suffers from postpartum depression and her...

In the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator is taken to an old estate home in order to get fresh air to heal from a nervous disorder. She describes it as a "beautiful" place with a...

The primary theme of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is that women who are suffering from post-partum depression, or any kind of depression, should be respected and allowed to make decisions regarding their...

In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the nameless narrator experiences postpartum depression. Her husband insists that she follow the "rest cure," which was designed to minimize distressing...

Had the story been told from a third-person omniscient viewpoint, a God's-eye perspective, if you like, then it wouldn't have been nearly as effective. T,hen the unnamed woman in the story would've...

The colonial mansion that John and his wife move into has stood empty an isolated for a long time, and John is able to rent it cheaply. The narrator says: It is quite alone, standing well back...

There are a couple of different types of conflict going on in the story. I believe that the primary conflict is Man vs. Society. The protagonist is living in a society (and further, a home) where...

We don't know much about the narrator's baby, but it plays a very important symbolic role in the story, nonetheless. It's instructive in this regard that the unnamed woman has been forced to...

The woman the narrator thinks she sees creeping behind the undulations in the yellow wallpaper is herself. As the narrator decomposes into madness, she identifies with the woman behind the...

John faints at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper" when he is confronted with the reality of his wife's serious mental condition and witnesses her creeping around the destroyed upstairs room in an...

I suggest a thesis that focuses on the oppression and destruction of the female characters that originates in the male characters' faulty perceptions of the female characters physical, mental,...

The yellow wallpaper symbolizes the oppression that many women of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's generation felt under the institution of marriage. The historical context of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" was printed in 1892, when women were still oppressed. In fact, even though they earned the right to vote in the 20th Century (1920), they were still oppressed. Things did...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman utilizes first-person narration in her celebrated short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is told from Jane's point of view as she suffers from postpartum depression and...

I would argue that the narrator's unreliability becomes obvious when she starts imagining the wallpaper to be observant and malicious. The fact that she starts to see a figure in the wallpaper's...

We actually don’t know know if the narrator’s name in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is Jane. In fact, most reprints of the text include a footnote toward the end of the story when the name appears. The...

Initially, the narrator's tone is confident but helpless. She clearly expresses her disagreement with the treatments that her husband and brother, both physicians, have recommended for her. She...

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the first-person narrator becomes fascinated by the wallpaper in her bedroom. She has post-partum depression and is being treated with the...

Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator's husband, John, has been treating his wife like an invalid who doesn't know what's best for her. As well as being the narrator's husband, John also...

The narrator initially describes the yellow wallpaper as being the worst paper she has ever seen in her life. She elaborates on the awful design of the wallpaper by mentioning that it has a...

The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is likely suffering from depression and likely from postpartum psychosis (at least in part) because of the young baby mentioned in the story. She finds that...

As the story progresses, the woman in the wallpaper increasingly represents the narrator's deteriorating mind, and is a symbol of her own feeling of being trapped and imprisoned by her family and...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" abounds in irony—dramatic, situational, and even, at the beginning, verbal. When the narrator is thinking relatively clearly, she describes her marriage ironically, saying...

The picture that we are given of the narrator in regards to the way she feels about her husband is that she is clearly trying very hard to be a loving and devoted wife. She does not argue and she...

Certainly, you could argue that Charlotte Perkins Gilman opposes the sexist practices of the nineteenth-century medical community, which largely excludes women from having a say in their own...

The narrator notices that the front pattern of the wallpaper forms bars which the trapped woman attempts to climb through but fails each time. The woman’s attempts heighten at night and she even...

This is a very important quote from the novel because it explores how the narrator, in her state of sliding gently into ever-greater madness, comes to identify her own state and position as being...

The fact that the bed in her room is nailed down is an ominous sign that the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is being treated like a prisoner who might move the bed to try to escape or harm...

To add to the relevant ideas above, generally, yellow in literature is the color of evil. Having been placed in the room by her cruel husband, perhaps the woman projects her husband's evil act...

A lot of the mood of "The Yellow Wallpaper" has to do with nervousness and madness. That unsettling, uncomfortable feeling is something the protagonist shares with the reader as both start to...

We're never really told what is wrong with the woman. However, she tells us that she has a baby. She also says that her husband rented the house for her to rest because of her "nervous...

The literary style of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is that of the "unreliable narrator." The story is told from a first-person perspective, with only one point-of-view, and so there is no way of telling...

Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" to protest a rest treatment she was subjected to for a temporary depression similar to the one the narrator of her story suffers. As with her story's...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses both syntax and diction masterfully to show the protagonist's deteriorating mental state in the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." Syntax refers to the arrangement of...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, it is clear by the end of the story that the main character has gone insane. There are several key phrases in the woman's journal that point...

We are able to distance the narrator from motherhood - in fact it is possible to read the story without realising that she is a new mother. As readers we are as disassociated with her role as a...

In this short story, the oppressed, mentally ill narrator is forbidden from writing her thoughts down and carefully hides her journal from her husband and sister-in-law. The narrator's husband,...

The protagonist's husband doesn't keep her locked in the room, exactly. Rather, he prevents her from working or finding any positive way to spend her time because he believes she is ill with...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed woman narrating the short story is virtually a prisoner in a small yellow room with horrendous yellow wallpaper. She is staying at this small summer house...

This is a fun and interesting question. When you read a work narrated by an unreliable narrator, you can't trust what he or she says. This means that as you go through the story, doubts arise and...

The narrator certainly does not feel that her husband understands or believes her when she describes her feelings of illness. She says, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a...

The narrator feels pity for the woman in the wallpaper. At first she was scared by the apparition, but then she felt compassion and the compulsion to free the woman. The narrator spends days and...

By the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator believes that she has, by peeling the wallpaper off the walls, freed a woman who was trapped by and within the paper itself. The narrator says, I...