What adjectives describe the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and what actions or thoughts support this?
Adjectives that describe the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short
story “The Yellow Wallpaper” include tormented, sluggish, and resilient.
Tormented is an apt term for the narrator due to how bothered she
comes across. She is disturbed by a number of things. The weather, the
wallpaper, and her writing upset her. She thinks her writing paper is mocking
her “as if it knew what vicious influence it had!” As for the wallpaper, the
narrator can’t seem to get over how “hideous” it is. At one point, she
declares, “The pattern is torturing.” The weather, too, displeases her. She
calls the damp weather “awful.” She describes it as “hanging over” her.
As for sluggish , it's a suitable adjective because, for most of the story, the narrator doesn’t seem to do much. A lot of her energy is taken up by the wallpaper, which leads to inaction. At...
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night, she doesn’t sleep, so her days are “tiresome and perplexing.”
Finally, it’s possible to describe the narrator as resilient. Eventually, she
overcomes her torment and sluggishness. To her husband’s dismay, the narrator
summons the will and energy to confront the ghoulish wallpaper.
What do the narrator's short journal paragraphs reveal about her character in The Yellow Wallpaper?
The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a woman trying to cope with involuntary thoughts and impulses caused by mental instability; she tries to manage these challenges by writing in her private journal, and the shortness of the paragraphs emphasizes the choppy and disjointed nature of the narrator's thought process. Here in the short paragraphs, the reader has literary proof of the narrator's pathologically busy brain, which is the most obvious element of the narrator's character.
As well, the narrator reveals her highly sensitive nature in her short paragraphs full of details describing her surroundings. In her writing, she admires the beauty of the garden, and she comments on the appearance of her room. Her sensitivity and her careful eye are evidence of her interests beyond the room in which she is living, interests like the outside world and aesthetic concerns like colors and the prettiness of other rooms in the house.
Describe the narrator's attitude in The Yellow Wallpaper.
The narrator seems to be deliberately speaking for the condition of women in the 19th century. Post partum depression, and mental illness, in general, were elements that were not understood. Such conditions were seen as character defects, and not a reflection of a neurological predicament. The narrator seems to be fighting the prevailing wisdom of the time that she "needs rest." Her demands for activity, such as reading or writing, the fixations on the wall paper, and the invention of the scenario within it as reflective of her own indicate that she seeks to establish voice, her own sense of voice, in a social setting that denies it. She demonstrates aspects of resistance in trying to convince her husband that she needs to be active and keeping the journal. When she realizes that in order to placate her husband she must sacrifice writing (own sense of personal expression, indicating how women's voices during the time period were socially subjugated by the institution of marriage), she asserts her voice in the study of the wall paper. The intricacies of design represents her own sense of wide ranging interest within her voice, the stench of it also reflects her own disdain at the social condition that is more akin to institutionalization and not rehabilitation. Finally, when she sees the pattern of the woman trapped in the bars, her voice asserts itself by seeing its own predicament in something as inanimate as wallpaper. Her mad act of tearing the wallpaper down is the narrator attempting to establish some level of voice, of advocacy, of sense of self in a setting that has denied it. The tone of anger and criticizing are both evident as her voice attempts to be heard.