her health. She expresses feelings that she isn't getting better, that she isn't gaining weight, and that her mind still isn't clear. He replies by telling her that she simply can't see the truth of how much she's improved.

The narrator is surrounded by men who claim to know more about her condition than she does. Both her husband and her brother are physicians who insist that she has simply a "temporary" nervous depression. The specialist they consider sending her to is also a male. So the narrator suffers, very much alone, and even becomes afraid of her husband before her complete break with reality in the final scenes of the story.

There are two core issues with the narrator, as evidenced through the events of the story. First, she suffers from some mental health issues and isn't receiving the treatment she needs. Second, her own concerns about her health are dismissed and trivialized by others until she becomes completely trapped in her own mental world and suffers a psychotic break.

Typically we think of character development in terms of a growth in some area, but that isn't the case for the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Instead, the narrator in this short story experiences a steady decline in mental faculties as the plot progresses.

When the story begins, the narrator, who likely suffers from some form of postpartum depression, understands that she is sick and even tries to convey what she believes will cure her. She longs for nature, for the company of other people, and for the ability to write. Yet she is initially frustrated that her husband dismisses her: "You see he does not believe I am sick!"

As the plot continues, the narrator's frustrations at being kept in a form of solitary confinement grow. She begins to associate her growing feelings of resentment with the physical features of her room. The room, a former nursery, as been ravaged by previous children. The wallpaper is torn in spots. The floor is "scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there."

Kept separate from nearly everyone, the narrator begins to focus her angst first on the pattern of the wallpaper, which she describes as "irritating." And then, she notices something else:

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

This "figure" evolves into a woman whom the narrator believes is trapped behind the pattern of the wallpaper. As time passes, the narrator "watches" this woman more and more until the woman "trapped" in the wallpaper becomes the singular focus of the narrator's concerns. She detaches from her husband and eventually begins to feel that she is "getting angry enough to do something desperate." At this point, she also notes that she doesn't "like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast." Clearly this is a departure from her initial character that longed for the peace outside her windows. The narrator then wonders,

I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

The narrator now sees herself as the woman who is trapped behind the patterns of the wallpaper, trapped in a life she doesn't control and cannot escape, and wonder if all women feel this same sense of repression. This sense of powerlessness drives her into further madness until she attempts to take control of her own life by pulling off the wallpaper, which symbolizes her entrapment, and tells her husband that now he "can't put [her] back."

In the end, the narrator frees herself of the physical and marital constraints imposed upon her by a society which doesn't understand her needs.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” John, the narrator's husband, can be best characterized as controlling and condescending. Let's see how this works.

John is a physician, and he has taken his wife on a trip to stay at an old house in the country for a time. The narrator is suffering from a nervous condition, and John has prescribe the rest cure. He is adamant that his wife is not to work at her writing or engage in stimulating conversation or even care for her baby. She must rest and take air and eat good food and do exactly as he says. John thinks that he knows what is best for his wife, and she will just have to obey. She can hardly “stir without special direction.” The narrator disagrees with John. She thinks that if she has more society and stimulation, and especially her work, that she will get better faster.

John even chooses the room in which the couple will sleep even though the narrator would much prefer another one. The narrator dislikes the chosen room with its horrible wallpaper, but when she expresses her feelings to her husband he merely calls her “a blessed little goose.” John is almost always condescending to his wife. He seems to think that expressions like “little girl” are terms of endearment, but really, they are denials of the maturity and self-determination of his wife.

To be fair, John does not mean to drive his wife into madness by his control and condescension, but that is what happens. By thinking he knows best and refusing to listen to his wife, he helps send her from nervousness into psychosis.

It is clear that the narrator of this excellent short story does not like the wallpaper that is in the room where she is forced to recuperate and rest at first. She describes the pattern as "committing every artistic sin," for example and then also characterises the colour as "repellant" in the way that it is a "smouldering unclean yellow." However, perhaps the most interesting description of the paper is shown in the following paragraph:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

The personification of the wallpaper as representing people who are committing suicide and "plunging" off at "outrageous angles" and "destroying themselves" represent the most disturbing description of the wallpaper. In a sense, this description could be said to foreshadow the fascination that the narrator has with the wallpaper and the way that she comes to commit a form of mental suicide by the end of the tale.

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 "rest cure," meaning she has limited social interaction and is not allowed to work. She spends most of her time in the room and is not supposed to be writing (even though she's a writer) or overexerting herself. The wallpaper is, at first, repellent to the narrator, but she soon becomes obsessed with it, likely due to her lack of another creative outlet.

Early in the story, the narrator conveys her strong distaste for the wallpaper's pattern and color:

I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. ...
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

The narrator's strong choice of words indicates her utter disgust with this wallpaper. The wallpaper becomes a sort of symbol for her feelings toward her position in general. She is upset and angry about being basically locked up in the room and having her freedom taken from her, but she projects those feelings onto the wallpaper.

Over time, the narrator becomes increasingly interested in the wallpaper. The more she studies the patterns, the more obsessed she becomes. She starts to imbue the paper with its own agency when she says, "This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!" She notices what she thinks looks like "a broken neck and two bulbous eyes star[ing] at you upside down." This evocative image seems like a person who has been hanged or hanged him or herself. What the narrator sees in this example indicates her mental instability and foreshadows later suicidal thoughts.

The wallpaper's effect on the narrator reaches a crescendo when she begins to see a woman in the wallpaper's patterns. This descent into madness, however, also gives the narrator special insight into her oppression. When she first notices the "woman," she says, "...it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit." This makes the narrator want to leave the house altogether, but not much later, she becomes so obsessed with the "woman" that she doesn't want to be torn away from observing her for even a moment. The pattern on the paper defies her understanding, as she "think[s] [she] ha[s] mastered it," but "It slaps [her] in the face, knocks [her] down, and tramples on [her]." The wallpaper presents a challenge for her; she has no useful creative or intellectual outlet, so she invests all of her energy in figuring out this mysterious, defiant paper.

The narrator's understanding of the paper and her situation occurs near the end, but this is where Gilman most clearly establishes what we might consider the thesis of her story. The narrator exclaims,

The front pattern does move --- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
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. ...
And she is all the time trying to crawl through. But nobody could climb through that pattern -- it strangles so...

The narrator has "discovered" that a woman or many women are trapped behind the paper, like she is trapped in this room, and like women are trapped in a patriarchal society where men are their husbands and their doctors, where their freedom is taken from them "for their own good." At the end of the story, the narrator rips the paper off the wall in an attempt to free the woman, in an attempt to free herself. She has gone insane, but she also realizes that she and other women are oppressed in her society, so she has gained insight, as well.

From the beginning of her stay at the manor house, the woman expresses her dislike of the wallpaper.

At first, she notices a "sub-pattern" which she describes as "irritating" because the only way anyone could actually notice it was when seen under "certain lights." In this pattern, according to the woman, there was a "provoking," "sort of figure" that she claims to see "skulking about" behind the design.

She also complains that the wallpaper dwells in her mind. She feels as if it traps her when she is on the big bed where she has to rest. Her main complaint is that she finds the pattern "pointless" and that she cannot figure it out. Slowly, her hatred for the wallpaper increases until the point where she reaches a meltdown once her emotional and psychological condition completely takes over her.

Based on this information, we could characterize the woman's reaction as antagonistic toward the wallpaper from the very start, which is ironic considering that the wallpaper is an object and not a person that she could transfer emotion into.

Most importantly, we can also characterize her reaction as "paranoid." This is because she feels threatened and chased by a lurking force that she is not sure about yet. The way she describes that a "figure" is "skulking about" inside the wallpaper denotes that she feels harassed, even persecuted, by something that is visible only in her mind's eye. As such, she feels the threat of not knowing exactly what it is that is chasing her, or how she can protect herself from it. Since we learn, as readers, that she suffers from a mental condition, it is no surprise that paranoia would be one of her reactions.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” based on her own treatment for depression.  The author had been under the care of a well-known physician who used “the rest cure” for nervous disorders. His instructions were explicit: stay at home as much as possible; have only two hours per day of intellectualism; and never write or paint again. After the treatment and writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman sent the noted doctor a copy of this story.  He immediately altered his treatment.

Through her story, Gilman intended to save people from being driven crazy by ill-conceived treatments for mental illnesses, particularly post-partum depression.   In addition, the story serves to examine the restrictive lives of married women in the nineteenth century.  The author points out the inability of many men to comfort and support their wives in crisis. 

In the beginning of the story, the reader immediately learns that the unnamed narrator is a woman who is married to John.  They are leasing a mansion for the summer.

The narrator’s husband is a doctor.  He is supervising her treatment and assures everyone around his wife that she tends toward hysteria.  Obviously, John does not take his wife’s problems seriously.  This simply fact might be enough to send a wife over the edge of sanity.

The treatment prescribed by John is complete bed rest.  He does not   allow her to see the new baby.  He wants her to do nothing.  For a while, she was journaling  but John discouraged her from doing it. She still does write sometimes just  because it is forbidden.

I lie down ever so much now.  John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don’t sleep…I have caught him [John] several times looking at the paper.

When the speaker tells her husband that she is not feeling any better, the doctor tells that she looking much better.

The young woman becomes obsessed with the hideous wallpaper in her bedroom.  Having to stay in her room continuously increases her mania.  The only thing that the narrator has left to do is to speculate about the ugly, irregular wallpaper of the attic room. The wallpaper grows more and more important to the narrator.  She thinks about it constantly as it begins to take on human characteristics.

The narrator begins to distance herself from everyone around her.  She feels as though the wallpaper is the  thing that she understands.  As her obsession with the wallpaper increases, the narrator begins to recognize a woman in the wallpaper. The narrator identifies with the woman trapped in the ugly yellow wallpaper.  As her paranoia continues, she sees the woman elsewhere in the house creeping around.

Finally, the speaker’s connection with reality is completely broken and she becomes the woman in the wallpaper.  Her husband comes in and finds her creeping around the floor following the pattern of the wallpaper.

Extending from the the excellent post above (#1), notice how important it is to differentiate how it is the prescribed treatment, and not necessarily the post-partum by itself, that causes the ultimate breakdown in our unnamed main character.

The unnamed narrator lives in a time and place that does not at all concede her any justice; it is inferred from the story that the available treatments had everything but the well-being of the female patient in mind. As a result, the "cure" was worse than the disease. Ultimately, the poor woman had no choice but to implode at the mounting stressors and limitations that were so cruelly imposed on her, supposedly, seeking for her "well-being".

The narrator focuses on the wallpaper because she suffers after having her baby, and it is the only point of "interest" in the room.  It is also a symbol of her oppression.  She asks her husband to take it down, but he does not care.  He does not see what it is doing to her.

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

 In those days, people did not really understand mental illness.  Also, there was a tendency to treat very badly women who were suffering from it. 

The wallpaper became the release, the chance to go off into a fantasy world.  The narrator is trapped, and her husband has no idea.  He is completely unaware of what is going on in her head, and makes no effort to understand her.

The narrator describes why she hates the wallpaper in some detail. First of all, she mentions its dilapidated state: great patches of it have been stripped off the walls. This is in keeping with the shabby state of the room in general. After this, she criticizes the pattern, specifically remarking that it is "sprawling" and "flamboyant." More specifically, she complains,

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

Unlike a plain color or a geometric pattern, the wallpaper draws in the eye. The narrator is unable to ever regard it simply as background. Unlike a painting, however, it draws one in without purpose or direction. The curves, described in telling phrases, "commit suicide" and "destroy themselves."

The narrator makes all these complaints about the condition and pattern of the wallpaper even before mentioning the color, her final reason for hating it at first sight. Yellow was often associated with sickness and depravity in the nineteenth century (the periodical The Yellow Book played on this connection), and the narrator specifically describes the color as "sickly." The biliousness of the hue is further exacerbated by the fact that it has faded unevenly, veering between orange and sulphur. The narrator refers to the paper as "committing every artistic sin," and her initial indictment of it is very damning on every visual front.

The narrator, who is never directly named, is a wife, a new mother, and is under the care of several people--her doctor (also her husband), sister, and others in the house.  She has been isolated from friends in the country, and isolated from any mental stimulation in order to recover from her post-partum depression (of course, when the story was written, there was no name for this condition).   She does secretly keep a journal...one wonders how differently the story would have ended had she been allowed to get out of the yellow room and engage in conversations, writing, reading, and other intellectual pursuits.  She is bored and restless, and entertains herself with the idea of a prisoner behind the wallpaper, who turns out to be herself as well as a representation of other women in her same situation.  This story is screaming of the position of women in the 19th and early 20th centuries--think "Leave it to Beaver" and "Happy Days" where women stayed at home all day, cleaned house in dresses, heels, and pearls and they made sure that dinner was ready and that they looked great when their tired husbands who worked all day came home.  Women were not considered to be intelligent creatures, nor were they listened to by their doctors when they gave symptoms for which there were no physical evidence.  Post partum depression and other depressions were only part of the reason they considered women to be overly emotional beings.

  The narrator of the story never actually identifies herself, and she is never called by name by any of the other characters in the story.  Her husband only refers to her with condescending terms of endearment like "little girl" or "blessed goose." Some critics believe that Jane might actually be the narrator and that Jane is referred to in third person to show that the narrator feels completely disassociated from herself and reality. 

The narrator is a woman who is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child, and her story is based on the author's own bout with that condition. In the 19th century, doctors did not know about this condition and considered women with the condtion to be hysterical and needing "rest cures."  The problem with this was that the rest cure, for the narrator, was the very thing that drove her crazy, and the wallpaper was a symbol for her feeling of imprisonment. Nobody would take her seriously; they told her not to do any of the things that would have actually made her feel better; kept her in a room with bars on the windows and ugly paper on the wall; away from friends and family; and consigned to do nothing but rest. The wallpaper was the repository of all of her feelings, and gradually she began to deteriorate, finally breaking down altogether. 

Gilman herself recovered from her depression and deeply resented the way she had been treated by doctors while she was suffering. The story is, in part, a cautionary tale for women who listen more to their doctors and men of authority than they do to themselves. 

In the early part of the story, the first-person narrator expresses some concern about certain qualities of the small quarters she is occupying, including the wallpaper. However, she accepts the ugly paper because her stay in the room will be temporary. She has come to the summer house at her husband’s request, because he believes she is ill, and she would prefer a ground-floor room with a garden view. He convinces her to stay in that room because his is next door. The walls’ yellow color seems repulsive and unclean, and it reminds her of illness and a bad smell, with its “sickly sulphur tint.” The patterns in the wallpaper are a different problem than the color; it “is dull enough to confuse the eye” and suggest agitated movement, which makes her uneasy. She even compares the abrupt ends of pattern parts to suicide and self-destruction.

The narrator cannot tune out environmental factors that annoy or disturb her. Soon, she becomes fixated on the patterns, which seem to have dimension rather than being flat. She becomes convinced that the vines are actually are moving and even strangling each other. The yellow background assumes an aura of rot or decay that nauseates her. Further confusion follows, as she begins to see the entire paper as alive, not just the vines. She perceives that the paper coming off the wall because someone is trapped behind it and trying to escape. She must remove the paper to free that creeping woman, whom she finally identifies as herself.

The husband, John, is the epitome of the nineteenth century male attitude that women were fragile beings whose place in life was that of the domestic arena.  He is the one who prescribes the “rest cure” for his wife, which is essentially his way of physically and emotionally imprisoning his wife, who is most likely suffering from post – partum depression.  He sees his wife as little more than a child, calling her a “little girl” and his “blessed little goose.”  He cannot (and does not want to) comprehend that his wife could have a complex psychological condition because women, in John’s mind, are not complex creatures at all.

The narrator feels confined physically and emotionally. The two are related as a result of her husband's behavior: He aims to control her because of his perception of what marriage entails. As a physician, he believes that isolation is helping her. He has the idea that she stay in a separate room, and he selects one that has an adjoining room where he can sleep—and keep an eye on her.

The woman remarks that her husband belittles her opinions: “John laughs at me, of course....” She sees this as a given within marriage. She also admits that she tries to conceal her true feelings from him and aims for self-control in front of him. These self-censorships often spill over into anger, however, which provides her with an emotional release. Although John promotes his theory that she only has a “temporary nervous depression,” she has secretly tried to continue her preferred activities, mainly writing.

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

Again she admits that she continues writing the text we are reading, despite its tiring effect.

[T]here is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

The narrator tries to exert control over the physical environment by changing the appearance of the room, as she hates the wallpaper. Not realizing that her own mind is creating the illusion of movement both on the wallpaper’s surface and behind it, she becomes convinced that a woman is imprisoned on the other side of the paper. She believes that this “faint figure… wanted to get out.” To free this woman—her alter ego—she pulls the paper off the walls. Finally, as she realizes they are one and the same, she exults in the temporary liberation she has achieved.

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there is no evidence that the narrator escapes the room with the yellow wallpaper or her insanity. In fact, the story shows every sign that the narrator goes completely insane by the end. Let’s look at how this works.

The narrator is supposed to be resting on her doctor husband’s orders because of her nervous condition. She is not to work or write or have any stimulation. She is to have fresh air and plenty of rest only. And she is bored stiff. In fact, she is so bored that her imagination kicks into overdrive.

The room the narrator’s husband chooses for the narrator is covered in hideous yellow wallpaper. The narrator has little to do, so she stares for hours at the wallpaper. It seems to move, its patterns shifting. Pretty soon, the narrator senses that there is a woman behind the wallpaper, trapped and trying to get out. The narrator becomes more and more fixated on the woman behind the wallpaper.

In fact, the narrator begins to identify with the woman. She wants to get out and be free. She feels trapped. The narrator’s paranoia grows and grows. She becomes suspicious of everyone. Eventually, she sees the woman creeping outside and around the bedroom.

At the end of the story, the narrator tears off the wallpaper. She creeps around the room, declaring to her husband that she will never go back behind the wallpaper. As her husband looks on in horror and then faints, she creeps over him. The narrator has completely lost her sanity.