The Yellow Wallpaper

The woman in the wallpaper represents the narrator's repressed self, trapped within the domestic sphere. As the narrator descends into madness, she identifies with this woman, seeing her own desires...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," direct characterization includes the narrator explicitly stating her need for social interaction and her dissatisfaction with her husband's care. Indirect characterization...

The significance of the name "Jane" in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is often interpreted as the narrator's true identity. In the story, the name appears near the end, suggesting a moment of...

By the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator believes she has freed a woman who was trapped within the wallpaper. In a final twist, she declares, "I've got out at last" and "I've pulled off...

John and his wife, the story's narrator, are living in the colonial mansion so that the wife can recover from postpartum depression. All we learn of the history of the house is that it has been empty...

In both the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the play A Doll's House, we have a Victorian-era female protagonist who is trapped in some way. For the narrator of "Yellow Wallpaper," she is...

The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes the smell of the wallpaper as a yellow smell. There's a strange odor pervading the house, and she can't quite put her finger on what it is. But...

When she says "Better in body perhaps," the narrator means that she may be physically healthy but that she does not feel mentally or emotionally healthy. She tries to convince her husband that her...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," descriptive language and narrative style are crucial in developing the narrator's character. Vivid imagery of the wallpaper reflects her growing obsession and mental...

The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is suffering from post-partum depression, which was not recognized at the time. Her husband's lack of attention to this condition and his insistence that she...

According to the story, the woman had been in the country house, and staying up in the "atrocious" nursery, for two weeks now. Her use of the word "atrocious" to describe the room is the first...

To write a response to "The Yellow Wallpaper," consider exploring critical approaches such as feminist theory, which examines the story as a critique of the oppression of women, or psychoanalytic...

Despite the fact that the narrator initially feels that the wallpaper is disgusting and frightening, she eventually comes to feel compassionate toward the woman she believes is trapped behind the...

The narrator has both a husband and a brother who are physicians "of high standing," both of whom believe that she is not really sick, but suffering from "hysterical" tendencies. The two men agree...

Throughout Gilman's short story, there is every indication of the oppressiveness of a patriarchal system influencing the life of the unnamed narrator. She bemoans, I don't like our room a...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" employs several key literary devices, including epistolary style, irony, and an unreliable narrator. The story is presented through Jane's journal entries, showcasing her...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the power imbalance is evident through the husband's dominance over his wife. He dismisses her opinions, controls her treatment, and confines her to a room, which...

The husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” called his wife, the narrator “a blessed little goose” and a “little girl.”  These “terms of endearment” showed how the narrator was treated like a child...

John won't allow the narrator to go visit Cousin Henry and Julia because they are stimulating people liable to cause her undue excitement. John says that he will ask Henry and Julia down for a long...

On the day before the narrator moves out of the country estate, she begins tearing the yellow wallpaper from the walls in an attempt to free the trapped woman behind. At this point in the story,...

In John Steinbeck's novella, Of Mice and Men, an especially lonely character who is made to live in the barn and not with the other ranch hands in the bunkhouse, remarks how a person goes crazy...

The narrator is depressed in "The Yellow Wallpaper" because she has just had a baby. Postnatal depression is very common in women, but in the narrator's time, it was often falsely identified as...

The husband, John, in the "Yellow Wallpaper" doesn't see the seriousness of his wife's deterioration because following along with the beliefs of that time, he thinks its impossible that a woman...

The patient in this story is the narrator, so the perspective we get in this story is clearly biased: we only know what the narrator reports. We learn from the patient, a young female who has...

The narrator is a young woman who suffers from depression and has been prescribed "the rest cure" by her husband. Her husband refuses to acknowledge her illness, and tries to make her well by...

The story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a tale about mental and physical oppression. This oppression comes as a result of a woman's personal struggle with what her peers call "nervous prostration", but...

Syntax refers to sentence structure and word order. Any deviation from a typical sentence structure can give us clues about the speaker's state of mind. Twice in these sentences, the first and the...

By ripping off the yellow wallpaper, the narrator is trying to escape her prison, and the prison shared by other women of her era and social standing. She is locked in a nursery with bars on the...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator's repeated lament of "what can one do?" initially suggests a submissive personality, as she attempts to adhere to the medical advice of her doctor husband....

The image suggests about the wallpaper that it is an intricate design, one of those that can, if you look at it long enough, seem to represent different shapes and figures.  The image suggests...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" was first published in 1892. The narrator is described as having what was in that period called a "nervous disorder" or "mental breakdown" for...

The narrator was afraid of being considered crazy and institutionalized if she told anyone what was happening to her. John didn't think it was important to pay attention to her or listen to her...

The narrator mentions that, in addition to its sickly and grotesque appearance, she hates the wallpaper's smell. She says that she did not really notice it much when the weather was nice and she...

One way in which the narrator is confined is through being forbidden to do anything except "rest."  The narrator is open about this in the exposition of the short story:    My...

Gilman's period and the cultural assumptions about women in the nineteenth century greatly influenced her creating the narrator in the story. She used herself, a woman who suffers from a mental...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," marriage is depicted as a restrictive and controlling institution. The protagonist's husband, John, exercises authoritative control over her, dismissing her opinions and...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator gets tired from looking at the wallpaper because it's incredibly dull. The color is repellent, a kind of unclean yellow. In some places, there's a lurid...

The narrator of the story enjoys writing, and she is willing to disobey her husband and brother—both doctors—in order to engage in this activity. She says, I did write for a while in spite of...

It is significant that the text of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper is available on the website of the U.S. Government National Institutes of Health.  Gilman’s...

Key events and turning points in "The Yellow Wallpaper" include the narrator's initial move to a secluded mansion for her health, her growing obsession with the wallpaper in her room, the climax...

The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story wants to believe in her husband's educated medical opinion. The reader meets John only through his wife's eyes. He seems genuinely concerned with...

The woman's ailment in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is perceived as a temporary nervous depression by her husband and doctors. They dismiss her symptoms and prescribe rest and isolation, which ultimately...

The narrator's mental illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is characterized by severe depression and anxiety, likely exacerbated by postpartum depression, isolation, and the oppressive treatment...

In The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator vicariously mirrors her own feelings and places them on the patterns on the wallpaper that covers the walls of her room. She begins to hallucinate that...

The protagonist's mental breakdown in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is caused by the enforced "rest cure" prescribed by her husband, John, which includes isolation and prohibition of intellectual...

In the end, Gilman's narrator finally submits to the seduction of insanity, symbolically represented by the yellow color (the color of evil in literature) of the wallpaper that the narrator...

The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an unnamed woman suffering from postpartum depression. She prefers to engage in writing and intellectual activities but is prohibited by her husband, who...

I think you are spot on with this idea. There is a definite sense in which the madness or the lunacy of the narrator worsens with the way that her husband and the doctors that are advising him...

The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is depicted as tormented, sluggish, and resilient, reflecting her mental instability and sensitivity. Her journal entries reveal a...

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator's relationship with her husband, John, is marked by patriarchal dominance and lack of understanding. John, a physician, dismisses his wife's mental illness as...