What is the narrative style of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and its effect on developing the main character?
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is told from a subjective, first-person point of view. The narrator is keeping a journal account of what is happening to her, written in a conversational style as if she is talking directly to the reader. We know she is writing because she notes:
There...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.
She later states:
I don’t know why I should write this.
The style of the journaling becomes more and more stream-of-consciousness as the story progresses, which has the effect of making us feel more and more that we are inside the head of the narrator, experiencing events as if we were her. This is increasingly disorienting, but it helps us understand how the treatment she is receiving for what appears to be postpartum depression isn't working, and is, in fact, worsening her problems, leading her finally to decompose entirely. By not providing the kind of narrative distance an objective third-person narrator would impose, Gilman insures we are up close to the speaker as she disintegrates. Her character develops for us from the inside out, not from the outside in, because we meet her at the point of her own interiority.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper", how does descriptive language develop the narrator's character?
It is important to remember that this excellent short story is written in the first person point of view. Therefore, the person telling us this story is the unnamed woman who is struggling with depression, and therefore every description that we are given tells us a lot about her character. What is key to me is the way in which the narrator describes the yellow wallpaper in terms that clearly display her own mental instability at the beginning of the story. Consider the following description that we are given:
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 contraditions.
Such descriptions of the lines in this pattern suddenly "committing suicide" clearly cast light on the narrator's character and her mental state. There is surely a parallel between the use of the adjectives "outrageous," "unheard-of" and "lame and uncertain," and the character of the narrator herself, especially when we consider the way that the narrator observes suicidal intent in the way that the lines "plunge off" and "destroy themselves."
This description therefore helps develop the character of the narrator by presenting us with her own mental instability, and suggesting her own despair through the detailed description that she gives us of the yellow wallpaper that oppresses her.