Student Question
What specific details and literary elements stand out in the following passage from "The Yellow Wallpaper" and what questions does it raise?
I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. 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 climb through.
Quick answer:
Specific details that stand out and literary devices that invite attention in this passage from “The Yellow Wallpaper” include personification, imagery, and gothic conventions. The passage raises questions about the reliability of the narrator as well as the truthfulness and meaning of the scene.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the female protagonist convalesces in a rustic mansion away from society. As a doctor’s wife and mother of a baby, this unnamed young woman feels trapped and impotent within her marital and maternal roles. Making matters worse is her growing obsession with the yellow wallpaper of the room where she stays. Although airy and large—and supposedly previously used as a nursery, playground, and gymnasium—the room seems like a prison. It has bars on the windows, rings in the walls, and a bed that is nailed to the floor.
Her husband insists that she not leave that room but rest there and see no one. Besides him, only her sister-in-law (her husband’s sister) is allowed to visit her. The isolated woman gradually loses any connection to people and reality.
Instead, the yellow wallpaper becomes her only companion. She studies it all the time, noting any...
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marks, blemishes, patterns, and more. One day, she thinks she spies the figure of a woman in the wallpaper.
I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. 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 climb through.
Significant specific details and literary devices in this passage include personification, imagery, and gothic elements.
First, the wallpaper comes to life by moving. Even scarier is the cause of its movement: the woman crawls around behind, shaking the pattern. Second, the figure is never described in detail but just appears as a shadowy, nebulous image. This single eerie shape then multiples into many women crawling around.
Third, gothic elements create an air of horror in this passage. The narrator discovers this movement at night; the women and their shadows come alive and crawl around like insects in the dark. Without any logical explanation, the wallpaper’s activity has only a supernatural cause. Finally, the popular gothic convention of a damsel in distress becomes apparent; the woman (and women) in the wallpaper are helplessly trapped behind the pattern. The detail that the woman (and women) crawl around quickly conveys urgency, desperation, and subservience.
The passage’s last sentence reveals the narrator’s and the woman/women’s entrapment in traditional gender roles. The figure tries to climb through, break out of, and escape from behind the wallpaper’s pattern. The wallpaper and its room symbolize a prison of domesticity.
The protagonist’s description of this passage raises questions of her reliability as a narrator and the veracity of this scene. Is what she is witnessing the truth or a figment of her crazed imagination? Is she actually sane, which would make this scene (if true) very haunting? Or is she insane (and possibly driven so by her husband), thus rendering this scene a delusion? Is there only one woman or many women crawling around … or actually none? Is the narrator’s vision of a woman (and women) crawling around behind the wallpaper pattern just a projection of her own feelings of entrapment?