essay of the yellow wallpaper

A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around, since he has forbidden her to write until she is well again, believing it will overexcite her.

Through a series of short instalments, we learn more about the narrator’s situation, and her treatment at the hands of her doctor husband and her sister-in-law.

To summarise the story, then: the narrator and her husband John, a doctor, have come to stay at a large country house. As the story develops, we realise that the woman’s husband has brought her to the house in order to try to cure her of her mental illness (he has told her that repairs are being carried out on their home, which is why they have had to relocate to a mansion).

His solution, or treatment, is effectively to lock her away from everyone – including her own family, except for him – and to forbid her anything that might excite her, such as writing. (She writes her account of what happens to her, and the effect it has on her, in secret, hiding her pen and paper when her husband or his sister come into the room.)

John’s suggested treatment for his wife also extends to relieving her of maternal duties: their baby is taken out of her hands and looked after by John’s sister, Jennie. Jennie also does all of the cooking and housework.

It becomes clear, as the story develops, that depriving the female narrator of anything to occupy her mind is making her mental illness worse, not better.

The narrator confides that she cannot even cry in her husband’s company, or when anyone else is present, because that will be interpreted as a sign that her condition is worsening – and her husband has promised (threatened?) to send her to another doctor, Weir Mitchell, if her condition doesn’t show signs of improving. And according to a female friend who has been treated by him, Weir Mitchell is like her husband and brother ‘only more so’ (i.e. stricter).

The narrator then outlines in detail how she sometimes sits for hours on end in her room, tracing the patterns in the yellow wallpaper. She then tells us she thinks she can see a woman ‘stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.’ At this point, she changes her mind, and goes from being fond of the pattern in the yellow wallpaper to wishing she could go away from the place.

She tells John that she isn’t getting any better in this house and that she would like to leave, but he tells her she is looking healthier and that they cannot return home for another three weeks, until their lease is up and the ‘repairs’ at home have been completed.

Despondent, the narrator tells us how she is becoming more obsessed by the yellow wallpaper, especially at night when she is unable to sleep and so lies awake watching the pattern in the wallpaper, which she says resembles a fungus.

She starts to fear her husband. She becomes paranoid that her husband and sister-in-law, Jennie, are trying to decipher the pattern in the yellow wallpaper, and she becomes determined to beat them to it. (Jennie was actually checking the wallpaper because the thought it was staining their clothes; this is the reason she gives to the narrator when asked about it, anyway. However, the more likely reason is that she and John have noticed the narrator’s obsession with looking at the wallpaper, and are becoming concerned.)

Next, the narrator tells us she has noticed the strange smell of the wallpaper, and tells us she seriously considered burning down the house to try to solve the mystery of what she smell was. She concludes that it is simply ‘a yellow smell!’ We now realise that the narrator is losing her mind rather badly.

She becomes convinced that the ‘woman behind’ the yellow wallpaper is shaking it, thus moving the front pattern of the paper. She says she has seen this woman creeping about the grounds of the house during the day; she returns to behind the wallpaper at night.

The narrator then tells us that she believes John and Jennie have become ‘affected’ by the wallpaper – that they are losing their minds from being exposed to it. So the narrator begins stripping the yellow wallpaper from the walls, much to the consternation of Jennie. John has all of his wife’s things moved out of the room, ready for them to leave the house. While John is out, the narrator locks herself inside the now bare room and throws the key out the window, so she cannot be disturbed.

She has become convinced that there are many creeping women roaming the grounds of the house, all of them originating from behind the yellow wallpaper, and that she is one of them. The story ends with her husband banging on the door to be let in, fetching the key when she tells him it’s down by the front door mat, and bursting into the room – whereupon he faints, at the sight of his wife creeping around the room.

That concludes a summary of the ‘plot’ of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. But what does it all mean?

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ begins by dangling the idea that what we are about to read is a haunted house story, a Gothic tale, a piece of horror. Why else, wonders the story’s female narrator, would the house be available so cheaply unless it was haunted? And why had it remained unoccupied for so long? This is how many haunted house tales begin.

And this will turn out to be true, in many ways – the story is often included in anthologies of horror fiction, and there is a ‘haunting’ of a kind going on in the story – but as ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ develops we realise we’re reading something far more unsettling than a run-of-the-mill haunted house story, because the real ghosts and demons are either inside the narrator’s troubled mind or else her own husband and her sister-in-law.

Of course, these two things are linked. Because one of the ‘morals’ of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – if ‘moral’ is not too strong a word to use of such a story – is that the husband’s treatment of his wife’s mental illness only succeeds in making her worse , rather than better, until her condition reaches the point where she is completely mad, suffering from hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. So ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a haunted house story … but the only ghosts are inside the narrator’s head.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ borrows familiar tropes from a Gothic horror story – it ends with the husband taking an axe to the bedroom door where his cowering wife is imprisoned – but the twist is that, by the end of the story, she has imprisoned herself in her deluded belief that she is protecting her husband from the ‘creeping women’ from behind the wallpaper, and he is prepared to beat down the door with an axe out of genuine concern for his sick wife, rather than to butcher her, in the style of Bluebeard or Jack Torrance.

Narrative Style

As we mentioned at the beginning of this analysis, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around. But it also has the effect of shifting the narrative tense: from the usual past tense to the more unusual present tense.

Only one year separates ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ from George Egerton’s first volume of short stories , which made similarly pioneering use of present-tense narration in order to depict female consciousness.

The literary critic Ruth Robbins has made the argument that the past tense (or ‘perfect tense’) is unsuited to some modes of fiction because it offers the ‘perspective that leads to judgment’: because events have already occurred, we feel in a position to judge the characters involved.

Present-tense narration deters us from doing this so readily, for two reasons. First, we are thrown in amongst the events, experiencing them as they happen almost, so we feel complicit in them. Second, because things are still unfolding seemingly before our very eyes, we feel that to attempt to pass judgment on what’s happening would be too rash and premature: we don’t know for sure how things are going to play out yet.

Given that Gilman is writing about a mentally unstable woman being mistreated by her male husband (and therefore, given his profession, by the medical world too), her decision to plunge us headlong into the events of the story encourages us to listen to what the narrator is telling us before we attempt to pronounce on what’s going on.

The fact that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is narrated in the first person, from the woman’s own perspective and in her own voice, is also a factor: the only access we have to her treatment (or mistreatment) and to her husband’s behaviour and personality is through her: what she tells us and how she tells it to us.

But there is another narrative advantage to this present-tense diary structure: we as readers are forced to appraise everything we are told by the narrator, and scrutinise it carefully, deciding whether we are being told the whole story or whether the narrator, in her nervous and unstable state, may not be seeing things as they really are.

A good example of this is when, having told us at length how she follows the patterns on the yellow wallpaper on the walls of her room, sometimes for hours on end, the narrator then tells us she is glad her baby doesn’t have to live in the same room, because someone as ‘impressionable’ as her child wouldn’t do well in such a room.

The dramatic irony which the narrator cannot see but which we, tragically, can, is that she is every bit as impressionable as a small child, and the yellow wallpaper – and, more broadly, her effective incarceration – is clearly having a deleterious effect on her mental health. (The story isn’t perfect: Gilman telegraphs the irony a little too strongly when, in the next breath, she has her narrator tell us, with misplaced confidence, ‘I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.’)

In the last analysis, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is so unsettling because it plays with established Gothic horror conventions and then subverts them in order to expose the misguided medical practices used in an attempt to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ women who are suffering from mental or nervous disorders. It has become a popular feminist text about the male mistreatment of women partly because the ‘villain’, the narrator’s husband John, is acting out of a genuine (if hubristic) belief that he knows what’s best for her.

The whole field of nineteenth-century patriarchal society and the way it treats women thus comes under scrutiny, in a story that is all the more powerful for refusing to preach, even while it lets one such mistreated woman speak for herself.

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10 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”

I absolutely loved this story. read it a few times in a row when I first crossed paths with it a few years ago –

“The Yellow Wallpaper” remains one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. Excellent analysis!

Fantastic book.

I cringe every time this story appears on a reading list or in a curriculum textbook. It’s almost hysterical in tone and quite disturbing in how overstated the “abuse” of the wife is supposed to be. It’s right up there with “The Awakening” as feminist literature that hinders, instead of promoting, the dilemma of 19th century women.

How is it overstated?

To witness the woman’s unraveling and how ignored she is, to me, a profound statement how people with emotional distress are not treated with respect.

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Terrific analysis. Gothic fiction is always open to many forms of reading and particularly for feminist reading – as openly presented by Angela Carter’ neo-gothic stories (which I would love to read your analyses of one day Oliver!). ‘the Yellow Wallpaper’ I think is the go-to story for most feminist commentators on Gothic fiction – and rightly so. I can’t help notice the connections between this story and the (mis)treatments of Sigmund Freud. Soooo much in this story to think about that I feel like a kiddie in sweet shop!

Thank you as always, Ken, for the thoughtful comment – and I completely agree about the links with Freud. The 1890s really was a pioneering age for psychiatric treatment/analysis, though we cringe at some of the ideas that were seriously considered (and put into practice). Oddly enough I’ve just been rearranging the pile of books on the floor of my study here at IL Towers, and The Bloody Chamber is near the top of my list of books to cover in due course!

I will wait with abated breath for your thoughts! I love Angela Carter :)

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper

Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 28, 2022

First published in New England Magazine in January 1892, and reprinted by Small, Maynard and Company as a chapbook (1899), “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most famous work. Depicting the nervous breakdown of a young wife and mother, the story is a potent example of psychological realism. Based loosely on Gilman’s own experiences in undergoing the rest cure for neurasthenia, the story documents the psychological torment of her fictional first-person narrator.

The narrator’s husband, John, a physician, prescribes isolation and inactivity as treatment for her illness, a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (10). John forbids her to engage in any kind of labor, including writing. Despite his admonitions, however, the narrator records her impressions in a secret diary.

Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

These diary entries compose the text of the story; they reveal the narrator’s emotional descent. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that she is suffering an acute form of postpartum depression, a condition acknowledged neither by John nor by the late-19th-century medical community. So severe is the narrator’s depression that a nursemaid has assumed care of the new baby. Deprived of the freedom to write openly, which she believes would be therapeutic, the narrator gradually shifts her attention to the yellow wallpaper in the attic nursery where she spends her time. The paper both intrigues and repels her; it becomes the medium on which she symbolically inscribes her “text.” Soon she detects a subpattern in the wallpaper that crystallizes into the image of an imprisoned woman attempting to escape. In the penultimate scene, the narrator’s identity merges with that of the entrapped woman, and together they frantically tear the paper from the walls. In an ironic reversal in the final scene, John breaks into the room and, after witnessing the full measure of his wife’s insanity, faints. Significantly, however, he is still blocking his wife, literally and symbolically obstructing her path so that she has to “creep over him every time!” (36).

Critics disagree over the meaning of the story, variously arguing the significance of everything from linguistic cues, to psychoanalytic interpretations, to historiographical readings. While some critics have hailed the narrator as a feminist heroine, others have seen in her a maternal failure coupled with a morbid fear of female sexuality. Some have viewed the story, with its yellow paper, as an exemplar of the silencing of women writers in 19th-century America; others have focused on its gothic elements.

Since the Feminist Press reissued the story in 1973, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has been widely anthologized and is now firmly assimilated in the American literary body of work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-paper. Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1899. Reprint, Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973. Lanser, Susan A. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 415–441. Shumaker, Conrad. “ ‘Too Terribly Good to Be Printed’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ ” American Literature 57, no. 4 (1985): 588–599. Veeder, William. “Who Is Jane? The Intricate Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Arizona Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1988): 40–79.

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General Education

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the story of a young woman’s gradual descent into psychosis. " The Yellow Wallpaper" is often cited as an early feminist work that predates a woman’s right to vote in the United States. The author was involved in first-wave feminism, and her other works questioned the origins of the subjugation of women, particularly in marriage. "

The Yellow Wallpaper" is a widely read work that asks difficult questions about the role of women, particularly regarding their mental health and right to autonomy and self-identity. We’ll go over The Yellow Wallpaper summary, themes and symbols, The Yellow Wallpaper analysis, and some important information about the author.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" Summary

"The Yellow Wallpaper" details the deterioration of a woman's mental health while she is on a "rest cure" on a rented summer country estate with her family. Her obsession with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom marks her descent into psychosis from her depression throughout the story.

The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" begins the story by discussing her move to a beautiful estate for the summer. Her husband, John, is also her doctor , and the move is meant in part to help the narrator overcome her “illness,” which she explains as nervous depression, or nervousness, following the birth of their baby. John’s sister, Jennie, also lives with them and works as their housekeeper.

Though her husband believes she will get better with rest and by not worrying about anything, the narrator has an active imagination and likes to write . He discourages her wonder about the house, and dismisses her interests. She mentions her baby more than once, though there is a nurse that cares for the baby, and the narrator herself is too nervous to provide care.

The narrator and her husband move into a large room that has ugly, yellow wallpaper that the narrator criticizes. She asks her husband if they can change rooms and move downstairs, and he rejects her. The more she stays in the room, the more the narrator’s fascination with the hideous wallpaper grows.

After hosting family for July 4th, the narrator expresses feeling even worse and more exhausted. She struggles to do daily activities, and her mental state is deteriorating. John encourages her to rest more, and the narrator hides her writing from him because he disapproves.

In the time between July 4th and their departure, the narrator is seemingly driven insane by the yellow wallpaper ; she sleeps all day and stays up all night to stare at it, believing that it comes alive, and the patterns change and move. Then, she begins to believe that there is a woman in the wallpaper who alters the patterns and is watching her.

A few weeks before their departure, John stays overnight in town and the narrator wants to sleep in the room by herself so she can stare at the wallpaper uninterrupted. She locks out Jennie and believes that she can see the woman in the wallpaper . John returns and frantically tries to be let in, and the narrator refuses; John is able to enter the room and finds the narrator crawling on the floor. She claims that the woman in the wallpaper has finally exited, and John faints, much to her surprise.

Background on "The Yellow Wallpaper"

The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was a lecturer for social reform, and her beliefs and philosophy play an important part in the creation of "The Yellow Wallpaper," as well as the themes and symbolism in the story. "The Yellow Wallpaper" also influenced later feminist writers.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, known as Charlotte Perkins Stetsman while she was married to her first husband, was born in Hartford, CT in 1860. Young Charlotte was observed as being bright, but her mother wasn’t interested in her education, and Charlotte spent lots of time in the library.

Charlotte married Charles Stetsman in 1884, and her daughter was born in 1885. She suffered from serious postpartum depression after giving birth to their daughter, Katharine. Her battle with postpartum depression and the doctors she dealt with during her illness inspired her to write "The Yellow Wallpaper."

The couple separated in 1888, the year that Perkins Gilman wrote her first book, Art Gems for the Home and Fireside. She later wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1890, while she was in a relationship with Adeline Knapp, and living apart from her legal husband. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published in 1892, and in 1893 she published a book of satirical poetry , In This Our World, which gained her fame.

Eventually, Perkins Gilman got officially divorced from Stetsman, and ended her relationship with Knapp. She married her cousin, Houghton Gilman, and claimed to be satisfied in the marriage .

Perkins Gilman made a living as a lecturer on women’s issues, labor issues, and social reform . She toured Europe and the U.S. as a lecturer, and founded her own magazine, The Forerunner.

Publication

"The Yellow Wallpaper" was first published in January 1892 in New England Magazine.

During Perkins Gilman's lifetime, the role of women in American society was heavily restricted both socially and legally. At the time of its publication, women were still twenty-six years away from gaining the right to vote .

This viewpoint on women as childish and weak meant that they were discouraged from having any control over their lives. Women were encouraged or forced to defer to their husband’s opinions in all aspects of life , including financially, socially, and medically. Writing itself was revolutionary, since it would create a sense of identity, and was thought to be too much for the naturally fragile women.

Women's health was a particularly misunderstood area of medicine, as women were viewed as nervous, hysterical beings, and were discouraged from doing anything to further “upset” them. The prevailing wisdom of the day was that rest would cure hysteria, when in reality the constant boredom and lack of purpose likely worsened depression .

Perkins Gilman used her own experience in her first marriage and postpartum depression as inspiration for The Yellow Wallpaper, and illustrates how a woman’s lack of autonomy is detrimental to her mental health.

Upon its publication, Perkins Gilman sent a copy of "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the doctor who prescribed her the rest cure for her postpartum depression.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" Characters

Though there are only a few characters in the story, they each have an important role. While the story is about the narrator’s mental deterioration, the relationships in her life are essential for understanding why and how she got to this point.

The Narrator

The narrator of the story is a young, upper-middle-class woman. She is imaginative and a natural writer, though she is discouraged from exploring this part of herself. She is a new mother and is thought to have “hysterical tendencies” or suffer from nervousness. Her name may be Jane but it is unclear.

John is the narrator’s husband and her physician. He restricts her activity as a part of her treatment. John is extremely practical, and belittles the narrator's imagination and feelings . He seems to care about her well-being, but believes he knows what is best for her and doesn't allow her input.

Jennie is John’s sister, who works as a housekeeper for the couple. Jennie seems concerned for the narrator, as indicated by her offer to sleep in the yellow wallpapered room with her. Jennie seems content with her domestic role .

Main Themes of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

From what we know about the author of this story and from interpreting the text, there are a few themes that are clear from a "Yellow Wallpaper" analysis. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was a serious piece of literature that addressed themes pertinent to women.

Women's Role in Marriage

Women were expected to be subordinate to their husbands and completely obedient, as well as take on strictly domestic roles inside the home . Upper middle class women, like the narrator, may go for long periods of time without even leaving the home. The story reveals that this arrangement had the effect of committing women to a state of naïveté, dependence, and ignorance.

John assumes he has the right to determine what’s best for his wife, and this authority is never questioned. He belittles her concerns, both concrete and the ones that arise as a result of her depression , and is said so brush her off and “laugh at her” when she speaks through, “this is to be expected in marriage” He doesn’t take her concerns seriously, and makes all the decisions about both of their lives.

As such, she has no say in anything in her life, including her own health, and finds herself unable to even protest.

Perkins Gilman, like many others, clearly disagreed with this state of things, and aimed to show the detrimental effects that came to women as a result of their lack of autonomy.

Identity and Self-Expression

Throughout the story, the narrator is discouraged from doing the things she wants to do and the things that come naturally to her, like writing. On more than one occasion, she hurries to put her journal away because John is approaching .

She also forces herself to act as though she’s happy and satisfied, to give the illusion that she is recovering, which is worse. She wants to be a good wife, according to the way the role is laid out for her, but struggles to conform especially with so little to actually do.

The narrator is forced into silence and submission through the rest cure, and desperately needs an intellectual and emotional outlet . However, she is not granted one and it is clear that this arrangement takes a toll.

The Rest Cure

The rest cure was commonly prescribed during this period of history for women who were “nervous.” Perkins Gilman has strong opinions about the merits of the rest cure , having been prescribed it herself. John’s insistence on the narrator getting “air” constantly, and his insistence that she do nothing that requires mental or physical stimulation is clearly detrimental.

The narrator is also discouraged from doing activities, whether they are domestic- like cleaning or caring for her baby- in addition to things like reading, writing, and exploring the grounds of the house. She is stifled and confined both physically and mentally, which only adds to her condition .

Perkins Gilman damns the rest cure in this story, by showing the detrimental effects on women, and posing that women need mental and physical stimulation to be healthy, and need to be free to make their own decisions over health and their lives.

The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis: Symbols and Symbolism

Symbols are a way for the author to give the story meaning, and provide clues as to the themes and characters. There are two major symbols in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

The Yellow Wallpaper

This is of course the most important symbol in the story. The narrator is immediately fascinated and disgusted by the yellow wallpaper, and her understanding and interpretation fluctuates and intensifies throughout the story.

The narrator, because she doesn’t have anything else to think about or other mental stimulation, turns to the yellow wallpaper as something to analyze and interpret. The pattern eventually comes into focus as bars, and then she sees a woman inside the pattern . This represents feeling trapped.

At the end of the story, the narrator believes that the woman has come out of the wallpaper. This indicates that the narrator has finally merged fully into her psychosis , and become one with the house and domesticated discontent.

Though Jennie doesn’t have a major role in the story, she does present a foil to the narrator. Jennie is John’s sister and their housekeeper, and she is content, or so the narrator believes, to live a domestic life. Though she does often express her appreciation for Jennie’s presence in her home, she is clearly made to feel guilty by Jennie’s ability to run the household unencumbered .

Irony in The Yellow Wallpaper

"The Yellow Wallpaper" makes good use of dramatic and situational irony. Dramatic literary device in which the reader knows or understands things that the characters do not. Situational irony is when the character’s actions are meant to do one thing, but actually do another. Here are a few examples.

For example, when the narrator first enters the room with the yellow wallpaper, she believes it to be a nursery . However, the reader can clearly see that the room could have just as easily been used to contain a mentally unstable person.

The best example of situational irony is the way that John continues to prescribe the rest-cure, which worsens the narrator's state significantly. He encourages her to lie down after meals and sleep more, which causes her to be awake and alert at night, when she has time to sit and evaluate the wallpaper.

The Yellow Wallpaper Summary

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the defining works of feminist literature. Writing about a woman’s health, mental or physical, was considered a radical act at the time that Perkins Gilman wrote this short story. Writing at all about the lives of women was considered at best, frivolous, and at worst dangerous. When you take a look at The Yellow Wallpaper analysis, the story is an important look into the role of women in marriage and society, and it will likely be a mainstay in the feminist literary canon.

What's Next?

Looking for more expert guides on literary classics? Read our guides on The Cask of Amontillado and The Great Gatsby .

Need important and interesting quotes? Check out these 18 To Kill a Mockingbird Quotes and 9 Great Mark Twain Quotes .

For help analyzing literature and writing essays , read our expert guide on imagery , literary elements , and writing an argumentative essay .

Carrie holds a Bachelors in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, and is currently pursuing an MFA. She worked in book publishing for several years, and believes that books can open up new worlds. She loves reading, the outdoors, and learning about new things.

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Analysis of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by C. Perkins Gilman

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Like Kate Chopin's " The Story of an Hour ," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's " The Yellow Wallpaper " is a mainstay of feminist literary study. First published in 1892, the story takes the form of secret journal entries written by a woman who is supposed to be recovering from what her husband, a physician, calls a nervous condition.

This haunting psychological horror story chronicles the narrator's descent into madness, or perhaps into the paranormal, or perhaps—depending on your interpretation—into freedom. The result is a story as chilling as anything by Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King .

Recovery Through Infantilization

The protagonist's husband, John, does not take her illness seriously. Nor does he take her seriously. He prescribes, among other things, a "rest cure," in which she is confined to their summer home, mostly to her bedroom.

The woman is discouraged from doing anything intellectual, even though she believes some "excitement and change" would do her good. She is allowed very little company—certainly not from the "stimulating" people she most wishes to see. Even her writing must happen in secret.

In short, John treats her like a child. He calls her diminutive names like "blessed little goose" and "little girl." He makes all decisions for her and isolates her from the things she cares about.

Even her bedroom is not the one she wanted; instead, it's a room that appears to have once been a nursery, emphasizing her return to infancy. Its "windows are barred for little children," showing again that she is being treated as a child—as well as a prisoner.

John's actions are couched in concern for the woman, a position that she initially seems to believe herself. "He is very careful and loving," she writes in her journal, "and hardly lets me stir without special direction." Her words also sound as if she is merely parroting what she's been told, though phrases like "hardly lets me stir" seem to harbor a veiled complaint.

Fact Versus Fancy

John dismisses anything that hints of emotion or irrationality—what he calls "fancy." For instance, when the narrator says that the wallpaper in her bedroom disturbs her, he informs her that she is letting the wallpaper "get the better of her" and refuses to remove it.

John doesn't simply dismiss things he finds fanciful though; he also uses the charge of "fancy" to dismiss anything he doesn't like. In other words, if he doesn't want to accept something, he simply declares that it is irrational.

When the narrator tries to have a "reasonable talk" with him about her situation, she is so distraught that she is reduced to tears. Instead of interpreting her tears as evidence of her suffering, he takes them as evidence that she is irrational and can't be trusted to make decisions for herself.

As part of his infantilization of her, he speaks to her as if she is a whimsical child, imagining her own illness. "Bless her little heart!" he says. "She shall be as sick as she pleases!" He does not want to acknowledge that her problems are real, so he silences her.

The only way the narrator could appear rational to John would be to become satisfied with her situation, which means there is no way for her to express concerns or ask for changes.

In her journal, the narrator writes:

"John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him."

John can't imagine anything outside his own judgment. So when he determines that the narrator's life is satisfactory, he imagines that the fault lies with her perception. It never occurs to him that her situation might really need improvement.

The Wallpaper

The nursery walls are covered in putrid yellow wallpaper with a confused, eerie pattern. The narrator is horrified by it.

She studies the incomprehensible pattern in the wallpaper, determined to make sense of it. But rather than making sense of it, she begins to identify a second pattern—that of a woman creeping furtively behind the first pattern, which acts as a prison for her.

The first pattern of the wallpaper can be seen as the societal expectations that hold women, like the narrator, captive. Her recovery will be measured by how cheerfully she resumes her domestic duties as wife and mother, and her desire to do anything else—like write—is something that would interfere with that recovery.

Though the narrator studies and studies the pattern in the wallpaper, it never makes any sense to her. Similarly, no matter how hard she tries to recover, the terms of her recovery—embracing her domestic role—never make sense to her, either.

The creeping woman can represent both victimization by the societal norms and resistance to them.

This creeping woman also gives a clue about why the first pattern is so troubling and ugly. It seems to be peppered with distorted heads with bulging eyes—the heads of other creeping women who were strangled by the pattern when they tried to escape it. That is, women who couldn't survive when they tried to resist cultural norms. Gilman writes that "nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so."

Becoming a Creeping Woman

Eventually, the narrator becomes a creeping woman herself. The first indication is when she says, rather startlingly, "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight." Later, the narrator and the creeping woman work together to pull off the wallpaper.

The narrator also writes, "[T]here are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast," implying that the narrator is only one of many.

That her shoulder "just fits" into the groove on the wall is sometimes interpreted to mean that she has been the one ripping the paper and creeping around the room all along. But it could also be interpreted as an assertion that her situation is no different from that of many other women. In this interpretation, "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes not just a story about one woman's madness, but a maddening system.

At one point, the narrator observes the creeping women from her window and asks, "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?"

Her coming out of the wallpaper—her freedom—coincides with a descent into mad behavior: ripping off the paper, locking herself in her room, even biting the immovable bed. That is, her freedom comes when she finally reveals her beliefs and behavior to those around her and stops hiding.

The final scene—in which John faints and the narrator continues to creep around the room, stepping over him every time—is disturbing but also triumphant. Now John is the one who is weak and sickly, and the narrator is the one who finally gets to determine the rules of her own existence. She is finally convinced that he only "pretended to be loving and kind." After being consistently infantilized by his comments, she turns the tables on him by addressing him condescendingly, if only in her mind, as "young man."

John refused to remove the wallpaper, and in the end, the narrator used it as her escape.

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The Yellow Wallpaper: a Literary Exploration of Mental Health

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Critical Analysis

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892 in the New England Magazine, was later included in a collection of Gilman’s works called In This Our World in 1893.

Introduction: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Table of Contents

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892 in the New England Magazine , was later included in a collection of Gilman’s works called In This Our World in 1893. The story features a narrator who is struggling with what her husband believes is a nervous disorder, and he has taken her to a rented summer home where she is forbidden from working or stimulating herself in any way. The narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room, which she despises, and begins to see a woman trapped inside its pattern. The story is a powerful critique of the patriarchal medical profession and the oppression of women during the late 19th century. Its features include a first-person narrative, symbolism, and a sense of claustrophobia and desperation that builds towards a tragic conclusion.

Main Events in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Introduction to the Setting and Characters
The narrator, along with her husband John, secure a colonial mansion for the summer.
John, a physician, dismisses the narrator’s illness as mere nervous depression.
Description of the Mansion
The mansion is isolated, with a beautiful but eerie garden, and has been empty for years.
The narrator senses something strange about the house.
Initial Observations and Discomfort
The narrator expresses dislike for their room, especially the ghastly yellow wallpaper.
She feels trapped by John’s control over her schedule and activities.
Analysis of the Wallpaper
The wallpaper is described as revolting, with a pattern that changes in the light.
The narrator starts to see a woman trapped behind the pattern and becomes fixated on it.
Deterioration of the Narrator’s Mental State
The narrator’s mental state deteriorates as she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper.
She feels increasingly isolated and begins to distrust John and the housekeeper, Jennie.
Attempts to Confront John
The narrator tries to communicate her distress to John, but he dismisses her concerns.
She becomes fearful of John and suspects he may be affected by the wallpaper as well.
Discovery and Liberation
The narrator discovers a woman creeping behind the wallpaper and believes she must free her.
She peels off the wallpaper in a fit of liberation and decides to confront John.
Climax and Resolution
The narrator locks herself in the room, determined to confront John when he returns.
She feels triumphant in her act of defiance and eagerly awaits John’s reaction.

Literary Devices in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Characterization in “the yellow wallpaper” by charlotte perkins gilman, major characters.

The Narrator: An unnamed woman with a rich inner life and intellectual curiosity. She suffers from what her physician husband John diagnoses as “temporary nervous depression” or “a slight hysterical tendency.” John dismisses her concerns about her mental health and the unsettling effect of the yellow wallpaper, which she feels is contributing to her condition. Confined to the upstairs nursery for a supposed “rest cure,” the narrator becomes increasingly frustrated and isolated. With limited outlets for her thoughts and feelings, the yellow wallpaper becomes an all-consuming obsession.
John: The narrator’s husband and a physician. John dismisses his wife’s concerns about her health and the unsettling effect of the wallpaper. He believes he is taking the best course of action by enforcing “rest” and disregarding her anxieties. John’s controlling and dismissive behavior contributes to the narrator’s mental decline.

Minor Characters

John’s Brother: Another physician who readily agrees with John’s diagnosis of the narrator’s condition, demonstrating the limitations of the medical field at the time.
Mary: The baby’s caretaker. The narrator seems to find comfort and trust in Mary’s kindness and competence.
Baby: The narrator and John’s child. The narrator expresses relief that the baby does not have to occupy the room with the yellow wallpaper.
Mother & Nellie: John’s mother and sister who visit the narrator for a week. Their presence likely restricts the narrator’s freedom and reinforces John’s control.
Jennie: The maid who helps take care of the narrator. The narrator becomes suspicious of Jennie’s behavior in relation to the wallpaper, hinting at the narrator’s growing paranoia.
Cousin Henry & Julia: The narrator’s relatives whom she expresses a desire to visit. John discourages this visit, further isolating the narrator and suggesting his desire to maintain complete control over her.

Major Themes in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Suffocating Effects of Patriarchy : The story critiques the limitations placed on women in 19th-century society. The narrator’s unnamed state reflects her lack of agency. John, her husband and physician, dismisses her concerns about her health and confines her to a room with the justification of a “rest cure,” a common but harmful treatment for women’s “nervous conditions” at the time. This enforced idleness fuels her descent into madness, highlighting the societal expectation for women to be passive and submissive.
Confinement and the Loss of Self: The yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol of the narrator’s entrapment. Initially, she describes it as “gross, uneven paper” with “odor of stale dead wood” (emphasis added). As her mental state deteriorates, the wallpaper takes on a life of its own, with its “repellent” yellow color and strange pattern seeming to crawl and pulsate. The narrator’s obsession with peeling back the layers of the wallpaper reflects her desperate attempt to break free from her confined existence.
The Power of Imagination and Perception: The story explores the blurring lines between reality and perception. John dismisses the narrator’s anxieties about the wallpaper as mere “fancy,” but the reader experiences the story through her increasingly unreliable narration. As the lines between reality and delusion blur, the wallpaper transforms into a monstrous entity that the narrator feels compelled to liberate. This raises questions about the validity of female experience and the power of a stifled imagination to manifest as madness.
The Thin Line Between Sanity and Madness: The story explores the descent into madness through the narrator’s journal entries. Initially, she expresses frustration with her situation and a longing for intellectual stimulation. Over time, her entries become fragmented and cryptic, reflecting her deteriorating mental state. The ending, where the narrator believes she has freed a woman trapped behind the wallpaper, leaves the reader questioning whether she has achieved liberation or succumbed entirely to madness.

Writing Style in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Introspective Narrative Voice:
Example: “I am sitting here at the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.”
Fragmented Prose Reflecting Mental State:
Example: “The front pattern does move, and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”
Vivid and Descriptive Language:
Example: “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
Symbolism and Allegory:
Example: The wallpaper itself symbolizes the oppressive societal constraints placed upon women during the 19th century, while the protagonist’s obsession with it serves as an allegory for her own mental imprisonment.
Exploration of Gender Roles:
Example: The protagonist’s confinement to the nursery and her husband’s dismissal of her desires to write reflect the restrictive gender roles of the time, highlighting the lack of autonomy afforded to women.
Representation of Mental Illness:
Example: The protagonist’s gradual descent into psychosis, as evidenced by her fixation on the wallpaper and eventual hallucinations, provides a poignant portrayal of mental illness and its impact on individuals.
Engagement with Themes of Autonomy:
Example: The protagonist’s struggle to assert her own agency and autonomy in the face of her husband’s control and societal expectations underscores the theme of personal liberation.

Literary Theories and Interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Topics, questions, and thesis statements about “the yellow wallpaper” by charlotte perkins gilman, short questions/answers about/on “the yellow wallpaper” by charlotte perkins gilman.

Who is the real prisoner in the story, and why?
While the narrator is physically confined to the upstairs room, the story argues that John, her husband, is the one truly imprisoned. John clings to outdated medical practices and societal expectations, limiting his own intellectual and emotional growth. The narrator, on the other hand, embraces a more fluid and imaginative reality at the story’s end, even if it appears to be madness.
(Reference: John enforces the “rest cure” despite the narrator’s objections. The narrator, by the end, seems to find a strange liberation in her delusion.)
Does the yellow wallpaper actually have a hidden pattern, or is it a figment of the narrator’s imagination?
The story cleverly leaves this ambiguous. The narrator initially describes the wallpaper as having a “tortuous effect on the eye” but later becomes fixated on a hidden pattern that seems to creep and crawl. John dismisses it as her imagination. The lack of a definitive answer allows the reader to explore themes of perception, sanity, and the limitations of relying solely on a patriarchal viewpoint.
(Reference: The narrator describes the wallpaper as “un-patterned” but later becomes convinced of a hidden pattern.)
Is the ending a victory or a descent into madness?
The narrator’s triumphant declaration of finally freeing a woman trapped behind the wallpaper can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, it suggests a complete break from reality. However, it can also be seen as a symbolic victory. The narrator, by embracing her unconventional perspective, finds a way to challenge the oppressive forces represented by the yellow wallpaper and John’s controlling behavior.
(Reference: The ending has the narrator creeping around the room, believing she has freed a woman trapped behind the wallpaper.)

Literary Works Similar to “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“ The Tell-Tale Heart ” by Edgar Allan Poe – Like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” this short story delves into the psyche of its unreliable narrator, exploring themes of madness and obsession.
“ The Lottery ” by Shirley Jackson – While not directly addressing mental health, “The Lottery” similarly examines the oppressive nature of societal norms and the consequences of blindly adhering to tradition.
“ The Metamorphosis ” by Franz Kafka – This novella, like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” explores themes of alienation and the individual’s struggle against oppressive forces, albeit through a different lens of existentialism.
“ A Rose for Emily ” by William Faulkner – Faulkner’s story, much like Gilman’s, delves into the psychological complexities of its protagonist, exploring themes of isolation, decay, and the impact of societal expectations.
“ The Birthmark ” by Nathaniel Hawthorne – This short story, while focusing more on science and the pursuit of perfection, shares themes of obsession and the consequences of trying to control nature, similar to the themes found in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Representative Quotations from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte perkins gilman, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Mental Illness and its Treatment

Reading the series of diary entries that make up the story, the reader is in a privileged position to witness the narrator’s evolving and accelerating descent into madness, foreshadowed by her mounting paranoia and obsession with the mysterious figure behind the pattern of the yellow wallpaper.

As the portrayal of a woman’s gradual mental breakdown, The Yellow Wallpaper offers the reader a window into the perception and treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth…

Gender Roles and Domestic Life

Alongside its exploration of mental illness, The Yellow Wallpaper offers a critique of traditional gender roles as they were defined during the late nineteenth century, the time in which the story is set and was written. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist, who rejected the trappings of traditional domestic life and published extensively about the role of women in society, and saw the gender roles of the time as horribly stifling.

The story’s family…

Gender Roles and Domestic Life Theme Icon

Outward Appearance vs. Inner Life

Another major theme in the story lies in the contradiction between outward appearance and inner life.

The story’s form, in a series of diary entries, gives the reader a glimpse into its writer’s inner life. This, in turn, allows us to watch as the narrator’s husband misinterprets her condition, and as she begins to consciously deceive both him and Jennie . Our privileged view into the narrator’s mind leads to an appreciation of the sarcasm …

Outward Appearance vs. Inner Life Theme Icon

Self-Expression, Miscommunication, and Misunderstanding

Alongside questions of gender and mental illness in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the simple story of a woman who is unable fully to express herself, or to find someone who will listen.

The narrator’s sense that the act of writing, which she has been forbidden to do, is exactly what she needs to feel better suggests this stifled self-expression. Since she is unable to communicate with her husband, this diary becomes a secret outlet for…

Self-Expression, Miscommunication, and Misunderstanding Theme Icon

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Realism and the Weird in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story We Used to Tell”

a painting of a woman in a yellow-tinged room standing in a corner with a small book in her hands

Two women staying in grand country houses lose their grip on reality as they attempt to cope with the unexplainable. Their breakdowns are each closely tied to a piece of art that is more than it seems—in one case, hideously tinted sheets of wallpaper; in the other, a malevolent picture. Yet Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a feminist classic typically read as a depiction of postpartum depression compounded by the casual mental violence of misogyny, and Shirley Jackson’s “The Story We Used to Tell” (first published posthumously in the collection Just an Ordinary Day in 1996) is counted as another piece of genre work in Jackson’s remarkable horror oeuvre.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently misguided about either interpretation. “The Yellow Wallpaper” certainly contains more than enough subtext—and just plain text—to support a rational explanation for the unnamed narrator’s descent into madness, and Katharine and her friend Y in Jackson’s tale are without a doubt drawn into the mysterious picture in the old wing by supernatural means. Some of the frisson that binds these two eerie tales together is lost, however, when genre boundaries deem one realistic and the other fantastical. When read together, Perkins Gilman’s tale reveals the realism peeking behind the frame of “The Story We Used to Tell,” and Jackson’s short story illuminates the otherworldly horror plaguing the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

A helpful tool for seeing these two works as part of a shared spectrum is the literary mode of the weird. Lacking allegiance to any one genre (although it’s often associated with horror and science fiction), the weird is instead a way of looking at our environments—or, more accurately, human attempts to interpret those environments. In “Toward a Theory of the New Weird,” Elvia Wilk explains that the weird can be defined as “the thing that literally exists but nonetheless resists linguistic description or cognitive explanation…dismantl[ing] the very tools of signification and representation that fiction depends on.” The weird also strips down the differences between the literal and the metaphorical, allowing weird narratives to function “on a very concrete level” that makes room for the absurd and unexplainable without any pretensions towards understanding.

As a story preoccupied with the breakdown of language and structures of meaning, “The Yellow Wallpaper” may be the perfect example of the weird’s power to refocus analysis of mainstream classics. The narrator begins a secret journal, because “dead paper” is “a great relief to [her] mind.” She’s desperate for any sort of confidante, trapped in an isolated country house after the birth of her child, with only her husband and sister-in-law for company. They refuse to grapple with her rising paranoia regarding the figures she sees in the “repellent” paper plastering her room.

The journal begins coherently, with the narrator referring frequently to her husband’s rational explanations for her depression and exhaustion. But as it goes on, she turns increasingly inward, rejecting his patronizing explanations and insisting that “[t]here are things in that paper that nobody knows but me,” one of which is “a woman stooping down and creeping about.” By the conclusion of the story, the narrator has given herself in completely to the lure of the wallpaper, ripping down yards of it and crawling on the floor like the woman she’s haunted by. “I’ve got out at last,” she cries to her horrified husband, “you can’t put me back.” The lines of communication that bound them at first have been fractured completely: he is trapped in his own world of masculine empiricism just as she has disappeared into the one beyond the wallpaper.

The standard reading for “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to interpret all of these events metaphorically. The wallpaper is a last-ditch escape for a woman reeling from postpartum depression and the mind-warping boredom of the “rest cure” (which Perkins Gilman herself endured after the birth of her daughter), and the woman in the wallpaper is the narrator’s suppressed rage, finally bursting out in florid madness. Still, there is something disquieting about the story, a lingering unease that can’t be explained away. Perhaps it is the malignity of the wallpaper itself, made up of “outrageous angles” that “destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

This description of alien geometries incomprehensible to the human eye predates the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft but feels very Lovecraftian in its insistence on the unknowability of evil (incidentally, Lovecraft thought so too, categorizing “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a tale of “cosmic fear” in his landmark essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”). Attempts to chalk all of this eeriness up to manifestations of post-partum psychosis have never satisfied me, as a reader or a critic. Neatly dismissing strangeness with a diagnosis seems a disservice, not only to Perkins Gilman’s formidable grasp of the ghost story, but also to the complexities of human experience. Why, I find myself thinking, does it all have to be so explainable ?

With the weird, it doesn’t. Taking its primary dictum—that many things lie outside of human comprehension—it’s possible to take the events of “The Yellow Wallpaper” at face value, seeing the narrator’s encounters with the woman in the wall as just as possible as a psychological break. It also raises the question of whether the rationality we gain by superimposing a medical prognosis over her experience is desirable. By diagnosing her, are readers demanding the same rationality and easy answers the narrator’s husband demands at the price of her mind and soul? In the end, this question seems to me to be the strongest argument for reading the short story as a weird tale. Challenging standard interpretations restores its essential unknowableness, the element that continues to bring me back to “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

If the weird, then, is most concerned with pushing the needle beyond what is expected and comprehensible, it is also possible to use this mode as a way to access the queasily familiar emotions lingering in “The Story We Used to Tell.” In many ways a narrative and thematic twin to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it is also much more overtly fantastical. Narrator Katharine is visiting her newly widowed friend, Y, in Y’s husband’s family mansion. There is an old painting of the house in Y’s room that, like Perkins Gilman’s wallpaper, is imbued with a sort of reality-bending power, “with the windows of this very room shinning faintly through the trees, and the steep winding road coming…down to the very edge of the picture.” The women joke about the creepiness of the picture, and shortly afterwards Y disappears.

When she sees an old woman “hanging on the inside of the glass of the picture, gibbering,” Katharine follows her into the picture and becomes trapped along with Y, at the mercy of “some malevolence of the old house” embodied by the ghost of Y’s grandfather-in-law and the old woman he has already driven to insanity. Knowing they can never escape, Katharine and Y murder the couple, hang their bodies in the woods behind the house, and become siren-like figures, calling others into the picture with them.

“The Story We Used to Tell” is unquestionably weird, not only in its main conceit (a ghostly picture never explained by any internal logic), but, on a deeper level, in its depiction of Katharine and Y’s reactions to the situations they find themselves contending with. Returning to the idea of the weird as a vessel for the unfathomable, it’s worth asking what is more inexplicable in a horror short story: that mysterious and terrifying forces exist, or that, knowing they exist, human beings are still convinced that their feelings and beliefs are paramount, ignoring evidence that the natural order does not care for them at all?

When John, Y’s lawyer, suggests that Y may have taken her life because of grief, Katharine is adamant that that is something her friend would never do: “she was going to sell this house…try to start life over again.” Jackson never conclusively comments on Y’s mental state before her disappearance, emphasizing Katharine’s insistence on her convictions in the face of what may be reasonable evidence. It’s a more sympathetic precursor to her and Y’s decision at the end of the short story to call John into the picture with them, letting their feelings of loneliness or predation govern their actions, despite clear knowledge of what the consequences of those actions will be. By the end of the tale, he “runs constantly about the house, screaming and beating the walls,” as unhinged as the grandfather’s first victim.

While the emotions driving Katharine and Y are as crucial to the plot as in any work of psychological realism, reading Jackson’s story weirdly reveals the nihilism and cruelty that emerge when human emotions do not have the central importance we are used to ascribing to them. In fact, these feelings are inconsequential at best and destructive at worst, and wholly insignificant in the face of unknowable evil. “The Story We Used to Tell” calls into question the universality of human feeling, just as a weird reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” disputes the value of rationalism.

Seeing both tales as manifestations of the weird presents a final paradox. If neither rationality nor emotions are reliable ways to interpret human experience, what analytical framework does that leave us with? This is a question without answer, of course—a fitting enigma for a literary mode that draws no conclusions, regardless of whether those conclusions have to do with genre, style, or human existence itself. What it does provide is a creatively provocative way of considering the books we read and the world we live in. That will have to be answer enough.

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The Intricate Design of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell

This essay about Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” explores the nine circles of Hell, each representing a different sin and its corresponding punishment. The essay examines the moral and ethical implications of these circles, from the virtuous pagans in Limbo to the traitors encased in ice in Cocytus. Each circle’s unique punishment reflects the nature of the sin it represents, such as the lustful being buffeted by a storm and the gluttonous wallowing in vile slush. The intricate design of Hell underscores medieval beliefs about sin and divine justice, offering a profound commentary on the consequences of human actions and the importance of faith and morality.

How it works

The first section of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem “The Divine Comedy,” “Inferno,” explores the journey of the human soul through the regions of the afterlife and is a timeless masterpiece. The “Inferno” presents a terrifying picture of Hell, divided into nine separate circles, each of which stands for a unique sin and its associated punishment. This elaborate design offers a profound investigation of moral and ethical concepts that endure throughout time, in addition to reflecting the medieval worldview.

The first circle, Limbo, houses the virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants.

These souls are not subjected to active torment but are condemned to an eternity of longing, forever separated from the divine presence. This circle highlights the importance Dante places on faith and the consequences of its absence, even for those who led morally exemplary lives.

In the second circle, lustful souls are buffeted by an eternal storm, symbolizing the chaotic and uncontrolled nature of their earthly desires. The tempest represents the power of carnal passion to sweep individuals away from reason and virtue, illustrating the medieval belief in the necessity of controlling one’s base instincts.

The third circle, reserved for the gluttonous, features souls wallowing in a vile slush produced by ceaseless, icy rain. This punishment reflects the degradation and excess associated with gluttony, emphasizing the corrupting nature of overindulgence and the physical and spiritual squalor it produces.

In the fourth circle, the avaricious and the prodigal are condemned to an eternity of rolling heavy weights against one another. Their endless toil represents the futility and conflict inherent in the pursuit of wealth and material goods, a sharp critique of the pervasive greed in society.

The fifth circle, the River Styx, is home to the wrathful and the sullen. The wrathful fight each other on the surface, while the sullen lie submerged beneath the water, stewing in their silent anger. This dual punishment underscores the destructive nature of both explosive rage and repressed resentment, illustrating how both forms of anger corrode the soul.

Heresy is punished in the sixth circle, where heretics are trapped in flaming tombs. This vivid imagery conveys the idea that those who reject established religious doctrines are spiritually dead, their fiery graves a stark reminder of the consequences of straying from the path of righteousness.

The seventh circle is divided into three rings to accommodate different forms of violence: against others, against oneself, and against God and nature. The violent against others are submerged in a river of boiling blood, the suicides are transformed into gnarled trees, and the blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers suffer on a desolate, burning plain. These varied punishments reflect the multifaceted nature of violence and its profound impact on both the victim and the perpetrator.

Fraud, a sin Dante viewed with particular disdain, occupies the eighth circle, Malebolge. Here, various types of deceivers suffer in ten bolgias or ditches, each tailored to their specific crime. From seducers whipped by demons to hypocrites weighed down by gilded leaden cloaks, the punishments in Malebolge are intricate and fittingly ironic, highlighting the pervasive and insidious nature of deceit.

The ninth and final circle, Cocytus, is reserved for traitors. These souls are encased in ice, their varying positions and degrees of submersion reflecting the severity of their betrayal. At the center lies Lucifer, eternally chewing on the worst traitors: Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. The icy environment symbolizes the cold, calculating nature of treachery, and Lucifer’s presence serves as a chilling reminder of the ultimate consequence of betrayal against God and humanity.

Dante’s “Inferno” is more than a poetic journey through Hell; it is a complex moral and philosophical treatise on the nature of sin and its repercussions. Each circle and punishment is meticulously crafted to reflect the underlying principles of divine justice, offering readers a chance to contemplate their own moral compass. Through its vivid imagery and allegorical depth, “Inferno” continues to captivate and challenge readers, inviting them to reflect on the nature of sin, justice, and redemption in their own lives.

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Young, Restless and Fired Up in the Cool Gray City of Love

Francine Prose’s new memoir, “1974,” looks back at her brief but transformative relationship with a countercultural champion.

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A black-and-white photograph of a young woman seated on a sofa. She has long, dark, wavy hair and is wearing a choker necklace.

By Dwight Garner

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1974: A Personal History , by Francine Prose

Francine Prose married young, in her final semester at Radcliffe. The match was imperfect, and she and her husband both suffered. The cultural winds blew against them. The great music emerging from the car stereo was zero help. “The music we loved had come to seem like a reproach, a reminder: Someone is in love, but it isn’t you, and you will never feel like that again,” Prose writes in her new memoir, “1974: A Personal History.”

Monogamy, she adds, “seemed embarrassing, hopelessly square and old-fashioned. The culture encouraged, expected and all but insisted upon erotic restlessness. Sex was free; sex was everywhere, a source of wonder, pleasure and heat without the chilling effect of familiarity and repetition.”

Within three years she was divorced. By 1974, when she was 26, she was spending more time in San Francisco and less time in Cambridge, where she had been in graduate school. Out west, she felt unfettered and alive (she was a Joni Mitchell fan). She lived with a bohemian older couple. They all existed on good coffee and “avocado sandwiches on San Francisco sourdough bread with mayo, black pepper and alfalfa sprouts.”

That year, at a poker game in the apartment, she met Tony Russo . Along with Daniel Ellsberg, Russo leaked the Pentagon Papers, which laid bare America’s perfidy in Vietnam. Published in The New York Times in 1971, the papers, in Prose’s summary, “confirmed what the antiwar movement had never been able to prove: Our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes.”

Russo was a countercultural and free-speech hero. He had spent 47 days in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg. He worked for NASA and later the RAND Corporation, where he was involved in a study of how Vietcong prisoners were interrogated, and some of their stories moved him deeply. By the time Prose met him, he was paranoid and unemployed. “An aura of unease surrounded him,” Prose writes, “the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose.”

Russo was charismatic, though, a Virginia-born charmer with a Southern accent. Prose had a thing for bad boys. Here was antiwar royalty. He was 10 years older. Before long they were riding around in his old, putty-colored Buick and talking all night, while he chain-smoked Camels.

Was it a love affair? Not quite. The sex was minimal and awkward. But there was something between them, if briefly, and that something is among the primary subjects of this memoir, which despite its darts of insight and many flashes of good writing remains lukewarm and distant. They didn’t know each other that well. Prose nonetheless hangs a great deal of her memoir on Russo and rehashes the well-known issues surrounding the Pentagon Papers themselves. Russo explains his past in long monologues.

There is more here. Prose is at work figuring out who she was in 1974, before she returned home to New York the following year. She writes, perceptively, “One danger of writing about yourself is that you may learn things about yourself that you don’t want to know.”

On the one hand, Prose was on the run from a borderline breakdown she’d had in Cambridge. She’d become an agoraphobe, unable to leave her apartment. She was fragile. Even thunderstorms threatened her sanity. She spent a lot of time consulting the I Ching. “I had absolutely no idea where I belonged in the universe or what I was going to do,” she writes. In her flight west she resembled a latter-day Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who moved to Pasadena from New England to recover from the postpartum depression she described in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).

On the other hand, Prose seems to have been one of the great overachievers of her era. She had a coddled upbringing. Both her parents were doctors. By 1974 she had published two well-received novels and was at work on her third. She had done a good deal of foreign travel and spent time writing in an apartment in Bombay with a view of the Arabian Sea. She had many far-flung friends she could drop in on.

Prose catastrophized good news. Here is her reaction when a publisher called to say that he wanted to publish her first novel:

First I didn’t understand what he was saying; then I didn’t believe it. I leaned against a wall and grabbed the back of a chair. I saw myself falling. I saw broken limbs. I saw crutches, I saw punishment for good fortune beyond anything I deserved.

I wonder how she reacted when her novel “Blue Angel” (2000) was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

If this quarter-life crisis memoir were a stool, the third leg — after Russo’s story and Prose’s own — would be the author’s attempt at a group portrait of her generation, not the baby boomers writ large but a sophisticated subset of them. This material is the least successful. A good deal of tired cultural and political history is given another airing, in the box-ticking manner of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” There are many sentences on the order of “we were very young and very fired up” and “we believed that love was the strongest emotion.”

There are just enough memorable set pieces to keep the reader going. In one of them, Prose runs into the Cockettes, the gender-bending theater troupe, in a San Francisco grocery store. Here were “a half-dozen drag queens, in full beards, feather boas, chest hair and satin gowns,” she writes. “They skittered like butterflies, only louder, maximizing the drama of stuffing family-sized bags of candy corn into their shopping baskets.”

She continues: “Whoever these marvelous creatures were, they were not like anyone in the Harvard English department. I felt dazzled, like Dorothy leaving black-and-white Kansas for a world redecorated in the rainbow pastels of a children’s breakfast cereal.”

The cool gray city of love could always, in a moment, brighten up.

1974 : A Personal History | By Francine Prose | Harper | 257 pp. | $27.99

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

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Feminist Perspective on “The Yellow Wallpaper” Essay

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Feminist critique of the yellow wallpaper, works cited.

The short play, The Yellow Wallpaper , by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is based on the lives of a chauvinistic husband and a sick wife. The over-dominating nature of the husband called John makes the environment unbearable for the mentally ill wife Jane. The wife is involuntarily imprisoned by the chauvinistic nature of her husband who would not listen to any of her suggestions. Moreover, John is quick at relating any of her ‘weak ‘ideas to mental illness. This paper presents a critique of the play The Yellow Wallpaper from a feminist perspective by applying symbolism to understand the 1800s society.

Detained in a mental prison as a result of the machination of her husband, the main protagonist Jane is deeply embodied in an unending struggle that women seeking freedom in their thoughts and actions face. The short play The Yellow Wallpaper is written figuratively to connote the gender struggle between men and women, especially in the institution of marriage. Although an open interpretation would denote a psychological thriller, it is apparent that the play was mainly a commentary on the unfortunate conditions of the women population in the 1800s. Especially, it captures the views of the author of how the then patriarchal society was hurting female freedom. For instance, the character of Jane’s chauvinist husband connotes an over-controlling person who cares very little about the thoughts of his wife. He proceeds to confine Jane in an oppressive environment against her will and would not listen to any of her suggestions (Schroder 39). In the conversations, John’s decision is final and cannot be debated by Jane. Although the wife has attempted on several occasions to confront John to change his stand, the conversations often end with the husband reaffirming an antagonist stand (Schroder 41). From a feminist perspective, John’s dominance in the conversations and decision-making on behalf of Jane is representational of female imprisonment and control by men against their will.

From the interaction between John and Jane, the husband is a typical illustration of a spouse who has mastered the art of absolute control. Specifically, he treats Jane as an inferior partner. The wife says that “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a marriage” (Gilman 1). In the view of the husband, Jane is a partner with weird, laughable, and inconsistent ideas which should not be taken seriously. Moreover, the mockery directed at the sick wife conforms to the expectations of the patriarchal society. However, the dominance is challenged when Jane decided to take command of her thoughts. As a result, the authoritative male figure was trimmed down and he became ‘as weak as a woman’. Jane confesses, “Now why should that man have fainted” (Gilman 17). When John saw the transformation of his wife to an independent thinker, he passes out. He could not believe that a woman could challenge his decision. In this scene, Jane reversed the traditional expectations characterized by male control of the thoughts of women (Golden 23). The shock and eventual fainting of John are triggered by the desire to overexert control over his wife. The husband is determined to conform to the expectations of patriarchal society through exerting dominance in his household.

The ideas and thoughts of Jane are representative of the feminist perspective. For instance, she desires to freely express her thoughts against the barriers imposed by society. Jane is defiant and confesses that “I did write for a while in spite of them” (Gilman 1). As a woman, Jane is depressed until she regains the ability to express her feelings in the hidden journal she is writing. Although she can continue scripting in hiding, Jane is depressed by the need to conceal her activities away from the chauvinistic husband. Specifically, Jane is struggling to remain in the full care of her husband. For instance, she says “he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful to value it more” (Gilman 2). Though the actions of the husband to pay the bills are good, Jane’s resentment is figurative of the resulting feeling of uselessness and imprisonment of the female gender (Tischleder 13). Just like other women, Jane feels the negative pressure imposed on her by society to worship the husband as a primary provider.

The entire plot of the play is exposed in a room that reminisces insanity and scorn from the perspective of a feminist. The empty and dull room is accentuated through the surrounding of Jane in thoughts and actions. For instance, her description of the room is emblematic of a prison-like environment where Jane’s requests cannot be heeded. When she requests the husband to consider repainting the walls, Jane gets a negative response from John. The husband says “that after the wall-paper was changed, it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on” (Gilman 3).

The unwillingness to change Jane’s environment is figurative of the desire of John to continue imprisoning her from free expression. Moreover, the description of the wallpaper is also symbolic of a psychological prison. Jane confesses that “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars” (Gilman 10). Across the play, Jane’s thoughts are concentrated on the wallpaper, and only gets relief when she removes it from the wall. Jane is captivated by the wallpaper to a point that she is unable to ignore the strange pattern on it. She later connected to the perceived image of a trapped woman in the background of the wallpaper (Goodman 18). Jane only gets relief after she gets rid of the paper. From a feminist perspective, the actions of Jane aimed at regaining control over thoughts and actions are representational female emancipation from the yoke of male dominance.

The Yellow Wallpaper story portrays a patriarchal society where men control the actions and thoughts of their wives. In this relationship, women are expected to take orders from men whose decisions are final. The author has expressed underlying feminist perspectives to illustrate the mental and physical hardships encountered by women during the 1800 era. These perspectives are hidden in the dominating actions of John, hidden thoughts of his wife Jane, and the room where the plot is played. However, Jane is determined to escape this prison by directing her thoughts in a hidden journal. Gilman has reflected on the psychological and physical imprisonment of the women through the symbolic use of the wallpaper, poorly painted room, and mental illness.

Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wallpaper . Virago, 1981.

Golden, Catherine, editor. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition . Routledge, 2013.

Goodman, Lizbeth. Literature and Gender . Routledge, 2013.

Schroder, Marie. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s the Yellow Wall-Paper from a Feminist Perspective. A Woman’s Place in a Patriarchal World . GRIN Publishing, 2016.

Tischleder, Babette. The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction . Campus Vergal, 2014.

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Loneliness in The Yellow Wallpaper
Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper & Trifles
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A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'The Yellow Wallpaper', an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around, since he has forbidden….
The Yellow Wallpaper: Essay Examples
Here you'll find a heap of excellent ideas for The Yellow Wallpaper essay. Absolutely free research paper and essay samples on The Great Gatsby are collected here, on one page. We will write a custom essay specifically. for you for only 11.00 9.35/page. 808 certified writers online.
The Yellow Wallpaper Essay
The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Example 📄 The Yellow Wallpaper Thesis Statement Examples 📜. Here are five examples of strong thesis statements for your essay: 1. "In 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays the damaging effects of the patriarchy on women's mental health, highlighting the need for autonomy and self-expression." 2.
Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper
Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 28, 2022. First published in New England Magazine in January 1892, and reprinted by Small, Maynard and Company as a chapbook (1899), "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous work. Depicting the nervous breakdown of a young wife and mother, the story is a potent example of ...
Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper': Point of View Essay
The wallpaper is "ripped," "soiled," "unclean yellow," "revolting," and "formless sort of figures.". These descriptions of the wallpaper are symbolic of the shapeless and suffocating life that the Narrator leads. It symbolizes a filled with life with harsh memories. "Soiled" symbolizes the burial act, thus representing ...
Understanding The Yellow Wallpaper: Summary and Analysis
The Yellow Wallpaper Summary. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the defining works of feminist literature. Writing about a woman's health, mental or physical, was considered a radical act at the time that Perkins Gilman wrote this short story. Writing at all about the lives of women was considered at best, frivolous, and at worst dangerous.
The Yellow Wallpaper Study Guide
Full Title: The Yellow Wallpaper When Written: June, 1890 Where Written: California When Published: May, 1892 Literary Period: Gothic Genre: Short story; Gothic horror; Feminist literature Setting: Late nineteenth century, in a colonial mansion that has been rented for the summer. Most of the story's action takes place in a room at the top of the house that is referred to as the "nursery."
The Yellow Wallpaper Essays and Further Analysis
The structure of The Yellow Wallpaper creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy. The story is written in a journal-style, first-person narrative which includes nine short entries, each entry ...
The Yellow Wallpaper Critical Essays
"The Yellow Wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Full name Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman) American short story writer, essayist, novelist, and autobiographer.
Analysis of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by C. Perkins Gilman
Catherine Sustana. Updated on March 29, 2020. Like Kate Chopin's " The Story of an Hour ," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a mainstay of feminist literary study. First published in 1892, the story takes the form of secret journal entries written by a woman who is supposed to be recovering from what her husband, a physician ...
The Yellow Wallpaper Essay
Introduction. The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that explains the sad story of a woman suffering from acute postpartum depression. Written during the dying years of the 19th century, The Yellow Wallpaper is characteristic of the mental and emotional treatment that women were subjected to during this period.
The Yellow Wallpaper
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.
The Yellow Wallpaper: a Literary Exploration of Mental Health
In that last line, the narrator states that she had to "had to creep over her husband every time" she went around the room. The use of the word "creep" is reminiscent of how the narrator described the woman in the wallpaper, and now that she has finished "freeing" her, the narrator has a moment of self-identification between herself and the women in the wallpaper.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Critical Analysis
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892 in the New England Magazine, was later included in a collection of Gilman's works called In This Our World in 1893. The story features a narrator who is struggling with what her husband believes is a nervous disorder, and he has taken her to a rented summer home where she is forbidden from working or stimulating ...
63 The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Topics & Examples
The Yellow Wallpaper essay prompts, titles, writing tips, and Yellow Wallpaper essay examples. 🟡 The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Questions. Is the Narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper reliable? The narrator of the story has mental health issues. Her slide into madness happens in the middle of the story and speed up at the end.
The Yellow Wallpaper Themes
Alongside its exploration of mental illness, The Yellow Wallpaper offers a critique of traditional gender roles as they were defined during the late nineteenth century, the time in which the story is set and was written. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist, who rejected the trappings of traditional domestic life and published extensively about the role of women in society, and ...
Realism and the Weird in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Story We Used
When read together, Perkins Gilman's tale reveals the realism peeking behind the frame of "The Story We Used to Tell," and Jackson's short story illuminates the otherworldly horror plaguing the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper.". A helpful tool for seeing these two works as part of a shared spectrum is the literary mode of the weird.
Unveiling Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper: An Analysis
Gabriel Worley Gabriel Johnson 5/3/2023 American Literature II Literary Analysis Essay Through its portrayal of the restrictive social standards and responsibilities that were placed on women, as well as the medical practices and beliefs common at the time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" reflects the influence of American culture during the late 19th century.
The Yellow Wallpaper: Study Guide
The Yellow Wallpaper study guide prepared by our editorial team is an extensive collection of materials necessary for understanding the most famous short story by Gilman. Along with the summary and analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper, you'll find here short reviews of the key themes, symbols, and literary devices used in the story.There are descriptions of all the characters as well.
The Intricate Design of Dante's Nine Circles of Hell
The essay examines the moral and ethical implications of these circles, from the virtuous pagans in Limbo to the traitors encased in ice in Cocytus. Each circle's unique punishment reflects the nature of the sin it represents, such as the lustful being buffeted by a storm and the gluttonous wallowing in vile slush.
Book Review: '1974,' by Francine Prose
Prose nonetheless hangs a great deal of her memoir on Russo and rehashes the well-known issues surrounding the Pentagon Papers themselves. ... depression she described in "The Yellow Wallpaper ...
62 Essay Topics on The Yellow Wallpaper
3 min. 708. Welcome to The Yellow Wallpaper Essay Topics page prepared by our editorial team! Here you will find an extensive list of essay ideas on the short story! Literary analysis, themes, comparison, characters, & more. Get inspired to write your own essay! We will write a custom essay specifically. for you for only 11.00 9.35/page.
Feminist Perspective on "The Yellow Wallpaper" Essay
The short play, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is based on the lives of a chauvinistic husband and a sick wife. The over-dominating nature of the husband called John makes the environment unbearable for the mentally ill wife Jane. The wife is involuntarily imprisoned by the chauvinistic nature of her husband who would not ...

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