Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Gilman Essay, Research Paper

A major theme in ?The Yellow Wallpaper? by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is that

solitary confinement and exclusion from the public results in insanity. The use

of imagery and setting helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The

unnamed protagonist in this story suffers from a nervous disorder which is

enhanced by her feeling of being trapped within a room. The setting of the vast

colonial mansion and particularly the nursery room with barred windows provides

an image of loneliness and seclusion experienced by the protagonist. Another

significant setting is the mansion connected by a ?shaded lane? (66) to the

beautiful bay and private wharf. It is possible that in her mind, she sees a

path which leads to the curing of her illness where happiness and good health

awaits at the end. The reason the lane is ?shaded? is because she is

uncertain whether or not this path can be traveled. Upon moving into the

mansion, she immediately becomes obsessed with the nursery room wallpaper with

?sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin? (64). Her

days and nights are so uneventful that she finds relief in writing a journal

which becomes more tiresome as her sickness progresses. In every few paragraphs

in her journal, she analyzes the wallpaper. Through the imagery she evokes from

the wallpaper, it can be seen that she is really analyzing herself and her

illness subconsciously. For example, she begins to see ?a strange, provoking,

formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and

conspicuous front design? (67). She describes her illness (as seen in the

wallpaper) as ?not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or

repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of? (68). In other

words, she cannot make any sense of what is causing her illness. A pivotal

moment in the story is when the woman protagonist is concerned only with the

yellow wallpaper in her journal. In lieu of her obsession with the wallpaper,

she becomes engaged in the actions of the women she sees in the wallpaper which,

of course, is really her own actions. The women ?is all the time trying to

climb through [the wallpaper]? (72). At this moment, she is desperate to

escape her illness but she is unable to because her confinement in the room has

already affected her more so than she realizes. The imagery of this situation is

described when ?the pattern strangles [the women] off and turns them upside

down, and makes their eyes white!? (72). In the end or in her last day at the

mansion, the isolation intensifies her illness to the point where she is no

longer curable and insanity takes over. The protagonist finally recognizes the

fact that the women she witnesses is really her own frame of mind and proclaims

?I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is

hard!? (75). She believes that she has at last gained her freedom from the

illness when in reality, the exact opposite has occurred. The incessant creeping

is the final summation to her insanity.