This essay examines the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. This essay approaches the short story from a formalist perspective. This essay will attempt to analyze the main character, the narrator, as she reveals herself within the tale. The narrator is supposedly in need of mental care, possibly crazy from postpartum depression. She alludes to not being able to care for her baby. Her circumstances reveal that she is in a mental institution. She is fending off some sort of postpartum depression, and she has been institutionalized at the bequest of her husband, John.
This essay argues that the narrator is not crazy and does not need to be in a mental institution, at least not in the beginning of the story. The source of her sickness is the mental institution and her husband’s neglect. The narrator becomes crazy only after she is trapped and made to become crazy. This essay supports these claims with the three claims: the narrator initially dislikes the room she is kept in, her husband proclaims she is getting better when she begins to actually get crazy, and that the narrator is crazy when she is about to be released, because she prefers her isolation and dislikes her husband.
The narrator misses her husband and does not like the mental institution in the beginning of the story. The narrator finds the walls are suffocating and ugly. She wishes her husband would share her room and misses him when he is away for the long periods of time. These are all the healthy reactions of someone who is sane and does not belong in a mental institution.
The next phase of the narration implies that the narrator is starting to actually become crazy. John tells her she is getting better just as the narrator is starting to display actual signs of craziness: “Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would [take you away], but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you.” [added] (Gilman 6). If one pays attention to John’s reasoning, it is clear that authority should be doubted, because even as a professional physician, he fails to recognize his wife’s true mental conditions. Therefore, John fails on two accounts; as a husband and a physician he is a destructive force to his wife’s condition.
John only speaks of physical improvements that indicate the narrator’s health; none of which were her initial reasons for being treated. The narrator has just discovered the woman behind the wallpaper, and she wants to share this information with John. The fact that she still wants to include John shows that she is still not completely insane; although she is having hallucinations, she is still emotionally intact. The fact that John tells her she is improving at the moment that she is actually becoming a madwoman; after she has actually felt the walls for the woman, illustrates that John did not understand her condition to begin with. John’s misjudgment of the narrator, at this point, should strengthen the reader’s opinion against John’s judgment of his wife’s mental condition.
It is because of the narrator’s depiction of him as a knowledgeable physician, the reader makes the same error of judgment that the narrator makes about John; the reader trusts that the narrator is crazy because she is in a mental institution (or rented mansion?) and she has an authoritative physician for her husband. These factors make the reader believe that she might be crazy; however, if the reader considers the egregious misjudgments of John, it is apparent that the narrator is sane until made crazy.
The next stage of the process that shows the reader that the narrator is now a worthy mental patient, albeit she is about to be released, is that she now prefers her isolation:
“I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once. And John is so queer now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.” [italics] (Gilman 8). She expresses disdain for John and she wants him to keep his distance as opposed to the beginning of the story when the narrator whished he would be closer.
Moreover, she now prefers the wallpaper, which has come alive with her doppelganger. She is not disturbed by the wallpaper but comforted by the wallpaper. She identifies so much with the wallpaper that at one point, the climax, she is removing the wallpaper and it becomes unclear who is the source of the action: the narrator or the woman behind the wallpaper. Gilman writes, “That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had. peeled off yards of that paper.” (9). It is unclear who “shakes” and who “pulls”. That is the day the narrator is to be released, supposedly made well, when she “creeps” herself and John out of their futures.
The narrator is most ill at the end of the story, evidenced by her suicide. In the wallpaper, the narrator foreshadows her ultimate fate: “It is dull enough to confuse the eye…when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide -plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.” (Gilman 2). The outrageous angles and contradictions are that she is made ill by her prescribed rest; the physician is untrustworthy; the hallucinations are the product of idleness and suffocation of sanity, and not the product of insanity.
