The Subversive Message of the ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’

The story’s main character is the narrator, whose physician husband, John, has diagnosed her with mild hysteria and believes that she can only become well again with much bed rest and quiet during a summer-long stay at a rented colonial mansion on a lovely but isolated landscape. Gilman immediately casts suspicion on the infallibility of the husband’s profession when toward the beginning of the story the narrator concedes that her husband’s being a doctor is, perhaps, “one reason I do not get well faster.” The reader may also at once wonder about the narrator’s happiness with her marriage as she makes a reference to a fantasy about reaching “the height of romantic felicity” at her temporary home but then reaso

Gilman, to say the least, makes an expert use of symbolism here, for eventually the narrator makes an important discovery in the wallpaper design, something she seems to be able to identify with. Behind the front design of the paper there is another, more dim and less conspicuous pattern. The narrator sees in the sub-pattern “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure,” which then turns out to be “like a woman stooping down and creeping about.” She feels frightened by it but cannot resist the temptation to delve into its complexity to further figure it out. As she begins to lose her sanity and thinks she sees the pattern move, she declares that the pattern (which does not bother anyone else) is a “constant irritant to a normal mind” and likens it to a “bad dream.” She also begins to notice that John and Jane seem rather “queer” as of late. “I am getting a little afraid of John.” If the pattern represents the state of her mind, then, yes, by now there is a considerable divergence between the pattern and a normal mind.

Although she, herself, makes it clear in the beginning of the story that she secretly believes “congenial work, with excitement and change,” would do her good, her doctor-husband forbids her from working or even writing her thoughts down (an activity from which she derives great mental relief). She admits that writing does exhaust her quite a bit but explains that it is because she is “having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” She fancies she would feel better if only she faced “less opposition and more society and stimulus;” she yearns for “advice and companionship about [her] work” (her writing, apparently) or the company of cousin Henry and Julia (“stimulating people”). But then, as though learning to accept that she is wrong, that her husband knows best, and that any intellectual activity or even just dwelling on her condition is bad for her, she resolves to “let it alone and talk about the house.” A traditionalist might argue that this is, after all, her duty as a woman and a wife.

Only twice does Gilman make the couple’s baby the object of the narrator’s attention in her writing and she does it in a manner that suggests her condition is due, in part, to post-partum depression. The recent mother mentions feeling relieved that the baby’s nanny is doing a good job because, though the child is “such a dear baby,” she, herself, “cannot be with him” since “it makes me so nervous.” Later, sh

Some topics in this essay:
Henry Julia, Yellow Wall-Paper”, John Jane, Perkins Gilman, , middle- upper-class women, front design, patterns wallpaper, “i feel, beginning story, main character, trying figure, middle- upper-class, upper-class women, narrator sub-pattern,