In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows us how sometimes if others tell us that something is true, it seems that we make it come true. This is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the main character is told what she can and can’t do by the people who were around her, it is hard for us to see her real personality. The only way that we get a chance to see her true personality is by the journal that she keeps. After reading the journal, we are left wondering whether she is really crazy or not when the story begins, and what has caused her to go insane at the end of the story.
The main character starts off the story by simply describing the things she and her husband do, and it sounds as if they are just a normal couple. However, we learn that her husband and her brother are both doctors, and they have similar opinions about her condition: “that there is really nothing the matter with one but
The main character goes from a woman who had a perfectly normal life, to a woman being caged in a room in an old house. She went from having a normal personality, to being wildly insane. And throughout this time we realize that it was because her husband helped create the lady in the wallpaper.
The function of the main character in this story is simple. Gilman is trying to show the audience how we should not let others affect the way we live our life because others may eventually take us over and then cause us to go crazy. We know that other people will always influence the things we do and say, but we cannot let them take over our lives. In her stay in the room she fell into the trap of the self-fulfilling prophecy. By listening to others opinions about her, she began to wonder if they were right and eventually without realizing it did exactly what they said. Gilman is trying to teach us a lesson to make sure that we never fall victim to
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