Woman in the Yellow Wallpaper

When a nervous condition begins to take over your mind, it becomes all consuming leaving you as a shell of the person you once were. In Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator was over taken by post partum depression, a nervous condition, which led to her mental undoing. During the story, the narrator, who is recovering from giving birth, has moved into a new house for the summer because of a nervous condition. Although, the narrator does not believe that she simply has a nervous condition, she complies with her husband's diagnosis because he is a physician. As time continues, she lives in a room with hideous wallpaper that became more eccentric as her mental health diminished. Ultimately, Gilman develops the narrator by creating a relatable character, using the wallpaper symbolically, and the use of imagery to show how the advancement of the wallpaper parallels the deterioration of the narrator's mental psyche.

In the short story the narrator's name is not disclosed, the story is also in first person. In having the story in first person, the reader is put into the narrator's shoes and is not allowed to know anything other than the narrator does. Ultimately, having the story in first person made the reader sympathize with the narrator, which made her relatable. Because of the fact that the narrator has no name, it makes the story seem like it can apply to anyone. The narrator is also made relatable because of the way that she is undermined by her husband. In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator says, "John is a physician and he does not believe that I am sick" she goes on to say "Personally, I disagree with their ideas" (Gilman, 1). This makes her relatable because of the fact that every person can relate to not having their opinion valued either because they were too young or thought to be incompetent. The fact that she is a woman means that her opinion is not valued, especially during the Gilded Age. During the Gilded Age many women were more or less stuck to the home, and raising the children, while they may have relished in having more economic and political freedom from the head of the household. Because of the fact that the story was written during the Gilded Age, it meant that many women could have read the story, and found it relatable and possibly inspiring. Even though the narrator became mentally insane, she found freedom within her own mind.

Another aspect of the story that contributed to the narrator's development was the wallpaper. While the wallpaper was first just hideous to the narrator, over time the wallpaper begins to take shape into a woman who is trapped behind bars. When the narrator sees the woman she saw her as a, "woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern" (Gilman, 5). A pivotal observation that can be made by the reader is that the woman behind the wallpaper only moves during the night in the moonlight. This shows how the narrator is beginning