Forced Insanity in the Yellow Wallpaper Essay Example

Hook. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman we see our narrator slowly lose her sanity as she is confined in a high room with a single barred window and eerily looking yellow wallpaper.  The initial purpose of the short story was for Gilman to bring attention into the treatment of mental health for women and postpartum depression.  We observe our nameless narrator slowly descend into madness while her descriptions of the simple wallpaper start from ugly and “artistically sinful” to becoming a puzzle she must solve.  Through her obsession with the mystery within the wallpaper, she starts to observe another “woman in the wall”.  The woman in the wall “breaks free”, portraying the narrator’s sanity breaking and letting her persona take over.

The narrator is diagnosed by her husband to be suffering from nervous depression, but later it is revealed to be postpartum depression, depression after having a child.  She is then confined to the house and to stay in the old nursery for most hours of the day for her treatment, popular during the time of the story in the 1800s.  During her “treatment” the only activity that she is allowed to do is to write, since it is the only activity they find to not be too physically straining.  The journal entries serve as the medium of our narrator to tell her story, describe her experiences, and reveal her slow descent into insanity,

As the story goes on the frequency of the wallpaper being mentioned increases as she loses her sanity through her isolation treatment.  The descriptions of the patchy wallpaper go from ugly and displeasing to the eye, to having enough nuance in the pattern to tell stories and entertain the narrator, to eventually becoming a barrier for a woman or women inside.  The woman is visible to her at all times, moving within the wall and even catching glimpses of her creeping around when looking out the windows, yet when she turns there is no trace of a woman creeping around the estate. .  This is clearly her reflection and her obsession with the wallpaper along with the archaic treatment has caused her to forget what she looks like and distorts her ability to distinguish reality from her hallucinations.

On her final night of therapy she wants her husband John to be the only one to see her tomorrow so that she can astonish him.  During the process of locking herself in she rips the wallpaper and makes a mess of the room out of frustration.  The tearing off the wallpaper marks the end of her sanity as she slips herself into the bars of the window and perches herself to await John’s arrival.  John faints at the sight of his wife, probably a shell of her former self since the beginning of treatment.  She leaves the room stating that she tore the wallpaper down so that he can non longer put her back, and she creeps out of her room enjoying her freedom.