Short Story Review: "The Yellow Wallpaper"
TRIGGER WARNING: If you are affected by domestic abuse and/or segregation, this blog post may be triggering. If you need support right now, please seek help from a therapist, other mental health professional, or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or text "START" to 88788 (available in the USA). You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, text "HOME" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 if you live in the USA, or text "CONNECT" to the Crisis Text Line at 686868 if you live in Canada. In addition, you can call 911 to report experienced, witnessed, or suspected domestic abuse and/or segregation and keep in mind that domestic abuse includes intimate partner abuse, family abuse, and physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse.
The settings, especially parts of them, in many works of literature often relate to the characters in some way. The parts of settings usually reflect and affect the development of the characters. Part of the setting in The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents the narrator. Readers can find out how the settings of stories relate to the characters through analysis.
The Yellow Wallpaper takes place in a summer hall that the narrator and her husband are living in for the summer. While staying there, the bedroom that the narrator stays in all day has a wall designed with bars. The narrator says that she dislikes the appearance of the wallpaper, but she says that it reminds her of something, but she cannot put her finger on what it specifically reminds her of. Due to her mental illness, her husband forces her to stay inside this room all day and do literally nothing. From staying in this room constantly, she becomes so obsessed with the wallpaper that she hallucinates an image of a woman behind bars on it. Eventually, she starts hallucinating the woman coming to life; she sees her moving, shaking the bars, "crawling", and "trying to climb through" (Gilman 1892). This represents how the narrator's husband makes the narrator feel imprisoned by making her stay inside all day. However, before she discovers that she sees a woman behind the wall's bar pattern, she says that she can smell the wallpaper everywhere she goes; she also says that there is "a funky yellow mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over" and that she "wonders how it was done and who did it and what they did it for" (Gilman 1892). It is implied that she thinks that the woman she is seeing on the wall did it when the she herself who is the narrator did it in reality. The narrator does not realize that she did it though because due to her mental illness, she is hallucinating that the woman behind the wall did it. The evidence in the story to prove that the narrator is the person who damaged the wallpaper is the smell of it being with her wherever she goes.
The settings in many stories often have some type of connotation with the main characters. The woman on the wallpaper that the narrator sees in the room that she is staying in in The Yellow Wallpaper represents how her husband makes her feel imprisoned from him forcing her to stay inside all day due to her disability. The particular setting of a story can serve as an effective tool for using imagery as a reflection of each character's state of mind. Furthermore, the setting can be bestowed a role in the story that places it at the level of the actual characters; it can influence the events of the story by both framing the situation and facilitating the discussion and conflict between those characters. The analysis of the setting's role can therefore provide greater context to the events of the story and allow the reader to perceive things that lie beneath each story's surface.
If you are affected by domestic abuse and/or segregation, remember that you are not alone and there is hope. If you need support right now, please seek help from a therapist, other mental health professional, or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or text "START" to 88788. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, text "HOME" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 if you live in the USA, or text "CONNECT" to the Crisis Text Line at 686868 if you live in Canada.
In addition, you can call 911 to report experienced, witnessed, or suspected domestic abuse and/or segregation and keep mind that domestic abuse includes intimate partner abuse, family abuse, and physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse.
You can also visit The Mighty's hotline resources page by clicking on this link: https://themighty.com/suicide-prevention-resources/
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Citations
1. Gilman, Charlotte P. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays, Ed. Sarah Touborg. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2016. 316-330. Print.
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