Reflections of Insanity
Then in the very bright spots she (the woman) keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the
bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that
pattern—it strangles s; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles
them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white.
The anonymous narrator of the short story The Yellow Wall Paper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an unfortunate existence, a woman born during a time when women were oppressed by society. The passage demonstrates how an intellectually active woman in the early 20th century inevitably descends upon madness due to the “rest cure” that mentally broke down countless number of like-minded women. The Yellow Wall Paper uses imagery and parallelism to depict how dreadfully women were suppressed and broken down by such a cure.
The passage takes place near the end of the novel when the narrator has for a long period of time hallucinated due to her obsessive fixation of the yellow wallpaper. As the perception of reality begins to waver, the narrator imagines that there is a woman within the patterns of the wall paper and alludes her circumstances to her creation.
It must be noted that both of these characters are by nature unable to escape. The woman on the wall paper, no matter how hard she shakes the bars “in the very shady spots” (Gilman), is unable to break away from the bounds of reality. Just like the woman she has conceived from her delusions, the narrator is also oppressed by the bars of reality in the form of John, her husband. John genuinely cares for her wife and wishes only for the narrator’s swift recovery. He is an established and competent member of society, and is also a physician, which puts him up at a higher authority regarding his wife’s medical needs. The narrator is fully aware of just how much her husband loves and cares for her, so she is submissive to her husband’s every orders and “keeps still... in the very bright spots” (Gilman). Internally, however, the narrator feels the embraces of her husband suffocating, thus, like how the woman on the wallpaper “takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (Gilman), challenges the authority of her husband by writing secretly and obsessively fixating on the patterns on the wall. The fact that John is morally flawless turns him into a representation of the bars women such as the narrator faced: well meaning, but mentally destructive.
Both the woman on the wall and the narrator struggles against the constrictions built by their societies, but they are ultimately unable to “climb through” (Gilman). As the novel is written in first person, or more specifically in “streams of conscience”, the plights of the woman on the wallpaper serves mostly to depict the desperate struggles of the narrator. This passage further elaborates on the victimization of womankind as the narrator realizes in her despair that “nobody could climb through the pattern” (Gilman). She comes to realize that no matter how much she attempts to climb through the patterns of expectations and pressures built by her husband, and therefore the world, she would only be “strangled so,” (Gilman) just to become one of the “so many heads” (Gilman) that have suffered the same fate as her. Even if it is done subconsciously, the mentally strained narrator gains the revelation that her struggles are fruitless, and that her fate was to be “strangled”, like the countless number of victims of her time.
The anonymous narrator of the short story The Yellow Wall Paper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an unfortunate existence, a woman born during a time when women were oppressed by society. The passage demonstrates how an intellectually active woman in the early 20th century inevitably descends upon madness due to the “rest cure” that mentally broke down countless number of like-minded women. The Yellow Wall Paper uses imagery and parallelism to depict how dreadfully women were suppressed and broken down by such a cure.
The passage takes place near the end of the novel when the narrator has for a long period of time hallucinated due to her obsessive fixation of the yellow wallpaper. As the perception of reality begins to waver, the narrator imagines that there is a woman within the patterns of the wall paper and alludes her circumstances to her creation.
It must be noted that both of these characters are by nature unable to escape. The woman on the wall paper, no matter how hard she shakes the bars “in the very shady spots” (Gilman), is unable to break away from the bounds of reality. Just like the woman she has conceived from her delusions, the narrator is also oppressed by the bars of reality in the form of John, her husband. John genuinely cares for her wife and wishes only for the narrator’s swift recovery. He is an established and competent member of society, and is also a physician, which puts him up at a higher authority regarding his wife’s medical needs. The narrator is fully aware of just how much her husband loves and cares for her, so she is submissive to her husband’s every orders and “keeps still... in the very bright spots” (Gilman). Internally, however, the narrator feels the embraces of her husband suffocating, thus, like how the woman on the wallpaper “takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (Gilman), challenges the authority of her husband by writing secretly and obsessively fixating on the patterns on the wall. The fact that John is morally flawless turns him into a representation of the bars women such as the narrator faced: well meaning, but mentally destructive.
Both the woman on the wall and the narrator struggles against the constrictions built by their societies, but they are ultimately unable to “climb through” (Gilman). As the novel is written in first person, or more specifically in “streams of conscience”, the plights of the woman on the wallpaper serves mostly to depict the desperate struggles of the narrator. This passage further elaborates on the victimization of womankind as the narrator realizes in her despair that “nobody could climb through the pattern” (Gilman). She comes to realize that no matter how much she attempts to climb through the patterns of expectations and pressures built by her husband, and therefore the world, she would only be “strangled so,” (Gilman) just to become one of the “so many heads” (Gilman) that have suffered the same fate as her. Even if it is done subconsciously, the mentally strained narrator gains the revelation that her struggles are fruitless, and that her fate was to be “strangled”, like the countless number of victims of her time.
As the narrator realizes how her struggle was not an individual crusade and how countless number of like-minded women were strangled by the societal pressures of her times, the narrator falls deeper into despair. To reflect upon the change of the initially hopeful tone that pervades within the passage, the last sentence sees a change in styling with the noticeable shift from singular tense to plural tense. The narrator sees how the many women on the patterns “get through” (Gilman), only for the pattern to “strangle them off” (Gilman), “turn them upside down” (Gilman), thus taking away the sense of freedom they may have felt from struggling against the expectations of society upon them. After they have been strangled off and turned upside down and thrown away, the women in the shadows have “eyes white” (Gilman), indicating that they have turned insane from the bars of society. From her realization of inevitable defeat, the narrator is able to foreshadow her tragic fate.
The passage, even if it is contextually at the end of the novel The Yellow Wallpaper, can be seen as a profound reflection of the story as a nightmare odyssey for the narrator. The narrator attempts to struggle against her well-meaning husband and society, fails, and becomes insane from the revelation like the countless other victims of the rest cure. The dark, cryptic imagery and the narrator’s visions serve to demonstrate to the readers how women were utterly broken from the unreasonable expectations of the society that was represented by the rest cure.
Works Cited:
Gilman, Charlotte P. The Yellow Wallpaper. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 5 Oct. 2013. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm>.
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