Preview

Annotation of Yellow Wallpaper

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
852 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Annotation of Yellow Wallpaper
Melancholy Me
“I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued. I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did! But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don’t get me out in the road there! I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. I wont, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow”.

The narrator has finally, after months of toiling over her obsession with the yellow wallpaper in the room where she was kept while ill, realized the relevance and meaning of the gloomy decoration. I chose this passage form the short story because it proves to the readers that the narrator is actually mentally ill and reveals her feelings and perception of the yellow wallpaper. This passage, in my opinion, is one of the most important parts of the short story due to the correlation of the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper and the women in the story. This passage also clearly reveals that the narrator of the story is mentally ill, bringing the story to an abrupt and formidable ending.
The narrator illustrates her disparity to become well, by threatening to jump out of a window. She immediately recants her statement, not because it is a terrible thing to do or because she would be killing herself, but because it would be improper or miss-interpreted. She also states that the ‘bars’ are too strong for her to jump through; referring to the line like pattern on the yellow wallpaper, demonstrating her

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    It is within the wallpaper that the narrator finds her hidden self and her eventual freedom. Her obsession with the paper begins subtly and then consumes both the narrator and the story. Once settled in the gothic setting, the narrator is dismayed to learn that her husband has chosen the top-floor nursery room for her. The room is papered in horrible yellow wallpaper, the design of which “commits every artistic sin”. The design begins to fascinate the narrator and she begins to see more than just the outer design. At first she sees “bulbous eyes” and “absurd unblinking eyes . . . everywhere”. The wallpaper consumes the narrator offering up more intricate images as time passes. She first notices a different colored sub-pattern of a figure beneath the top design. This figure is eventually seen as a woman who “creeps” and shakes the outer pattern, now seen as bars. This woman-figure becomes essentially the narrator’s doppelganger or double trapped behind the bars of her role in…

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper

    • 989 Words
    • 4 Pages

    What would you do if you had no say in your marriage? What if you could not influence your own life? What if you are locked behind bars and no one believes you? The narrator deals with these problems throughout the short story “The Yellow wallpaper”, which is written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1899.…

    • 989 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrator is suffering from an illness and her husband who is a physician takes her away to a vacation house to get better. While there he forbids her to do any mental or physical activity. While her husband is away she secretly writes in a diary telling the readers about her experience with the horrid yellow wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s character, the…

    • 677 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    At the beginning of the story, the narrator has been confined to a yellow-room nursery by her husband, with the thought that confinement and isolation would solve her post-partem depression. As the story progresses, she comes to believe that there are women trying to escape the wallpaper. She then realizes that like the women, she needs to escape her confinement and her husband’s grasp. When her husband discovers her, he faints. The narrator then continues to move around the room, and states, “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (27). Gilman’s tone is notably ironic because her narrator’s reaction to her husband fainting reveals both mockery and madness. The narrator is mocking her husband’s lack of masculinity due to him fainting in front of a girl. As a man, her husband should have taken action and used physical force to restrain his wife. However, he chose to faint at the sight of his wife, demonstrating that he has lost the power to a woman, which at…

    • 1386 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    It is evident that the narrator is frequently alone with her thoughts. Her husband, John, “is away all day, and even some nights” (42), and Jennie, who takes care of her, leaves her to be alone and does the housework. This isolation caused her mental health to deteriorate. A dangerous effect of the complete isolation the narrator experienced is obsession. The narrator was told to do nothing, except sleep. She could not even talk to anyone about how she felt. One of the only things that could not be taken away from her was the wallpaper of the room. As a result, she paid close attention to it. The narrator would “lay there for hours” (143) watching the pattern of the wallpaper; she would attempt to decipher it. According to her, the wallpaper would stare her “as if it knew what a vicious influence it had” (66). It wasn’t…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the setting took place at a vacation home. She describes the room as big and roomy and had windows with bars on them. “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” (Gilman, 1899). The narrator also stated the room was once a nursery, which can correlates for how John treats he wife like a child. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” (Gilman, 1899). Again, the author is showing how women had to take direction from their husbands who ran the household.…

    • 523 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    At the beginning of the story the protagonist despises the wallpaper and wants it removed, but as the story progresses it is the wallpaper that allows her a canvas of opportunity to imagine on. As her creativity flows and her insanity starts to develop, her perceptions are thought to be figurative and she just imagines this character who wants to escape the wallpaper of her bedroom. All of the windows are “barred” representing a prison like facility illuminating her physical confinement (23). Not only that, but when she is lying in bed at night she sees the light from “twilight, candle light, lamplight and worst of all by moonlight,” cause the wallpapers pattern to become bars (29). This imagery brings out her true feelings towards the room. She acts imprisoned as if the confinement is increasing the desire she has to escape. As the night becomes clearer, the protagonist notices, “the outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” (29). The moonlit night is revealing her shadow more precisely and the pattern of the bars are preventing her from any further advancement. As the story goes on her fascination with this character grow and she feels the need to escape from the segregation of her room as…

    • 1114 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The further she focuses on it, the more obsessed she becomes. She begins to observe how it varies in different light and notices a sub pattern within the wallpaper. This she perceives as a positive side to the wallpaper. All of this stimulates her mind and she even becomes excited about life because of the wallpaper. As she continues to study the wallpaper, she notices that the woman in the wallpaper is behind bars and shakes the bars powerfully. Since she only focuses that wallpaper, she begins to put herself in the place of that woman she claims to observe. Had she been taken away from that house or given other activities, she would not have continued with the delusion that she is in the…

    • 1141 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kjjkbjkbj

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages

    1. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” undergoes a profound change from the beginning of the story to the end. How is her change revealed in relation to her response to the wallpaper? How does she fell about the change? How do your feeling differ from the narrator’s?…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

    • 1239 Words
    • 5 Pages

    It is a bit ironic that the author chose a color so bright and usually defined as being a happy and joyful color. However, this story is not at all joyful, but is instead is very depressing and sad. The wallpaper is described in such great detail that it is very easy for the reader to picture exactly what the author is trying to say. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study…” within this description of the the wallpaper it is obvious that the narrator is unhappy with the wallpaper and as the story goes on the wallpaper begins to play a vital role in her psychological deterioration (156). The wallpaper appears to be a border that keeps the women trapped within the shadows of the men. As the narrator begins to rip the paper off this is the symbol of freedom and the struggle to be release from the constant stereotypes and gender differences. It is interesting to see that even though the wallpaper was what was causing the narrator to deteriorate at the end of the story, the wallpaper is what finally frees…

    • 1239 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the yellow wallpaper, the narrator is the character that the readers feel sad for the most. The narrator is a young wife and mother whose physician husband, john claims that she is suffering from depression. He takes her to a rest cure treatment and locks her in a nursery with 'rings and things in the walls' to ensure a good rest for her. Yet, she loses her sanity under the circumstances of John's excess suppression and the distracting yellow wallpaper in the room. John completely holds the authority over the narrator and takes care of her so careful as if she is a little girl with the nickname ‘blessed little goose’ named by him. He asks her to control herself over her imaginative and storytelling power. The narrator wants to satisfy her husband and obeys him although she 'disagrees with' his idea and has 'heavy opposition’, and she ‘takes pain to control herself’, which ‘makes me (the narrator) very tired’. Not wanting to disappoint her husband and her desire of being an ideal mother and wife, she tries hard to be lenient and thus, she suppresses her creative fantasy even with pain. The narrator becomes completely detached from the outer world when john turns down her request of living in the room ‘downstairs that opened onto the piazza and had roses all over the window’. The suppression is so unbearable that the narrator starts to write her journal in order to express her stress secretively without anybody knowing. She finds relief in writing the journal as she mentions ‘it’s such a relief!’ It proves that the suppression by john makes the narrator afraid of telling him her inner thoughts, which makes their relationship distant. In the meanwhile, the narrator knows that john loves her very much but she doesn’t like the way he loves her. As the narrator loses touch with the outer world, she stays in the room and the weird yellow wallpaper distracts her attention. By using contrast, the change in the narrator’s attitude towards the wallpaper is shown clearly.…

    • 1643 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    yellow

    • 1442 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Constantly alone and forbidden to leave her bedroom, the lack of something to occupy her time causes the protagonist to become delusional. With “barred windows for little children and rings and things in the walls” the room is much like her prison (Gilman 174). Even the pattern on the wallpaper (which at first was completely random) “at night in any kind of light, twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all moonlight, becomes bars” as if she is caged (Gilman 182). Both times here she refers to aspects of her room as bars. As she begins to feel imprisoned she projects her feelings onto the wallpaper, but the idea of the room being her prison goes from figurative to more literal as the isolation deepens her need for an escape.…

    • 1442 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Many times in life, we encounter many life changes we can't seem to control. We even break down to the point that we are unsure of what to do with ourselves. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “ The yellow wallpaper” the narrator is very obsessive. It focuses on a woman who’s going through depression and has had a nervous breakdown. Her husband tries to help her by moving her in a home, only to keep her upstairs in room (nursery) covered with a yellow wallpaper. He wants her to be isolated and recover from her depression. As part as a way to do so, her husband John, doesn't want her using her imagination in any way but she resist at the treatment. His plan for her to get better fails. Throughout the story, the narrator came across learning…

    • 695 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Yellow Wallpaper Symbolism

    • 1581 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Her senses are being constantly crowded with thoughts of the wallpaper and she is subconsciously trying to free herself from it. This eventually leads to her seeing bars in the pattern of the wallpaper and further towards schizophrenia coupled with a nervous breakdown. As this breakdown is nearing, she starts tearing the wallpaper off of the wall and locks her husband out: "I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes." (Gilman 668) What is this all about? She has a rope with her and she is continually tearing paper off of the wall. All the while she is mumbling about "…creeping women." (Gilman 668) She says: "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?" (Gilman 668) Maybe that is why she has rope. Maybe she is going to hang herself from the bars in the window once she frees herself from the…

    • 1581 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrator describes her illness and her husband’s take on her treatment. Her thoughts give detailed insight into her mind as the narrator enters the state of a psychotic breakdown. The narrator’s thoughts describe her reasoning for not getting well faster. “John is a physician, and perhaps-(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) –perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”(224) The narrator expresses her concerns on paper and wonders if this has any effect on her wellbeing. John has confined her to a room in which she initially dislikes the yellow wallpaper. “I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.”(226) The narrator’s initial thoughts on the yellow wallpaper are that it is horrid. She is confined in a room, picked by her husband, and for some reason she is unable to figure out the pattern to the yellow wallpaper. “It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things”.(226) She continues to look into the pattern, without actually figuring it out. The narrator is becoming used to the yellow wallpaper and its qualities. She smells the wallpaper everywhere in the house and even so, when she is out of the house. Unbeknownst to her, the smell of the wallpaper begins to creep around her the more…

    • 578 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays