The Role Of The Narrator In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

In the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is a young mother that suffers from depression. She is married to a physician who underestimates the severity of her illness, prescribing bed rest in a secluded room as her form of treatment. As an example of a dynamic character, the narrator has a change in her mental condition by the isolation she receives in order to recover from her depression.
As her physician, the narrator’s husband forbids her to participate in any creative activity that would exercise her imagination as part of her cure. Although she disagrees with him, she did not say anything, instead she vents through her writing in a secret diary, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 380). By her weakness keeping her silent and not expressing her disproval, she unknowingly accepts the treatment that in time will only worsen her condition. However, letting her mind rebel, she turns her imagination towards the wallpaper.
First she only sees curves in the pattern, but as her negative feelings control her depiction, the images become more sinister, making her become fixated on the wallpaper. “Her diary entries mark her increasing fascination with a heavily patterned wallpaper as she turns her excess energy toward understanding its bizarre forms and speculating on the history of the room itself” (Scott 201). As her fixation continues, the narrator becomes progressively more dissociated with