'The Yellow Wall-Paper': The Woman in the Paper

Image credit: denisecblog.wordpress.com

Charlotte Perkins Stetson utilizes an array of writing concepts in The Yellow Wall-Paper to ultimately portray the confinement of the narrator by her husband, including a strong focus on symbolism and direct sentence structure changes. The yellow wallpaper is symbolic of the suppression of the reality that women, particularly the narrator, endured during this time. The narrator’s sentence and paragraph length abruptly changes, upon her revelation of the reality imposed on her as compared to her actual reality. The text in this analysis presents a crucial involvement in the story’s climax, in which Stetson abruptly transitions the attention from detailed accounts of ambiguity to more direct and concise ideas in the events that follow.

The reality of The Yellow Wall-Paper is one that is offered to the reader by an unreliable narrator. This narrator is implied to be mentally ill by her husband and her brother and has essentially been locked up in a room. This room contains traces of evidence that it had been used for similar instances: a bolted down bed with gnaw marks, torn pieces of wallpaper, and barred windows. She has become just as an intimate object as the wallpaper by being confined to this one room and kept away from her family. The reality that Stetson set up in The Yellow Wall-Paper is broken through the revelation that the convincingly unreliable narrator breaks her own reality. She is the woman in the wallpaper. The reality of a woman who appears to be mentally unreliable as a narrator becomes the only reliable character in the story.

The form of the following text breaks the reality that was initially set up through changes in the sentence and paragraph structures.

“Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision, (p. 655).”

Before this text appears in the story, the sentences and paragraphs were lengthier to elaborate the detail of occurrences. Even in the detailed accounts, there was also a strong sense of ambiguity that the author presented to the reader prior to this particular text. It served as a crucial element in order to set up the parallel characteristics between the narrator and the wallpaper. The paragraph we are analyzing is one of the last that follows this structure. The paragraphs and sentences that proceed become shorter and include concise statements of the occurrences as the story progresses.

This paragraph is the point in which events shift. The narrator comes to the realization that she is the woman in the wallpaper. She is the one confined by the wallpaper’s irrational and restraining patterns and these patterns are symbolic of her suppression at her husband’s hand. Once this moment of clarity is presented, the author utilizes this to allow the narrator to articulate more clearly. In order for the ambiguity to be removed from the narrator’s thoughts during this revelation, it is important for the author to proceed with curt language. This can be seen in the latter part of the text in which the symbolic meanings are made clear.

“Why there’s John at the door!

It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!

How he does call and pound!

Now he’s crying for an axe,” (p. 656).

The language utilized in this text of the story creatively captures the uncanny experience that the narrator, and the readers, witness firsthand. Hardy’s use of clear adjectives in describing the wallpaper allows the reader to see what the narrator sees when she is analyzing it. Every curve and line are detailed articulately. Her use of symbolism closes the ambiguity of the meaning of the wallpaper and turned it into a powerful message. Not only is it creative, it is also empowering.