The Glass Menagerie

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, gives powerful insight to the male misunderstandings of the feminine psyche. Throughout the course of the story, our protagonist becomes increasingly mentally ill. What starts out as a “nervous condition”, most likely caused by post-partum depression, steadily progresses to full blown insanity. As the story reads on, the narrators thoughts and actions change, they mirror the negative emotional changes she is going through. As her mental state declines, so does her disposition and attitude toward nearly everything. The authors use of imagery through the narrator’s eyes helps the reader to more clearly understand the full magnitude of the narrators progressive and frightening emotional decay.

When the story begins, our main character has pleasant descriptions and thoughts about the summer home she, her husband John, her sister-in-law Jennie, and her baby are staying in. She describes the house and grounds as beautiful and pleasing. As she takes a tour of the grounds she comes upon a “delicious garden!…large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them” (20). As she enters the house, she and John decide to stay in the nursery room upstairs. She describes the room as a “big, airy room…with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore” (33). She seems positive and eager to begin their vacation at the house. When looking out her bedroom window, she sees the garden and quickly becomes fixated with it’s beauty. She describes what she can see out each window of her bedroom. Out one window, there is the garden “…those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, and the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees” (60). Out the other window “…a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shady lane that runs down there from the house” (61).

As the story progresses, her descriptions become increasingly unpleasant and ultimately gruesome; due to her obsession with the wallpaper. When she first discovers the paper in her bedroom, she is instantly infatuated with it. She reveals that she “never saw a worse paper in my life” (33). She describes the color as “repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (35). Her beautiful descriptions of the house and its contents begin to decline. She now uses ugly descriptions when talking about her bedroom. “The floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out her and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it has been through wars” (74). She says that she “doesn’t mind it a bit--only the paper” (75).

Her obsession with the paper rapidy becomes more severe. She says “it dwells in my mind so!” (95). The narrator goes on to speak of the wallpaper constantly. It seems to be the most important thing on her mind. She studies it day in and day out, trying to discover anything she can about it. She describes how she exhausts herself in trying to figure out what direction the pattern is supposed to go in. It literally wears her out; paragraph 103 describes “…the interminable grotesques seems to form around a common center and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it”. Her mental state clearly takes a turn for the worse when she begins to describe seeing things in the paper. She has delusions of moving figures that eventually form shapes of women. She also begins to become somewhat paranoid. “Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I keep watch of it all the same” (121). She feels that the women and images in the wallpaper truly do exist, but that her husband and Jennie would think her to be even more sick than she is. She describes that “the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous” (123, 124). She seems scared of the woman in the wallpaper who is “creeping about behind the pattern” (125). As she studies the pattern more, her thoughts of it become gruesome.

As her mental deterioration reaches it’s worst point, she describes the wallpaper as a “fungus”, the color as “hideous”, and the pattern “torturing”. She talks about how you “think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is