“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman deals with a woman whose husband and brother believes that she has a temporary nervous depression. As she stands in an old children’s playroom inside an abandoned house, this particular yellow wallpaper catches her eyes and mysteriously keep her attention.
As the story progresses, the yellow wallpaper symbolizes the main female character’s situation in her state of mind. “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern looks like a broken neck ad two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness.” (Gilman, pg.5) The yellow wallpaper is what is making the narrator going crazy. It keep drawing in her attention and making her upset when she, not only can’t figure out the pattern, but can’t figure out why it has such an attraction to her. She knows that it must have a special meaning behind it, since her mind keeps referring back to it. “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” (Gilman, pg.9) AT this point, the wallpaper is a representation of the narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator has asked her husband if they could leave from the house but he insists that it’s going o make her “better” from her depression. When the narrator saw the woman behind bars, it represents herself because she feels trapped. She’s not able to walk around without her husband or his sister behind her back. She’s not able to write freely; she has to sneak and write when nobody is around. Her husband checks up on her to make sure she has taken her naps like she’s young child. She’s not able to release her true self because she constantly has someone watching over her. “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman, pg.15) This quote is important because it’s almost as though the narrator is claiming her independence. Every time she would look at the wallpaper, she would see the woman behind bars, reminding herself of her own situation. Ripping the yellow wallpaper up is like a release from her husband’s ways to keep her closed.