Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper: Story of a Woman Confined in a Room With Ugly Yellow Wallpaper, Who Gradually Goes Insane: Examples of Opposites
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the story of a woman, confined in a room with ugly yellow wallpaper, who gradually goes insane. The story is written in first person, which makes it sound as if the writer is the speaker, but writing it this way makes the experience of the woman's growing difficulties more intense. The author sets the reader up to feel that the speaker is the writer from the second sentence in the story, and uses this technique to build tension based on conflicting perceptions throughout the story. From the very beginning, the reader feels that he or she is experiencing what the narrator experiences. The narrator's difficulties are revealed subtly at first. In the second sentence, the speaker says that she thinks the house is haunted, although she finds the idea charming at that time. She has several reasons for believing this, one being that the
" She hates the wallpaper, and yet she cannot ignore it. Through the character's struggle with opposites, the reader sees both the reality and the increasingly distorted perceptions of the narrator. The wallpaper has begun to seem alive to her. In a final irony, she comes to imagine that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper, trying to get out. She also notices that it has been empty for a long time. The opposite is true: she is trapped in the room, but on the outside of the wallpaper, not behind it. house is part of a hereditary estate but that the rent for the summer was quite low. Later in the story she says she is "quite fond" of the room, but in the same sentence calls the wallpaper that dominates it "horrid. She has no say in anything, and it is he who picks the room with the yellow wallpaper although she much preferred another room. She loves all the windows in her room but hates the wallpaper. The tension between husband and wife is a lot like the speaker's larger struggle with sanity and insanity. Throughout the story, Gilman uses these opposites to reveal both the reality of the narrator's situation and what the woman believes is going on, resulting in a story about madness that reveals both the writer's understanding of reality and her character's descent into madness. Her husband, a physician, does not allow her to leave this room much, and she hides her writing from him because he does not want her to write. " Such subtle suggestions of struggling with opposites only reveal the state of her mind later in the story, increasing the tension of the story line.
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