Name: Polly Chrysochou
             Department: Faculty of English Literature, Short Stories
             Assignment: Dissertation on "The Yellow Wallpaper"
             The importance of the wallpaper in "The Yellow Wallpaper", and the 'three' sides
             of Jane
            
             The 'trio' in Jane
            
             In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", Gilman makes direct or indirect reference to objects which play a symbolic role within the context of the story and elucidate its thematic fibre, a fibre which revolves around the main character and whose essence is integrated in her inner constitution. Thus, in order to come to terms with the story and draw certain conclusions based on this fibre, it is crucial to examine these objects and what they symbolise within this thematic fibre and obtain a better understanding of the main character.
             The main object which forms the backdrop to this fibre and generates the thread of action is the wallpaper itself, a mirror image of the heroine Jane and her cohesive selves, an opaque medium into the subdivisions of her own mind. Jane, who is also the narrator of the story and its centre of consciousness, is recounting her domesticated and repressed way of life, as well as her husband's treatment of her as a result of her postpartum depression. What emerges, however, from Jane's exposition, becomes a sinister paradox open to diverse interpretation, for what comes to the surface as a result of Jane's constant obsession with the wallpaper is an unnerving sense that she is suffering not only from postpartum depression, but also from multiple schizophrenia. Her own narration in effect becomes an egocentric psychoanalysis where the fibre of her identities can be divested and detached little by little by the reader, and constant references to the wallpaper allow for this process since it is the wallpaper itself which forms the fibre of Jane's selves. One such instance is when Jane claims that the wallpaper changes color by nig...