critical analysis essay on the yellow wallpaper

A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around, since he has forbidden her to write until she is well again, believing it will overexcite her.

Through a series of short instalments, we learn more about the narrator’s situation, and her treatment at the hands of her doctor husband and her sister-in-law.

To summarise the story, then: the narrator and her husband John, a doctor, have come to stay at a large country house. As the story develops, we realise that the woman’s husband has brought her to the house in order to try to cure her of her mental illness (he has told her that repairs are being carried out on their home, which is why they have had to relocate to a mansion).

His solution, or treatment, is effectively to lock her away from everyone – including her own family, except for him – and to forbid her anything that might excite her, such as writing. (She writes her account of what happens to her, and the effect it has on her, in secret, hiding her pen and paper when her husband or his sister come into the room.)

John’s suggested treatment for his wife also extends to relieving her of maternal duties: their baby is taken out of her hands and looked after by John’s sister, Jennie. Jennie also does all of the cooking and housework.

It becomes clear, as the story develops, that depriving the female narrator of anything to occupy her mind is making her mental illness worse, not better.

The narrator confides that she cannot even cry in her husband’s company, or when anyone else is present, because that will be interpreted as a sign that her condition is worsening – and her husband has promised (threatened?) to send her to another doctor, Weir Mitchell, if her condition doesn’t show signs of improving. And according to a female friend who has been treated by him, Weir Mitchell is like her husband and brother ‘only more so’ (i.e. stricter).

The narrator then outlines in detail how she sometimes sits for hours on end in her room, tracing the patterns in the yellow wallpaper. She then tells us she thinks she can see a woman ‘stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.’ At this point, she changes her mind, and goes from being fond of the pattern in the yellow wallpaper to wishing she could go away from the place.

She tells John that she isn’t getting any better in this house and that she would like to leave, but he tells her she is looking healthier and that they cannot return home for another three weeks, until their lease is up and the ‘repairs’ at home have been completed.

Despondent, the narrator tells us how she is becoming more obsessed by the yellow wallpaper, especially at night when she is unable to sleep and so lies awake watching the pattern in the wallpaper, which she says resembles a fungus.

She starts to fear her husband. She becomes paranoid that her husband and sister-in-law, Jennie, are trying to decipher the pattern in the yellow wallpaper, and she becomes determined to beat them to it. (Jennie was actually checking the wallpaper because the thought it was staining their clothes; this is the reason she gives to the narrator when asked about it, anyway. However, the more likely reason is that she and John have noticed the narrator’s obsession with looking at the wallpaper, and are becoming concerned.)

Next, the narrator tells us she has noticed the strange smell of the wallpaper, and tells us she seriously considered burning down the house to try to solve the mystery of what she smell was. She concludes that it is simply ‘a yellow smell!’ We now realise that the narrator is losing her mind rather badly.

She becomes convinced that the ‘woman behind’ the yellow wallpaper is shaking it, thus moving the front pattern of the paper. She says she has seen this woman creeping about the grounds of the house during the day; she returns to behind the wallpaper at night.

The narrator then tells us that she believes John and Jennie have become ‘affected’ by the wallpaper – that they are losing their minds from being exposed to it. So the narrator begins stripping the yellow wallpaper from the walls, much to the consternation of Jennie. John has all of his wife’s things moved out of the room, ready for them to leave the house. While John is out, the narrator locks herself inside the now bare room and throws the key out the window, so she cannot be disturbed.

She has become convinced that there are many creeping women roaming the grounds of the house, all of them originating from behind the yellow wallpaper, and that she is one of them. The story ends with her husband banging on the door to be let in, fetching the key when she tells him it’s down by the front door mat, and bursting into the room – whereupon he faints, at the sight of his wife creeping around the room.

That concludes a summary of the ‘plot’ of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. But what does it all mean?

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ begins by dangling the idea that what we are about to read is a haunted house story, a Gothic tale, a piece of horror. Why else, wonders the story’s female narrator, would the house be available so cheaply unless it was haunted? And why had it remained unoccupied for so long? This is how many haunted house tales begin.

And this will turn out to be true, in many ways – the story is often included in anthologies of horror fiction, and there is a ‘haunting’ of a kind going on in the story – but as ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ develops we realise we’re reading something far more unsettling than a run-of-the-mill haunted house story, because the real ghosts and demons are either inside the narrator’s troubled mind or else her own husband and her sister-in-law.

Of course, these two things are linked. Because one of the ‘morals’ of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – if ‘moral’ is not too strong a word to use of such a story – is that the husband’s treatment of his wife’s mental illness only succeeds in making her worse , rather than better, until her condition reaches the point where she is completely mad, suffering from hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. So ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a haunted house story … but the only ghosts are inside the narrator’s head.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ borrows familiar tropes from a Gothic horror story – it ends with the husband taking an axe to the bedroom door where his cowering wife is imprisoned – but the twist is that, by the end of the story, she has imprisoned herself in her deluded belief that she is protecting her husband from the ‘creeping women’ from behind the wallpaper, and he is prepared to beat down the door with an axe out of genuine concern for his sick wife, rather than to butcher her, in the style of Bluebeard or Jack Torrance.

Narrative Style

As we mentioned at the beginning of this analysis, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around. But it also has the effect of shifting the narrative tense: from the usual past tense to the more unusual present tense.

Only one year separates ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ from George Egerton’s first volume of short stories , which made similarly pioneering use of present-tense narration in order to depict female consciousness.

The literary critic Ruth Robbins has made the argument that the past tense (or ‘perfect tense’) is unsuited to some modes of fiction because it offers the ‘perspective that leads to judgment’: because events have already occurred, we feel in a position to judge the characters involved.

Present-tense narration deters us from doing this so readily, for two reasons. First, we are thrown in amongst the events, experiencing them as they happen almost, so we feel complicit in them. Second, because things are still unfolding seemingly before our very eyes, we feel that to attempt to pass judgment on what’s happening would be too rash and premature: we don’t know for sure how things are going to play out yet.

Given that Gilman is writing about a mentally unstable woman being mistreated by her male husband (and therefore, given his profession, by the medical world too), her decision to plunge us headlong into the events of the story encourages us to listen to what the narrator is telling us before we attempt to pronounce on what’s going on.

The fact that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is narrated in the first person, from the woman’s own perspective and in her own voice, is also a factor: the only access we have to her treatment (or mistreatment) and to her husband’s behaviour and personality is through her: what she tells us and how she tells it to us.

But there is another narrative advantage to this present-tense diary structure: we as readers are forced to appraise everything we are told by the narrator, and scrutinise it carefully, deciding whether we are being told the whole story or whether the narrator, in her nervous and unstable state, may not be seeing things as they really are.

A good example of this is when, having told us at length how she follows the patterns on the yellow wallpaper on the walls of her room, sometimes for hours on end, the narrator then tells us she is glad her baby doesn’t have to live in the same room, because someone as ‘impressionable’ as her child wouldn’t do well in such a room.

The dramatic irony which the narrator cannot see but which we, tragically, can, is that she is every bit as impressionable as a small child, and the yellow wallpaper – and, more broadly, her effective incarceration – is clearly having a deleterious effect on her mental health. (The story isn’t perfect: Gilman telegraphs the irony a little too strongly when, in the next breath, she has her narrator tell us, with misplaced confidence, ‘I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.’)

In the last analysis, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is so unsettling because it plays with established Gothic horror conventions and then subverts them in order to expose the misguided medical practices used in an attempt to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ women who are suffering from mental or nervous disorders. It has become a popular feminist text about the male mistreatment of women partly because the ‘villain’, the narrator’s husband John, is acting out of a genuine (if hubristic) belief that he knows what’s best for her.

The whole field of nineteenth-century patriarchal society and the way it treats women thus comes under scrutiny, in a story that is all the more powerful for refusing to preach, even while it lets one such mistreated woman speak for herself.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

10 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”

I absolutely loved this story. read it a few times in a row when I first crossed paths with it a few years ago –

“The Yellow Wallpaper” remains one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. Excellent analysis!

Fantastic book.

I cringe every time this story appears on a reading list or in a curriculum textbook. It’s almost hysterical in tone and quite disturbing in how overstated the “abuse” of the wife is supposed to be. It’s right up there with “The Awakening” as feminist literature that hinders, instead of promoting, the dilemma of 19th century women.

How is it overstated?

To witness the woman’s unraveling and how ignored she is, to me, a profound statement how people with emotional distress are not treated with respect.

Pingback: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Summary of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story – Interesting Literature

Terrific analysis. Gothic fiction is always open to many forms of reading and particularly for feminist reading – as openly presented by Angela Carter’ neo-gothic stories (which I would love to read your analyses of one day Oliver!). ‘the Yellow Wallpaper’ I think is the go-to story for most feminist commentators on Gothic fiction – and rightly so. I can’t help notice the connections between this story and the (mis)treatments of Sigmund Freud. Soooo much in this story to think about that I feel like a kiddie in sweet shop!

Thank you as always, Ken, for the thoughtful comment – and I completely agree about the links with Freud. The 1890s really was a pioneering age for psychiatric treatment/analysis, though we cringe at some of the ideas that were seriously considered (and put into practice). Oddly enough I’ve just been rearranging the pile of books on the floor of my study here at IL Towers, and The Bloody Chamber is near the top of my list of books to cover in due course!

I will wait with abated breath for your thoughts! I love Angela Carter :)

Comments are closed.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

*** Enter the $2,000 College Transitions No Essay Scholarship Contest ***

The Yellow Wallpaper: Summary and Analysis

July 16, 2023

Reading this “The Yellow Wallpaper” summary and analysis will help students gain a solid understanding of a canonical short story. In this article, we’ll analyze the historical and biographical relevance, characters, symbols, themes, and more. We’ll also consider the story from several critical lenses. By the end, readers will be peeling back layers of meaning as if stripping away sheets of wallpaper to reveal multiple, even paradoxical interpretations.

But first, if you haven’t already done so, read “The Yellow Wallpaper.” It’s just over 6,000 words and can be read in one afternoon. Once you’re finished, step back into 19th-century New England for a little historical context.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary: The Author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born in Connecticut a year before the Civil War, had an unusual upbringing. Her father abandoned her family in her infancy, and her mother relied on the help of her husband’s sisters. These women made a pretty incredible lineup. They included suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and educationalist Catharine Beecher. Gilman’s impressive aunts influenced her understanding of what a woman could accomplish. Her mother, on the other hand, forbade reading fiction. Despite receiving only four years of formal schooling, Gilman enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. In this era, most women didn’t attend college at all, and settled instead for marriage.

Around this time, Gilman met Martha Luther, and the two became extremely close. Their friendship evolved into a romance, one constrained by society’s codes and anti-gay laws. Yet she married Charles Walter Stetson at 24. A year later, she suffered postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. As this depression deepened, her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, prescribed a “rest cure.” The treatment involved long, frequent naps, a focus on childcare, and a particular caveat: Charlotte should “never touch pen, brush or pencil” for as long as she lived. For someone passionate about poetry, this rest cure was a death sentence.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary (Continued)

Luckily for Gilman, her depression subsided after she and Stetson divorced—another unusual choice for a woman at this time. We find echoes of these autobiographical events in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New England Magazine published Gilman’s story in 1892. While Gilman went on to publish books of poetry and give lectures on topics including suffrage and social reform, “The Yellow Wallpaper” remains her chef d’oeuvre, and has been anthologized in various collections.

Progressive or Problematic Feminist?

Unfortunately, we can’t revisit Gilman without acknowledging her unsavory beliefs. Yes, she championed social reform, and yes, she was related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Yet Gilman’s views on race appear convoluted and misguided at best. A deeper look into her writing reveals blatant racism. Though not a supporter of slavery, Gilman adopted a eugenicist stance, claiming that Anglo-Saxons belonged to a purer class of people. These dangerous and abhorrent views complicate the history of women’s rights in America—a movement that owes much of its success to black suffragists .

Though we may study Gilman’s work through a feminist lens, we certainly should not mistake her for a hero. She’s a complex figure, a champion of women’s rights, and an ignorant member of the white elite, blinded by privilege. In fact, the paradoxes in her biography point to a bigger entanglement of class, power, gender, and race in America. Thus, we shouldn’t ignore her problematic views when reading her work. Rather, we ought to incorporate and critique them as part of our analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Characters

A slim cast of characters appears in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” We first encounter the narrator, an unnamed woman, and her husband John, a physician. They appear as “people like John and myself.” This immediate coupling of the two main characters creates a false sense of companionship. Yet as the story progresses, the reader will notice a strange dichotomy. John’s opinions on his wife’s health, and his power to impose his opinions, are at odds with her real mental and physical needs.

The narrator could be called “unreliable.” As her mental health deteriorates, the reader becomes less capable of differentiating between what the narrator sees and reality. This distorted point of view allows for an interesting ambiguity and multiple interpretations. For example, among our list of characters we must consider those that don’t exist. The narrator writes, “I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths,” though John claims they don’t exist.

Jennie, John’s sister, lingers at the story’s periphery, taking care of household chores and the baby. This baby remains offstage, for the narrator feels too nervous to care for him. (“Jennie” is a nickname for “Jane,” which also appears in the story.) Other offstage characters include Gilman’s real-life physician, Weir Mitchell, and a brother, also a physician. While their roles seem minimal, these authority figures work to further dissolve the narrator’s credibility. We also hear of cousins Henry and Julia, whom the narrator isn’t allowed to visit. She does briefly see her mother and Nellie (perhaps a sister), and Nellie’s children. Lastly, the narrator mentions someone named “Mary,” who may be a servant. (From a critical race lens, we might ask if Mary is black. This would explain why her presence appears inconsequential to a white, upper-class narrator.)

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary

Much of what occurs in “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes place in the narrator’s mind. The story begins with the narrator’s first secret journal entry. She describes a summer house they’ve rented, which she finds “queer,” and “haunted.” John dismisses these impressions. He prefers rational ideas. He forbids the narrator from daydreaming, as well as writing, or performing any stimulating work. In fact, because of her condition, which John calls a “temporary nervous depression,” the narrator cannot have “society and stimulus.” Rather than pick a pretty room, she must sleep in an eerie nursery covered in garish strips of yellow wallpaper.

The stifling atmosphere of “The Yellow Wallpaper” only worsens. Work takes John away most days. The narrator’s strength has weakened, so she cannot write in her journal for two weeks, nor care for her baby. Describing the room in greater detail, we learn that the floor is “scratched and gouged and splintered.” The wallpaper’s pattern appears to crawl with “absurd, unblinking eyes.” Occasionally, the narrator spots “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” there.

Next, Jennie takes on more housekeeping responsibilities. The narrator writes infrequently, recounting her exhaustion, despite enforced naps. John refuses to leave early, though his wife feels worse and cries all the time. Nevertheless, John insists she’s improving. She investigates the figure in the wallpaper and determines she’s a woman. This woman crawls about and shakes the bars that form a pattern on the wallpaper. Determined to discover the wallpaper’s secret, the narrator waits until John is out. Then she locks herself in the nursery and strips off large swaths of paper. When John finds her, she’s creeping about the room, just like the women who creep in the paper and along the hedges. John faints—and the narrator continues to creep right over his prone body!

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary: Symbols

The wallpaper serves as the story’s title and primary symbol. The wallpaper becomes the narrator’s obsession, and thus reflects and represents her mental instability. Yet this symbol has layers. Not only does it represent an impenetrable wall where rational thought ends and madness begins. It also offers up a surface on which the narrator can project her own fantasies. In this way, the yellow wallpaper becomes a multi-layered symbol of creative freedom, repression of that freedom, and the madness that ensues.

Within the wallpaper, the narrator finds various images. These images, too, serve as symbols. For example, we might interpret the eyes in the pattern as a sort of watchfulness. They could represent the gaze of society, keeping an eye on the narrator. Reversely, we could interpret these eyes as belonging to the woman, or women, trapped below the paper. In this sense, their eyes reflect an inability to speak. They can look, but they cannot express their imprisonment. Likewise, the bars in the wallpaper point to the repression of women. The narrator describes these bars as an outside pattern, which a woman beneath shakes to no avail.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary: Irony

Besides symbolism, “The Yellow Wallpaper” employs an array of literary devices. Irony pervades the entire story and allows for double interpretations. For example, the narrator writes, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” The reader can read this at face value. In this case, the narrator suggests that marriage simply involves harmless laughter. Read ironically, the reader will see that the narrator is stating that a wife is not expected to be taken seriously. Irony reveals that John patronizes his wife (or “little girl”). He “cares” for her through a combination of absence and prohibition, denying her any liberty. He contradicts himself, telling his wife she’s fine one moment, then convincing her she’s sick when it suits him.

The nursery room carries an allusion to a very different sort of room. The more the narrator describes this room, the more it sounds like it may have been used to restrain someone. (The bed is nailed to the floor.) Here Gilman invites her readers to recollect Charlotte Brontë’s famous madwoman in the attic, the character Bertha from Jane Eyre . Readers who make this connection may wonder if John insisted on keeping his wife here for the same reason Mr. Rochester hid Bertha. Through allusion, the nursery takes on an even more sinister appearance.

The couple’s baby acts as another allusion, this time to postpartum depression, which Gilman herself suffered from. Doctors at the turn of the century understood very little about postpartum depression. They dismissed it as hysteria, a catch-all phrase to explain away female ailments.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Summary: Foreshadowing

*Trigger warning: this subsection discusses mental health in relation to suicide, and may be distressing to readers.

Foreshadowing appears in the story as well. When describing the wallpaper, the narrator talks of curving lines that “suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles…” Later, she describes “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.” A third reference to suicide appears when the narrator states that “to jump out of the window would be admirable exercise.”

Yet Gilman’s narrator remains alive at the end of the story. These planted hints of coming death have a different end goal. They ask the reader to take women, and women’s artistic endeavors, seriously. Gilman herself spoke of suicide during her “rest cure,” when she wasn’t allowed to produce art. The sculptor Camille Claudel and, decades later, writer Virginia Woolf both attempted suicide by jumping from a window. Through this foreshadowing, “The Yellow Wallpaper” warns against a greater societal tragedy taking place across the centuries.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Analysis: Theme 1

Taken together, these literary devices allow readers to better understand several underlying themes. The first involves the suffering and subordination of women in society. This larger social commentary becomes particularly evident when the narrator begins to see “a great many women” behind the bars of the wallpaper. Through a critical feminist perspective, we might say that the narrator seems to intuit the past repression of other women just like her. She senses that she’s part of a larger, systemic problem. Other details in the story point to this system. Jennie, presumably well-educated and belonging to the upper class, has no prospects other than serving her brother as a housekeeper.

The second theme involves the danger of rest cures. While “resting” sounds innocuous enough, being forced to do nothing can turn into torture. In fact, this lifestyle resembles prison life—no wonder the wallpaper appears to have bars. In the late 19th century, rest cures were prescribed to women who suffered real ailments, including depression. These rest cures backfired, enhancing symptoms of depression. They corralled women into a position of uselessness, just like the narrator state in this story. Deprived of friends, work, hobbies, and exercise, and unable to speak of this deprivation, women were reduced to the role of mother, or worse: a birthing instrument.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Analysis: Theme 3

The third theme involves creative power as emancipation. While writing wearies the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” it also offers her rare moments of autonomy and agency. The narrator states, “I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” In Gilman’s time, society and medicine reinforced the theory that education would overstimulate women’s brains and lead to hysteria. Today we know that women’s and men’s brains function the same way. Women are equally capable of creative output. In fact, studies show that creative outlets allow people to heal faster. Gilman and many others knew of the benefits of working. In fact, many men in her time did too. Yet those who wished to uphold a strictly patriarchal system forbid women from expressing their opinions. They feared that these opinions would undermine men’s superior positions.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Analysis and Conclusions

As we’ve seen from “The Yellow Wallpaper” summary, this short story must be read at multiple levels. Various perspectives, from a biographical standpoint to a feminist lens to a critical race lens allow readers to peel back layers of meaning. So what can we make of the ending?

The story ends with the narrator believing she herself has emerged from the wallpaper. Most analyses commonly state that this ending depicts her descent into a full-fledged psychosis. And yet, readers may also come to an inverse conclusion. If the women behind the wallpaper’s bars represent female suppression, we can interpret the narrator’s final act as one of defiance and emancipation.

Rather than throw herself out the window, as a tragic female heroine might, the narrator disobeys her oppressive husband and locks the door. Just as divorce allowed Gilman to overcome her depression, Gilman’s narrator breaks the bonds of her condition by defying her husband. In doing so, she gains autonomy. Merging with the woman in the wallpaper, she frees the woman trapped behind it. In this interpretation, we can conclude that by harnessing her imagination, the narrator finally sets herself free.

Additional Resources

For more literature-related content, look no further than the following links:

“High School Success”
Best colleges English
Best colleges creative writing
The Road Not Taken Analysis & Meaning
The Great Gatsby – Themes & Expert Analysis
High School Success

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.