"There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind That Outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day" - The Yellow Wallpaper

           Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a commentary on mental health in the late 1800s. You can connect the story to how mental health was treated, how women in general were treated, and different themes dealing with isolation or confinement. There are countless discussion points one could make about this story. I want to take a closer look into the actual wallpaper and what it symbolizes throughout the story.

            Before Gilman even brings us into the room with yellow wallpaper we get the sense that there is something off in this house. The house is surprisingly available for John and his wife to live in. The narrator explains that “there was some legal trouble… anyhow, the place has been empty for years” (486). Even when the narrator is describing the house in a positive way I got the sense that there was more to the story.

“The Most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock…” (486).

            So it’s a beautiful old house. But it’s secluded from everything around them. Even on the grounds the landscaping and the architecture is closing you in and keeping you away from the outside world. The hedges act as a barriers, the walls close you in, things lock you out, or most likely, in. It gives the reader an uneasy feeling and the narrator is left feeling uneasy about it.

“There is something strange about the house – I can feel it.” (486).

 As we move into the house we are introduced to the room upstairs where John and the narrator will be sleeping. The narrator implies that it used to be a nursery and that’s why the windows have bars over them. That may be true, it may be some lie she tells herself to better her situation. Regardless, the bars over the window add to the isolation of the house and can contain her in her room easier. But what stands out to the narrator is the wallpaper in the room.

“The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.” (487).

She goes onto describe is as patterns that “[commit] every artistic sin” (487), “smoldering unclean yellow” (487), and patterns that look like “they suddenly commit suicide” (487). It is not a pleasant wallpaper. It seems that the wallpaper is really distracting her from his sickness, whatever it may be, and the fact that she is stuck in this secluded house in a room with bars on the window. She begins to think that wallpaper is growing on her and that she likes her room so much because of it. It starts to become an obsession of hers. And soon it starts to mirror her own situation.

            She starts to see this woman in the wallpaper. The woman moves around in the wallpaper; she is “stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern” (491). She starts to think that the woman wants to get out from behind the paper. As the story progresses the woman in the wallpaper becomes clearer and clearer to the narrator. It sort of has an inverse relationship with the narrators mental health. As she digresses the hallucinations progress. She starts to notice at night that the patterns “becomes bars! The outside pattern… and the woman behind it is as plain as could be.” (492). I feel that this reflects the narrators actual situation. She is barred into her room. The outside of the house could be like the outside pattern that keeps her trapped in this room. And she’s the woman stuck in there wanting to get out. More and more the narrator starts to draw parallels with the woman in the wallpaper. “By daylight she is subdued, quiet…. It keeps me quiet by the hour.” (493). Both the wallpaper woman and the narrator are active at night and quiet during the day. As the story goes on it seems that the two merge to become one. By the end of the story the two are indistinguishable. The narrator becomes her hallucination. It makes me wonder if the whole time she has been this woman in the wallpaper. Maybe she just didn’t realize what she was doing at night and she created this other woman to explain everything. This just goes to explain how difficult mental health problems can be to the individual. When reality is out of the question what does someone have left? Should someone in this state of mind be left alone in an old house at all? No one should feel like they are trapped behind anything forced to “creep” around in the hopes of getting out one day. People shouldn’t be forced to feel this way. There needs to be other ways to help people who are not in the right state of mind.