Yellow Wallpaper Flaws

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character, otherwise known as the narrator, plays a crazed, mysterious character. Throughout the short story she tells of her own life, yet the reader never even learns her name. The narrator is undoubtedly a Jane Doe. Within the first lines of the story, we find out valuable information about our narrator. The narrator says, “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral homes for the summer,” Just within this statement we find out that our narrator is a woman, more than likely middle class due to the fact she refers to herself as “mere ordinary people”, and that she has a husband named John. It is not her name or personal history that we need to know to understand

This short story resembles parts of a dark or gothic novel. She has a domineering husband, unfair and unnecessary restrictions, and she is crazed. Even through all this, she still writes with sophistication and grace, and continues to write in her journal through her mental instability and breakdowns. Due to her lack of activity, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, and the woman inside. She begins peeling away at the wallpaper to free the woman behind the pattern. Referring to the woman in the paper, she says, “I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did?” She also says, “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!” Through these quotes readers can see that the narrator has started to identify with the woman in the paper herself. She believes that she is a woman freed from behind ugly wallpaper, yet she still writes like a classy societal lady. The narrator was not just telling a story of a mentally impaired woman who was obsessed with wallpaper; she was conveying a message of social issues concerning treatment of the mentally ill and of women