"The Yellow Wallpaper": A Look Into Post-Partum Depression

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the life and mind of a woman suffering from post-partum depression in the late eighteenth century. Gilman uses setting to strengthen the impact of her story by allowing the distant country mansion symbolize the loneliness of her narrator, Jane. Gilman also uses flat characters to enhance the depth of Jane’s thoughts; however, Gilman’s use of narrative technique impacts her story the most. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses interior monologue to add impact to Jane’s progression into insanity, to add insight into the relationships in the story, and to increase the depth of Jane’s connection with the yellow wallpaper it self.

First, Gilman’s use of interior monologue adds strength and power to the impact of the progression of Jane’s mental illness, by allowing the reader to experience the decline first hand through Jane’s secret journal. Carol Margaret Davison mentions Jane’s journaling in her essay Haunted House/ Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “the Yellow Wallpaper.” Davison remarks, “ ‘Authority’ is, in fact, crucial to her concerted act of secretly chronicling her side of the story, her unofficial version of events, is outlawed by her paternalist husband who consistently refuses to believe that she is seriously ill,” (56). Gilman’s choice of interior monologue enhances the “outlawed” nature of Jane’s writing and the denial of her husband to believe his wife’s illness (325). Indeed, the refusal of her husband to believe her illness and the tiring nature of her secret writing (326), all influence Jane’s already fragile mental state. Jane states in the beginning of the story, “I get so unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I am sure I...

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...th to her story. The way in which Gilman uses setting, character, and subject matter all add realism and strength to The Yellow Wallpaper. However, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s use of the narrative technique of interior monologue to tell her story adds enjoyment and, more importantly, impact for the reader.

Works Cited

Davison, Carol Margaret. "Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Women's Studies 33.1 (2004): 47-75. Academic Search

Complete. EBSCO. Web. 28 July 2010.

Hochman, Barbara. "The Reading Habit and 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'." American Literature 74.1 (2002): 89. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 28 July 2010.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia.

Literature: An Introduction to fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Sixth. New York: Pearson Longman, 2010. 325-336.