The Yellow Wallpaper And Virgin Suicide Analysis

Narrative Voice in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Virgin Suicides

Both The Yellow Wallpaper and The Virgin Suicides are told in first-person. The former, singular and the latter, plural. While the stories themselves are different in terms of content, the narrative used is very similar, and the narrators share similar characteristics through their respective stories. The narrators in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Virgin Suicides suffer from a neurosis of sorts, affecting how the reader understands the story. The narrators experience severe obsessive tendencies, prompts that cause them to retreat to a more juvenile state of mind, and are ambiguous about themselves. This mental impairment shown by the narrators changes how the readers interpret the

Whether or not she actually has this mental illness at the beginning is debatable. However, certain indications can be made that she is succumbing to hysteria throughout the story. Most apparent is the development of her excessive fascination with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. She uses a relatively normal choice of words to describe its repulsiveness: “The colour is a repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” (Gilman, 649). This preoccupation with the wallpaper became the primary focus of her writings and her thoughts during the story. The words the narrator uses to explain the wallpaper become much more obsessive, with the tiniest details, whether or not they are actually there, noticed by the narrator: “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind [the pattern], and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast…” (Gilman, 654). This narration forces the reader to identify with this obsession with the wallpaper. It is very quickly what the story becomes to be about, even though it was originally only meant to be her journal during the Rest

In The Virgin Suicides, there is no character development of the narrators as they serve solely to tell the story to the readers, even if they occasionally share their own opinions. Therefore, there is no need for the reader to know who the boys really are, as long as they explain the story of the Lisbon girls. This only serves to help the reader get a side of the story that’s relatively unbiased, since it’s not from the Lisbon girls themselves. This is contrary to The Yellow Wallpaper, where the ambiguity of the narrator actually adds an important element to the story: mystery. We never find out the name of the narrator, nor much of her background or what is to become of her once the story is over. The only clues the reader gets are from what she mentions about herself, her husband, her sister-in-law and from a single line she writes near the end of the story: “‘I’ve got out at last,” said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane?’…” (Gilman, 656). This line could mention her name, however, it could also be a misprint of her sister-in-law’s name, Jennie. It could also be the final clue into who she was before her downward spiral into madness through her time in the Rest Cure. This possible name is one of the only indications one has of the narrator’s identity, other than an estimated age, that she has a child and is