The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

Setting is a critical part of any story, developing both the time and place in which the story takes place, as well as mood and tone of the text. This certainly takes no exception in Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Not only does the setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper” achieve the above, but also it goes one level deeper by giving the reader insight into the narrator’s mindset. By utilizing the setting as described by the narrator, along with the knowledge of the narrator’s battle with hysteria, the reader can fully interpret the setting, its impact on the narrator, as well as determine Gilman’s implications throughout the story. Gilman sets the mood of the story by including the narrator’s initial reaction to the house. At the beginning

Based on the narrator’s description of the room, the reader learns that the “windows are barred for little children” and that there are “rings and things in the walls” (534). Using these observations, the narrator determines that the room was first “a nursery, then playroom and gymnasium” (534). However, taking a closer look at the setting of the room, the reader realizes that the narrator isn’t exactly seeing things as they are and probably is in denial. From the reader’s perspective, the room is most likely one of a patient in an insane asylum. The “barred windows” are there to prevent possible suicide of patients and the “rings and things” are there as a form of activity that patients can do while being there. This suspicion is further developed when she describes the wallpaper as being “in great patches around the head of my bed, about as far as [she] can reach” (534). This implies that former mental patients were being tied up to the bed, so they would scratch the wall above them, thus explaining the

The narrator first describes the wallpaper as “repellent, almost revolting” but she cannot ignore it. Her attraction to the yellow wallpaper grows as she attempts to figure out its pattern. She keeps looking at the yellow wallpaper and determines that the pattern is a woman trapped within the wallpaper, “shaking [the bars] hard”, trying to escape (542). This ultimately leads to the climatic ending with the narrator ripping the wallpaper apart, crawling on the floor alongside the rooms’ walls, and completely “losing it”. Even though the narrator’s obsession of figuring out the wallpaper’s pattern is the primary impetus that causes her to go insane, there is a greater underlying reason as to why this happened. The yellow wallpaper, combined, with the rest of the room, serves as a symbol of Gilman’s critique of confinement of both women in marriage and the mentally ill, which the narrator suffers