Emotional Struggles In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The narrator’s emotional struggles in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” culminate in a mental breakdown that leaves her unable to recognize her identity or situation. The setting of the story both clarifies her struggles by serving as an analogy to the distressing dynamics of her relationships and by heightening her psychosis.
John’s insistence that the two of them remain in the nursery despite his wife’s pleas and the surplus of alternative, appealing rooms in the house introduces his exertion of control over her. Gilman effectively incorporates representations of the narrator’s loss of power in her marriage through the specifics of the bedroom. The treatment to which the woman is subjected—including her husband’s disregard

She describes the color of the wallpaper as “a smouldering unclean yellow” with “a sickly sulphur tint.” The depiction is evocative of urine, which would be inescapable in a house with a baby in the late 19th century, without the luxury of disposable diapers. The smell would permeate the home, but although the narrator’s baby is a reasonable source of this “peculiar odor,” she attributes it to the wallpaper. The protagonist’s description of this particular aspect of the setting indicates a persistent, if subconscious, regard for her baby. She provides imagery with similar connotations when she describes a portion of the wallpaper where “the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down,” similar to the lolling head of an infant. Gilman’s inclusion of these descriptions of the surroundings reveals the guilt the narrator feels for “not [doing her] duty in any way.” She is unable to attend to her child due to her nervousness, but all the same, she regrets her failure to fulfill her expected roles in the family. Through the author’s use of setting, she clarifies the narrator’s sense of shame due to her roles as an absentee mother to her “dear baby” and a “comparative burden” to

And I 've pulled off most of the paper, so you can 't put me back!" Her psychosis is the result of forced inactivity and relative isolation in a disturbing, “almost revolting” room. In this sense, the setting is the cause of the character’s development. In assuming the identity of the woman created in response to the disconcerting room, the narrator simultaneously takes on a new behavior toward her husband. Referring to him as both “young man” and “that man” shows irreverence that is not articulated in her earlier entries. Likewise, creeping over him shows a disregard for the man that she has revered and felt guilty for