37 pages • 1 hour read
Charlotte Perkins GilmanThe Yellow Wallpaper
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1892A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a writer whose husband has forbade her to work due to a mysterious ailment called “temporary nervous depression,” or “a slight hysterical tendency” (131). She is married to a physician named John and has recently given birth to a baby boy. With her husband John, their infant son and two others, the narrator spends a summer in a rented mansion in the countryside. Although she claims an attachment to her infant son, the narrator cannot bear to spend time with him, which suggests she is suffering from what is now understood to be postpartum depression and/or anxiety. As the summer passes, the narrator spends little time in the company of others, and her mental health steadily declines until she loses all sense of reality. Although she makes efforts to alert her husband to her worsening condition and to her own treatment preferences, he ignores her wishes and condition, which only makes the situation worse. The narrator appears to know what she needs, but she is denied and dismissed, which only intensifies her decline.
The issue of the narrator’s name is unclear. In her last spoken statement of the story, the narrator says to John, “I’ve got out at last […] in spite of you and Jane” (147). One interpretation of this use of the name Jane is that the narrator has fully taken on her doppelganger’s identity and refers to herself in the third person. If this is true, the name of Jane is symbolic of all women. On the other hand, if Jane does not refer to the narrator and the narrator is not given a name, her namelessness is highly symbolic in a similar way; her name could be any name, just as any woman could inadvertently find herself in the same situation the narrator describes in the diary entries that make up the short story.
John
John is the narrator’s husband, and he is a successful and well-respected doctor who clearly admires the work of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, neurologist and inventor of the rest cure. The narrator’s feelings towards her husband and his version of Weir Mitchell’s rest cure are ambiguous. At the start of the story, she wonders if his being a doctor renders him incapable of fully understanding her condition; though John, like the narrator’s brother, is a physician of “high standing” (131), he cannot see his wife’s suffering and instability. Alongside this description of John, the narrator expresses a sense of gratitude as well as admiration for her husband, suggesting that she accepts their gender roles and their marriage as it stands. Just as the narrator symbolizes all women, the name John, which is perhaps the most commonplace for men as Jane is for women, suggests that the narrator’s husband symbolizes all men, especially the ones who believe their positions to be superior to those of women. John appears to be a doting husband who expresses great concern for his wife by deciding what is best for her. In doing so, he denies her agency over her own life and health, which in turn contributes to her inevitable mental decline.
Jennie
Jennie is John’s sister and the housekeeper. She attends to the narrator’s needs and checks on her regularly while John is away working. The narrator feels great affection for Jennie, who is protective of the narrator. However, according to the narrator, Jennie is perfectly satisfied with her work as a housekeeper, aspiring to nothing more. This description of Jennie suggests that she is unable to understand the narrator’s creative ambitions, and the narrator goes as far as to say that she believes Jennie “thinks it is the writing which made [her] sick” (136). Jennie accepts what John says about his wife’s illness, representing in this case the women who willingly and without suspicion accede power to men in patriarchal societies.
Mary
The narrator provides very little detail in her mention of Mary, whose role in the household is to look after the narrator’s baby. The narrator appears to trust Mary and to feel grateful for Mary, but no specific descriptions of this character appear in the story. In this way, women of a servitude status hold no social significance and are merely cogs in a household’s operations.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman—writer, social reformer, and feminist theorist—was born in Connecticut in 1860. Her father left her family when she was 7 years old, and she grew up in impoverished conditions. After a difficult childhood, Gilman sought to educate herself, and she eventually became an important contributor to social reform theory and women’s issues. Gilman married and had a daughter, and she also struggled with depression for much of her life, before and after the birth of her child. Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932, and at this time, she had already published writing on right-to-die issues; her self-inflicted death took place in California in 1935, and in her suicide letter, she asserted that she preferred using chloroform over living with cancer. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is perhaps Gilman’s best-known work, but she also wrote an influential text titled Women and Economics, which was published in 1898. In this work, she demonstrated why women should have economic independence, and she wrote about this topic again in addition to other social issues that concern women in works of non-fiction titled The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) and Does a Man Support His Wife? (1915).
Related Titles
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
