The Yellow Wallpaper

The designs that appear in the wallpaper patterns are as frenzied and chaotic as the thoughts and observations that mark the narrator’s weakening grasp on reality. The narrator uses violent language to describe the pattern of the wallpaper, an inanimate object that carries little emotional weight in and of itself. The narrator projects her madness onto the wallpaper, dramatizing her descriptions of the designs and using alarming language like “commit suicide” (133), “a broken neck” (135), and “great slanting waves of optic horror” (137) to discuss the wallpaper. This frightening imagery, of which only the reader is aware, communicates the seriousness of the narrator’s problems; ironically, no one else in the household takes the narrator seriously when she speaks of her concerns about herself, and then it becomes too late.

Inside the wallpaper pattern, the imaginary woman leads a mirrored existence to that of the narrator. Like the narrator, who passes her days trapped inside her bedroom, the woman in the wallpaper is trapped inside the wallpaper. Both women move around within the confines of their respective prisons, and the narrator’s writings and her projections of herself onto the woman of her hallucinations reveals what the narrator is unable to say about her own condition. Once the woman in the wallpaper is free, the narrator is then able to celebrate both her alter-ego’s triumphant escape from the wallpaper and her own escape from a suffocating reality.