Psychoanalysis of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

As a summary this story focuses on the narrator and her history with depression that has occurred after her giving birth to her first child. On the other hand, her husband who is a doctor at the same time, suggest her to rest in a room as a treatment plan which eventually kills her productivity and increases the gap between the narrator’s true self and the narrator itself. The room that she was suggested to rest in is a room with yellow wallpaper and this explains where the name of the story comes from, with following days first narrator starts to analyze and focuses on the pattern which will eventually leads to her seeing another woman behind this yellow wallpaper and was trap inside of it. At the end of the story narrator has another episode and rips the yellow wallpaper in order to set the woman behind it free, the husband who saw her wife going mad and ripping the wallpaper faints, after that she continues to crawl around the room and the story ends.

Focusing on the symbolism that have been used in this story, the first symbol that pops up after reading the story, parallel with the name of the story as well is the ‘yellow wallpaper’. The meaning behind the color yellow is bidirectional, while the bright yellow stands for freshness, happiness and positivity, the dark yellow stands for sickness, dirt and has a disturbing effect, which in these case as the narrator distinguished as well the room that she rests in she describes the yellow as strangest yellow, has a yellow smell and unclean yellow, she even states that she can understand how children hated it. It has been stated yellow is not the greatest color to choose for a room that an individual suggested to rest in, back in the history in Egypt yellow was worn to signify the dead, also studies show that babies cry more in rooms that are painted in yellow which is parallel with what the narrator suggested earlier. I believe that the color yellow in this story suggest the narrator’s own death of creativity and how they killed her courage to create with trapping her into a room and not letting her write anymore and how it increased her depression state.

Focusing on the pattern of the wallpaper, she tries to understand how the pattern works and recognized how the pattern repeats the same pattern over and over again. I believe this repeated pattern symbolizes the female history which narrator itself is trapped too, when we look at the history we see girls becoming like their mother and eventually doing the same stuff without any desire to create or add something different and unique to the world, giving birth to a child, becoming a mother and doing house work mostly which is a repeated domestic pattern that has been followed for years which becomes a cycle. It is important to recognize that the narrator’s tendency to depression increases with her giving birth and getting locked up into a room as a treatment without writing (without creating) with the manipulation of her own husband which is a trap for her for following the patterns. Specifically, her seeing another woman behind the wallpaper that has been trapped and wants to be set free is another sign that this is her who is trapped in the pattern with her own life and she wants to be set free, in this case the woman behind the wallpaper can’t be anyone but the narrator. But if we look from a wider perspective we can state that the woman behind the wallpaper can be every female in the history as well and representing their desire to be set free and break the repeated chain.

Another symbol is the moonlight, which comes up and mentioned a lot in the story. We can explain this with the opposition of sun, while sun associated with positivity and energy, the moonlight which occurs in the night and dark times associated with suppressed things coming back to life specially feelings and thoughts. In this case it is obvious that the narrators inside world have been affected by the moonlight which lead these sorts of outcomes.

Moreover, bed is another symbol as well, bed can be linked with two ideas, first it is a place to rest and sleep and second it is place that opens up the doors of sexuality. In the story bed is strongly linked with a place to rest and also a trap that she is forced to lay in, in a deeper sense we know that female sexuality has been ignored for decades and it is not appropriate for females to have sexual desires, they should be pure and virgin which forces females to repress their sexual tendencies. But sex is also something that ends up with creation, it is the two people coming together and creating something, just like creating an idea you attract something, and it comes together with another triggering stimuli and becomes a new creation of your own. In this case her laying and resting in a bed also states that how her sexuality linked with her creation is repressed as well, she cannot write, and she have to lay and rest in the bed, there is room she stays in but there is no room for her creation and allowance for her essence to come up.

Also, the room that she has been forced to stay in is not the prettiest room in the house, there is another room with a garden view, but her husband wants her to stay in the room that is in the upstairs with dirty yellow wallpaper that is already sound depressing and limits her choice and made the choice for her. Like the room inside being not depressive enough to trigger her mental state, the only freedom based thing or inspiration based thing in the room is the window and the view that comes with it, the room that narrator stays in does have a window but it is full with bars and again underlines the fact that her freedom is limited and creates the sense that there is no way out.

There is also lots of usage of ‘I’ in the story as well which can be easily recognizable while reading the story, this excessive usage in ‘I’ helps the creation and the link of empathy between the narrator and the readers and makes story easier to understand and find something in common. Everyone who reads the story can focus on a time and associates this with the story to time when they felt trapped in a cycle and wanted to be set free and free of all the suppressions that has been exposed from the environment and the society that we live in.

I would like to focus on the ending of the story as well, the ending of the story is kind of ambiguous and open to make comments. We have learned that we should not always trust the narrator and always read the story with a doubt. In the story there is reference to a rope that has not been associated with anything, there is highly depressed woman who sees another woman behind the wallpaper and there is rope which automatically links into the idea of suicide, could it be possible if she hung herself and caused in her own death and this is her way of setting herself free. Another doubt that pops up while reading the story is her husband’s reaction, it is understandable that he saw her wife going mad in a horrific way and ended up fainting to the floor, but how true can these be? From the earlier parts of the story the narrator suggested that his husband going on business trips in the city, which automatically can be linked with him having an affair and calling it a business trip. This might look simple, but for a depressed woman who is trapped in a room and having hallucinations this is actually can be taking into account as a strong motivation to kill her own husband. At the end of the story after her husband laying on the floor she does not do anything and continues to craw in a circle around the room and always paints a picture that she is stepping on him while crawling without giving any care. Narrator herself being locked up and not having any kind of freedom in her life, her disorder and her creativity and her husband going outside deciding her what to do and probability of him having an affair increase these sorts of doubts. It might be possible that she murdered her own husband and that’s how she set herself free due to her husband being the one who suppressed her ability to write and suggest a rest treatment, with killing her husband she might have been liberated both herself and the woman behind the wallpaper and crawled out of the room to her freedom. Narrator also ends the story saying;

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

Narrator saying that her husband fainted and now she had to creep over him every time can also be associated with her setting herself free and becoming independent as well.

In addition, if we look at the history man has always been associated with power and strength, but in these case after seeing his wife becoming free he is the one who faints which shows that they are not always the one with the power and males are afraid of female power. In order for a female to become free they should be independent and should not be attached to any male figure that tells them what to do. I believe her husband fainting in the story is another sign on power of a free woman.