payment page
Genre
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is best described as a gothic horror tale, but it is also a character study and a socio-political allegory.
Narrator
The narrator of the short story is a mentally troubled young woman, possibly named Jane.
Point of View
As the main character’s fictional journal, the story is told in strict first-person narration, focusing exclusively on her own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Everything that we learn or see in the story is filtered through the narrator’s shifting consciousness, and since the narrator becomes insane over the course of the story, her perception of reality is often completely at odds with that of the other characters.
Tone
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is in a state of anxiety for much of the story, with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation—a tone Gilman wants the reader to share.
Tense
The story stays close to the narrator’s thoughts at the moment and is thus mostly in the present tense.
Protagonist
The narrator of the story, a young upper-middle-class woman who is suffering from what is most likely postpartum depression and whose illness gives her insight into her (and other women’s) situation in society and in marriage, even as the treatment she undergoes robs her of her sanity.
Major Conflict
The struggle between the narrator and her husband, who is also her doctor, over the nature and treatment of her illness leads to a conflict within the narrator’s mind between her growing understanding of her own powerlessness and her desire to repress this awareness.
Rising Action
The narrator decides to keep a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gradually intensifies into obsession.
Climax
The narrator completely identifies herself with the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper.
Falling Action
The narrator, now completely identified with the woman in the wallpaper,spends her time crawling on all fours around the room. Her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, right over his fallen body.
Foreshadowing
The discovery of the teeth marks on the bedstead foreshadows the narrator’s own insanity and suggests the narrator is not revealing everything about her behavior. The first use of the word “creepy” foreshadows the increasing desperation of the narrator’s situation and her own eventual “creeping.”
