Who Is The Narrator In The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Narrator in the “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a depressed young mother who has recently given birth. Like many women, the Narrator suffers from postpartum depression. To combat this depression her husband, John, prescribes her the Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. This leads the Narrator to have a mental breakdown which severely warps her personality.
The Narrator is an intelligent young woman who longs to feel accomplished and useful. She becomes obsessed with figuring out the wallpaper complex pattern to the point that her attitude to the wallpaper turns from disgust to intrigue. This obsession probably stems from her cabin fever that she develops from her “cure”. The Narrator was so deprived of mental stimulus that she grasped to the puzzle that the wallpaper introduced like a drowning man would to a float. The Narrator also uses …show more content…
The Narrator describes the room as having “rings and thing in the walls” (217). This prison imagery shows how hopeless the situation is. She is basically under house arrest and there is nothing she can do about it. The Narrator starts the wallpaper as a prison that strangles the women that try to escape it “turn[ing] them upside down, and make[ing] their eyes turn white” (226). This shows her belief that there is no escape from her plight. Her only choices are to remain in her prison or take the risk of death to gain her freedom. She finally loses her sanity and identity when she “got out at last in spite of you[John] and Jane” (229). Jane is the narrator who lost hope that she could escape her domestic prison and formed another persona that could. She feels chained to her husband and the expectations of others that she must come up a way of escape via the woman in the wallpaper. The Narrator is imprisoned by the expectations that her husband and society has placed on which causes her break for
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