The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox: as she loses touchwith the outer world, she comes to a greater understanding of the inner realityof her life. This inner/outer split is crucial to understanding the nature ofthe narrator’s suffering. At every point, she is faced with relationships,objects, and situations that seem innocent and natural but that are actuallyquite bizarre and even oppressive. In a sense, the plot of “The YellowWallpaper” is the narrator’s attempt to avoid acknowledging theextent to which her external situation stifles her inner impulses. From thebeginning, we see that the narrator is an imaginative, highly expressive woman.She remembers terrifying herself with imaginary nighttime monsters as a child,and she enjoys the notion that the house they have taken is haunted. Yet as partof her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way.Both her reason and her emotions rebel at this treatment, and she turns herimagination onto seemingly neutral objects—the house and the wallpaper—in anattempt to ignore her growing frustration. Her negative feelings color herdescription of her surroundings, making them seem uncanny and sinister, and shebecomes fixated on the wallpaper.
As the narrator sinks further into her inner fascination with thewallpaper, she becomes progressively more dissociated from her day-to-day life.This process of dissociation begins when the story does, at the very moment shedecides to keep a secret diary as “a relief to her mind.” From that point, hertrue thoughts are hidden from the outer world, and the narrator begins to slipinto a fantasy world in which the nature of “her situation” is made clear insymbolic terms. Gilman shows us this division in the narrator’s consciousness byhaving the narrator puzzle over effects in the world that she herself hascaused. For example, the narrator doesn’t immediately understand that the yellowstains on her clothing and the long “smootch” on the wallpaper are connected.Similarly, the narrator fights the realization that the predicament of the womanin the wallpaper is a symbolic version of her own situation. At first she evendisapproves of the woman’s efforts to escape and intends to “tie her up.”
When the narrator finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in thewallpaper, she is able to see that other women are forced to creep and hidebehind the domestic “patterns” of their lives, and that she herself is the onein need of rescue. The horror of this story is that the narrator must loseherself to understand herself. She has untangled the pattern of her life, butshe has torn herself apart in getting free of it. An odd detail at the end ofthe story reveals how much the narrator has sacrificed. During her final splitfrom reality, the narrator says, “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you andJane.” Who is this Jane? Some critics claim “Jane” is a misprint for “Jennie,”the sister-in-law. It is more likely, however, that “Jane” is the name of theunnamed narrator, who has been a stranger to herself and her jailers. Now she ishorribly “free” of the constraints of her marriage, her society, and her ownefforts to repress her mind.
