The story unfolds slowly over many weeks, beginning with the arrival of the narrator (whose name, Jane, is not revealed until the end of the story) at an estate in the country. Jane has gone into a gradual decline, losing interest in her family and her surroundings, since the birth of her baby. Her husband, John, and her brother believe that a long rest is what she needs to feel more like herself. Because both men are respected physicians, Jane believes that they know what is best for her and tries to put on a good face, despite her increasing suspicions that her rest cure may do her more harm than good.

At first, the colonial estate where she is the only guest appears harmless and quaint, with large gardens and spacious rooms. Jane later reveals that her windows have bars and her bed is bolted to the floor. The only people whom she sees are her husband, who comes from the city to check on her, and her nurse, John’s sister, Jennie. Jane never has contact with her recently delivered child nor with friends. Her summer home takes on a more sinister tone as her mental condition deteriorates, with the very wallpaper in her room coming to grotesque life.

Jane’s husband blames her thinking for all of her problems and forbids her to do anything that will employ her mind productively. Jane rebels at first and keeps a secret journal, but as she weakens, even that endeavor becomes too tiring. She withdraws into her thoughts, which form the running interior monologue of her mental collapse. Apparently accepting the separation from her infant, Jane slowly loses control of her imagination and her motivation to seek human contact. After she collapses and is forced to keep to her room, she becomes fascinated with the patterns on the yellow wallpaper, seeing in the paper’s swirls faces and patterns that first amuse and then terrify her.

From her barred window, Jane begins seeing women creeping about the gardens on their hands and knees. Soon she discovers that another woman is trapped behind the wallpaper in her room, something that only she can see. At night, this woman pushes and struggles behind the paper in an effort to escape, rattling and ripping it as she fights to get free.

Jane says that the woman creeps along the walls, and she tries to help free her by gradually peeling back her wallpaper prison. Jane begins to notice signs of deterioration in her room: smears on the wall and bite marks on the bedstead. Gradually she no longer wants to leave her room; when John comes to take her home, she refuses to go and locks herself in with the creeping woman who is now free in the room.

Jane’s husband and sister-in-law gain entry and find only Jane creeping around and around the room, surrounded by shreds of wallpaper. The story concludes as she creeps over the form of her husband, who has fainted from the shock of seeing her in her madness.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is partly autobiographical. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote it after she fled from her husband with her infant daughter to California. More important than the story’s similarities to Gilman’s own experience is the larger issue of a woman’s right to be creative and autonomous. The story can be seen as advocating a woman’s right to act and speak for herself; the alternative clearly leads to madness, as it does for Jane.

At the time of the story, most people believed that women were delicate and prone to madness if overstressed. A common treatment for their presumed mental illnesses combined isolation, rest, and inactivity—the very things that cause Jane’s breakdown. From her own account, readers know that Jane enjoys writing and reading, yet John considers these to be dangerous activities to be avoided at all costs. At that time, it was common to remove a depressed woman from all sources of stress or sensory stimulation; women such as Jane were separated from their children, kept in bed, hand-fed, bathed, and massaged. It is precisely this type of treatment that drives Jane to begin hallucinating. The silent madness into which Jane withdraws is not only her reaction to the cure that men prescribe for her, but her only available form of rebellion against these tyrannies.

As Jane becomes more distanced from the world and from any source of sensory stimulation, she begins to hallucinate. Her visions of the creeping women and the woman enshrouded behind her bedroom’s wallpaper symbolize her own binding and oppression. It is the rest treatment prescribed by physicians such as her husband and brother that metaphorically cause the women whom Jane sees to creep like infants rather than walk as independent adults. Jane’s rest cure becomes her own wallpaper prison, one that simultaneously drives her insane and pushes her to assert her own rebellious selfhood. By freeing the woman from behind the wallpaper, Jane succeeds in freeing herself. Sadly, however, her mental state has deteriorated so badly that she has become truly insane and will remain utterly dependent on her husband.

At the story’s conclusion, the narrator locks herself in her room and ties a rope around her waist so that she cannot be removed. Jane, the woman from behind the yellow wallpaper, creeps about the edges of her prison, a room that she will now use as a fortress. It is significant that Jane waits to reveal her name to readers until after her husband faints in horror at seeing her reduced to a crawling madwoman.

The most prominent technical and stylistic feature of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is Gilman’s combining of the first-person narrator and present-tense narration. By allowing readers to see only what Jane sees as she sees it, Gilman duplicates as closely as possible the feelings of entrapment, isolation, and unreality that Jane experiences. Jane’s decline into true madness is so gradual and her narrative voice seems so level-headed, even when she describes events that one knows are impossible—such as the creeping women in the garden or the woman struggling to free herself from behind her room’s wallpaper—that one might misread this tale as a ghost story rather than as an account of Jane’s mental deterioration. By making the descriptions of the women, the room, and the malevolent shapes and faces in the wallpaper so immediate and realistic, Gilman tricks the reader into seeing Jane as simultaneously mad and in the grips of some haunting supernatural specters. This ambiguity increases the shock that readers experience when they realize that Jane has been talking in metaphors throughout her narrative, that she has been recounting her own sense of intellectual and emotional oppression, rather than seeing actual women crawling about on the ground in the gardens or moving behind her room’s wallpaper.

Some readers may be content to let their interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” rest with the supernatural; if left here, however, readers will miss the more important point of Gilman’s tale. Gilman forces readers to reconsider Jane’s entire narrative by means of the story’s conclusion, when Jane finally speaks her own name for the first time as she creeps over her husband’s inert body. Little of the story will then make sense unless reexamined. Gilman plants numerous clues throughout the story that express Jane’s interior struggle to be herself and to reclaim her independence: her need to be creative by keeping a journal, or the existence of the woman for whom Jane demolishes the yellow wallpaper to effect her escape. Similarly, the information that Jane offhandedly supplies readers in the story’s early stages—such as descriptions of the bars on her window, the bite marks on the bed that is bolted to the floor, and her increasing lassitude—now can be reinterpreted as describing the true nature of where Jane has been staying: at an asylum. On second reading, “The Yellow Wallpaper” becomes the story of a woman who, while she may have been depressed, was not insane when she began her cure.

Essay by Melissa E. Barth.

Character Profiles

Yellow Wallpaper, The (Identities and Issues)

Yellow Wallpaper, The (Women’s Literature)

Author Biography