The first-person narrative of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, immediately grabs the reader’s attention. The first-person viewpoint gives readers a clear window into the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. This window is helpful and harmful as the narrator’s mental state steadily declines. Third-person understanding of a character with mental health concerns, such as the narrator, may be challenging. Readers can gain direct access to the narrator’s thoughts, which is helpful. This access, however, turns out to be a double-edged sword. It is impossible to trust a narrator whose grasp of reality is slipping. As a result, almost every statement the narrator makes in his story must be challenged.
The distinction between the narrator as the subject and the yellow wallpaper as the object dissolves as the narrator’s mental state deteriorates. The narrator eventually starts to think of herself as part of the wallpaper. Because the reader is involved in this transformation due to the first-person perspective, they may witness the subject and object coming together. The yellow wallpaper is described in detail and given a personality. It is given the ability to act on its own: “…when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide-plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions” (463). Using the pronoun “you,” the author forces the reader to see herself glancing over the pattern with the narrator and finding the ludicrous turns and twists equally absurd. Soon, the narrator engages the wallpaper emotionally as if it were a person: “I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness” (465). The narrator holds back any major emotional outbursts up until this point. The power the wallpaper must possess to anger our narrator, who was previously docile, must be imagined by the reader. The reader is initially prone to think that something supernatural is happening in the house and that the yellow wallpaper is fascinating because of its power over the narrator.
The narrator’s descriptions of the location are perhaps the most objective information she can give. The reader can safely assume that the setting descriptions are reasonably accurate because the narrator seems bothered by nothing other than the wallpaper in the setting. The nursery is described so profoundly that the reader is forced to think of a lunatic asylum from the early 20th century. The nursery contains “windows [that] are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls…It is stripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach” 463). According to one astute reader, this room has all the characteristics of a mental facility. Suicide prevention measures include window bars and wall-mounted rings for restraining security. Near the bed, the wallpaper has mostly been pulled away, as if someone were bound there and unable to reach farther. The actual bed is a “great immovable bed-it is nailed down, I believe…” (466). The reader must question the claim that the space was first a nursery and then a gymnasium. What kids’ playroom has ever had windows that were locked, holes in the walls, wallpaper that was torn up, and a bed that was bolted to the floor? The environment that is being described resembles an insane asylum considerably more than a nursery or playroom for kids.
By telling the story in the first person, the author allows readers to accompany the narrator as she descends into lunacy and engenders some sympathy for her suffering. The wallpaper now has an olfactory presence in addition to its visual one, boosting its authenticity. The narrator keeps removing the wallpaper because she genuinely believes she has freed herself. The reader is forced to think that the narrator’s story is inaccurate because of the first-person perspective, which increases the reader’s compassion for the narrator.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Virago Press, 1981.