Monday, April 22, 2013

The Yellow Wallpaper

Initially I wanted to avoid talking about this story, as I've said similar things about it before. But I think it fits well with the theme I've been following, and thus want to analyze it a bit.

The story starts off with a narrator who is most probably suffering from a form of depression, and living in a time where rest cures were thought to be effective. These coupled together make for a terrible mental state, whatever it may be classified as, and, subsequently, a 'haunting of the mind'.

The narrator's mental condition deteriorates throughout the story. At first she contemplates the wallpaper, and how it is slightly off-putting. She seems to convince herself that the room she is in is different from what it more than likely is, although we as readers will never know for sure, as the narrator is our only source of information and she is unreliable. The wallpaper is nothing more than an instigator for the narrator's decline.

As the narrator is left without any sort of creative outlet, her mind tries to find other ways to occupy itself. She is forced to spend the majority of her day sleeping or 'resting', and her access to any sort of entertainment is limited. She attempts to write down her thoughts, but as she has to hide that, also, she is left only with her own mind to wander through.

In the room, the wallpaper is the only other interesting aspect the narrator can focus on. Because she has nothing else, she allows her mind to focus intently on it, becoming even obsessed with it. Her lack of human contact, coupled in with her exclusion from creativity, causes her to latch on to anything she can. In her case, the wallpaper.

When her condition deteriorates further, she begins seeing things. This may be her mind attempting to find an 'out' of her isolation. That is, when people are isolated so thoroughly, they tend to start hallucinating and the mind creates a separate world for them to live in. This is much the same as the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper.

By the end of the story, the narrator has become so engulfed in her own imagination that she has detached herself from reality. She is unable to separate her hallucinations (the 'woman' in the wallpaper) with her own self. It is likely she created the image of the woman being trapped as a way to escape her, for lack of a better word, torture via rest cure. The woman is a reflection of herself, who cannot escape the prison put in place for her by others. The narrator then allows the mental image of this woman to break free, which is a longing the narrator herself has had -- to be free of the rest cure and allowed to live her life in the way she wants -- and lets it overtake her mind. If she can't be free in reality, she allows herself to lose her mind in order to escape that reality.

In the end, although The Yellow Wallpaper has a bit of ghostly element to it, it is a much more psychologically based work. The narrator, rather than being haunted by an outside being, is being haunted by herself. Everything she allows herself to see and feel are fueled by her own mind, rather than an outside existence acting on her.

5 comments:

  1. I definitely interpreted the story as her being haunted by her mind especially because no one else in the home was seeing what she was seeing. Also we an sympathize with the woman because she was left alone in a room for so many hours in the day without stimulation that she compensated by trying to find patterns in the wall-paper. In The Yellow Wall-paper, the main character sees several women in the wall-paper which is very interesting because she is a woman herself. Then at the end, she transformed into something that her husband could not understand. In terms of what you were saying (haunted by her mind), what do you interpret the final scene in the story? Did she just go completely insane, or does her circling of the room with a rope tied to her waist representative of something?

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    1. Personally, I think she went completely insane. But that's only scratching the surface. Circling the room could represent her inability to escape. In the end, even though she's 'escaped' to the reaches of her mind, she's still trapped in that mind, and is there only because of the choices of others. The rope tied to her waist could be interpreted similarly. Although she has broken free of the confinements put forth by her husband, she is still tied down by him. It was he who forced her into this state, and she cannot plausibly exist in such a state without him to take care of her in the future.

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  2. Carter,

    It seems as though you are saying there was no haunting in this story, more a nervous breakdown. Perhaps this is because we have no back story to the "ghost" in the yellow wallpaper. In most Gothic Literature, we have some idea of who this ghost once was and why they are there. That affirms the readers idea that a ghost does exist. In this story, however, we are only given a few peculiar through from the narrator to work with. This might be the reason we don't perceive this story as a haunting.

    I love your idea of a mental instability being a haunting of the mind. Although, I wish you had gone into more detail about that. You could make a whole post on that idea alone! If a mental instability was a haunting in the mind, would the skull be the coffin like enclosure that buries the brain? I'd love to see ideas like this flushed out in another post!!

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  3. Oh I just thought of this but when you say that the nervous breakdown, I think of events that accumulate to drive a person to think irrationally. In the Fall of the House of Usher, we really did not have much of a back-story but we discussed how Roderick was haunted by his own mind. Perhaps this also relates to the Yellow Wall-paper. Her mind became her ghost and she began to irrationally obsess over a "woman or women" in the wall-paper.

    If you were to make a post more on mental instability being a haunting of the mind, the perfect source for evidence would have to be The Uncanny. Think about how Freud would have interpreted the Yellow Wall-paper. Especially because the haunted was a woman, he would definitely get kicks from the story. Freud seemed to enjoy discussing regression, which is very important to this story because at the end of the story, she was on all fours (a primitive animalistic state) and was feeling the room as though she had seen if for the first time.

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  4. (I am on a role with agreeing with people tonight!)

    I think it is definitely clear that the main character in The Yellow Wallpaper is deteriorating mentally. Though I don't think her deterioration is what is driving the characterization of the wallpaper. Instead, I think there is a deeper analogy of human emotion, particularly obsession, and how it drives our minds. There are many arguments for the main character suffering from postpartum depression... and perhaps it could be said that motherhood is its own type of obsession or dedication. That dedication is seen again with the how she examines and views the wallpaper. To further, if the woman in the paper is indeed trap, could the main character be viewing motherhood that way? Could it be (like other parts of the story... for example, her role as a wife) that the commentary is less on mental illness and more so on the entrapments of gender roles? I also agree there's a more ghostly feel at the end. I think the scariest thing is that mental illness is so undefinable. It is socially taboo, as well. It also is uncontrollable...

    Carter, on a personal note, your blog has been interesting. Thank you for creating shaping a new way of looking at the texts.

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