“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a disturbing look into the mind of a woman who has been pushed past her emotional cliff-face into the turbulent seas of insanity. This woman, who is obviously not her in right mind to begin with, is forced into a small room where she is not permitted to do anything even remotely active. All she can do to occupy her time is lie there and let her imagination run wild.
This freedom of her mind is what conjures up the woman behind the wallpaper. This feral woman who claws at her surroundings is trapped, unable to free herself, and becomes even more bestial by the moment. The woman behind the wallpaper is obviously a physical representation of the real wife’s subconscious. Not able to express herself through what many would call normal means, forcing herself to put on this docile, domestic mask in front of her husband, friends, and company, living day after day, week after week, staying subservient to her husband who does not allow her even to express herself or show any part of her personality but for her meek-tempered, apologetic, docile housemaid side, forces her to bottle her emotions and psychosis deep within her, where it builds and builds until it is unable to contain itself and erupts from her subconscious, projecting itself onto the walls in a physical manifestation of her inner turmoil in an act which finally frees her from the constraints imposed upon her by outside forces and allows her inner personality to reign free.
What the wife sees behind the wallpaper is actually herself. This is confirmed at the end with the transformation of the wife into the woman. Despite the placid outward appearance, an inner war is waging within the wife. It was only a matter of time before that inner turmoil was able to burst free from the mild-mannered wife’s outer façade.
The story is also a commentary on the social position of women at the time. The wife is forced into trying to change herself for her husband and to meet the expectations society has of her. She is not expected to express herself. She is not expected to think for herself. She is not even expected to act for herself. The wife is pressed into this mold the society of the time expects all women to fit within and in order to do this, she must subdue her true self. She is slowly drowning, losing herself to the demands of her patriarchal society. As Sylvia Plath described, the wife is a woman “in the bell jar, [whose life is as] blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
The yellow wallpaper of the dilapidated room symbolizes the binding confines of society from which the crazed woman -- the wife’s tormented subconscious -- tries desperately to escape. This ugly, peeling, wallpaper is society’s hidden, unattractive side which forces the wife to conform.
At the conclusion of the story, the subconscious of the wife has finally burst forth, transformed by the repression into a twisted, vicious, shade of a person. The story is a lesson regarding the stifling of one’s true self and the consequences of such an action. Because, really, who wants to turn into the lady behind the wallpaper? (551)
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1 comment:
Tibi--very good commentary on the psychological theme of the story and the use of the woman in the wallpaper as a symbol of the narrrator's repression. The only thing I might disagree with is your take on her at the beginning; to me, whatever illness she is suffering is a mild one, as she is very rational in her style at the beginning, and is made progressively worse by her confinement.
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