1. Escape From The Yellow Wallpaper
Literary Critique Paper
By Jessica Sullivan
I have chosen the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to
discuss as the topic of my Literary Critique. I feel that there is a lot to be learned from this story
as far as medical science, and study of the human mind, or the deterioration of it. This story
really reflects how fragile we are as human beings. No matter how sound we may start out as, we
all have our breaking points.
The woman telling the story suffers from mental illness, supposedly a nervous disorder,
whether it is defined by depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive-disorder, or something
slightly more serious. Her illness is characterized by sadness initially, followed by severe vivid
delusions or hallucinations, and leading to possible insanity.
One of the things that really bother me in the story is how the narrator’s creativity is
banished, un-encouraged, stifled. The story is told by a series of journal entries made by the
woman and easily documents her progress down this road to madness. It is in my opinion that
doing so can be therapeutic for most, keeping account of one’s feelings, documenting our life
events, and just in general getting it out onto paper. I think this is what comforted this individual
even though she was not allowed to be doing so. In a sense she is not allowed to express herself.
She is confined to a room by her husband who is a doctor and thinks that this it is in the best
interest of her to not be allowed to go outside, or to work, and he has control of everything. John

2. should have encouraged her imagination and creativity instead of trying to force her to conform
to his own rigid personality, one severely lacking in excitement. They were recently married and
also recently she gave birth to a child who might further explain some of her symptoms that she
is experiencing and today might be linked to postpartum depression, although the time-period in
which this story took place these things were not discovered and researched in-depth. We know a
lot more about treating these issues nowadays as well.
Also, it was social norms of this time period that women were expected to fulfill their duties
as wives and mothers and be content in their existence as nothing more. This oppression I think
might have been something our narrator was having a problem coping with.
In my eyes, she is held prisoner, and it is so desolate to her, it makes me sad that anyone
thought this would help her depression. You can see how this isolation affects her throughout the
short story. I wonder why solitary confinement is ever determined to be a good thing for anyone;
it is used as a form of punishment for inmates in prison. Loneliness cannot be good for the
human soul, and the “rest cure” is simply ridiculous.
She soon becomes immediately obsessed with the nursery room wallpaper with “sprawling,
flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin”. She is very poetic and passionate about this
wallpaper. She deciphers and analyzes it, drawing her own meaning from it. She is letting her
isolation build anxiety within her and it is driving her mad. It would make me mad too, not only
mentally ill mad, but angry mad. She starts ripping the wallpaper off the wall, symbolic of her
own imprisonment. She begins to see “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems
to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design”. She is hallucinating. There is a
woman in the wallpaper, crawling on all fours, trying to escape the bars of a jail cell or prison.

3. She begins to identify with that woman and sees herself as also a prisoner within the wallpaper.
By tearing it down she truly believes that she has broken out of the wallpaper within which her
husband John has imprisoned her. In the end of the story, she escapes, crawls over her husband
and exclaims:
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so
you can't put me back!"
Had this woman lived in our day and age there would have been much reasonable solutions
available for her problems. They simply did not know then what they know now. I am reading
also about the author, that she had a personal experience with depression and wrote this story to
help combat some of the issues revolving around different treatment methods and their
effectiveness. This story was actually about her.
In the end of the story, our main character and narrator begins seeing things; she believes she
is indeed inside the patterns of the yellow wallpaper, and feels safe here. She is confined within
the walls of her own mind, which happen to be covered in yellow wallpaper. She refuses to leave
and is happy to remain there forever, comfortable.
"For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But
here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the
wall, so I cannot lose my way."