The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

742 Words3 Pages
How Does the Structure in The Yellow Wallpaper Contribute to the Theme of ‘Descent Into Madness’? The structure in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson plays a pivotal role in demonstrating the descent into madness for our main unnamed character. We shall call her Dear, for simplicity. The style that this short story is written in can be described as a journal, or diary entry, and it provides a near personal connection to the main character and the reader as they both feel the sensation of being trapped, of loneliness, and obsessiveness, which are some things that a third-person perspective would fail to do on such a level. From the first time they arrived to the countryside home, to the nursery, to the obsession with the wallpaper,…show more content…
Barred windows, beaten walls and floors, gnawed headboard and, finally, the key to the descent, the beaten yellow wallpaper. With such an abstract pattern and sickly hues of yellow, Dear expresses a great distaste for sharing a room with the wallpaper, whom she almost insists that the wallpaper knows its vicious influence on her and she pleads that the husband removes it, who then refuses as their stay is a mere three months. At first, she seems fixated on the unsolvable pattern on the wallpaper, and has now made it her mission to unlock its secret. The pattern on the wallpaper serves as something to keep her mind busy, but then it turns into an obsession when Dear progresses from fixated on the wallpaper as if were a little puzzle to pure determination to crack the wallpaper’s puzzle, analyzing it day and…show more content…
At night, Dear swears she can see something moving behind the wallpaper, like a form. During this time, her entries become shorter, choppy, everything fixated on that wallpaper and the mysterious woman that appears from within it. She admits she may not be all right in the head, but her husband denies this. Suddenly, Dear is now fixated on the mysterious wallpaper woman that sneaks about in the gardens. At first, it began with the shapes seeming to form a creeping woman, then an almost formless being seemingly trying to break free from behind the wallpaper, until finally, when she imagines these men and women trapped behind the wallpaper and trying to break free in the night, Dear insists that she has seen a woman, the woman, creeping about outside in the gardens. These elements - the sense of dread, of obsession, of visions - can be connected to the ‘gothic genre’ that this short story is categorized in. The structure is masterfully crafted to display how one’s mind works in the descent: calm, to worrisome, to obsessive, to borderline, as some say, crazy. Nevertheless, the true descent began when Dear first encountered this wallpaper and became fixated with it, even unofficially admitting that she would kill anyone before she let them figure out its secrets before herself. However, it seemed it was not only Dear that seemed affected as it was hinted that the wallpaper also fixates other characters,
Open Document