A key part of this story is the fact that this woman is trapped in this situation because her husband won’t listen to her – she’s hysterical, and moreover, a woman in 1892. However, Gilman actually uses this unreliability of the narrator to her advantage. And by the end of the story when the narrator believes there is a woman inside the wallpaper, the reader knows she is not speaking from an objective point of view. Soon after the story opens, the narrator says of her husband John, “You see he does not believe I am sick!” (Gilman 1670) Later she is described as a woman with an “imaginative power and habit of story-making” (1672). Gilman certainly sets up the narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to be less than perfectly truthful. A certain degree of reliability is lost when readers only hear one side of the story, especially when it’s impossible to tell if that one side of the story is even true. It must be admitted that there is a problem with having a first person narrator in a work of fiction. Isolation was the dominant theme that made women take control of their homes.

During this time, domestic ideology positioned women as spiritual and moral leaders in their households. The paper was written during in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, she locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer ends. Towards the end of the story, she imagines there are women creeping behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed with the pattern and colour of the wallpaper. The author depicts the effect of under stimulation on the narrator’s mental health and her deterioration into psychosis. The room’s openings are grilled to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate. The woman hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being accused of overburdening herself. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a ‘temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency’, a diagnosis common to women in that period. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. The story is presented in the first person with a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer.

The yellow wallpaper wallpaper