The Yellow Wallpaper 485Almost all major anthologies of American literature
include The Yellow Wallpaper.
Carmine Esposito
Freedom in The Yellow Wallpaper
The main character’s fight for freedom is a major
theme of The Yellow Wallpaper. At the start of The
Yellow Wallpaper, we are told that the narrator is
being treated by her physician husband for a ner-
vous condition. As part of her treatment, the nar-
rator is confined to an attic room and “absolutely
forbidden to ‘work.’ ” Even though the narrator
disagrees with this treatment, she is powerless to
fight it, “Personally, I believe that congenial work,
with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?” The narrator finds herself
at the start of the story both physically and psycho-
logically confined. As the story progresses, we wit-
ness the narrator free herself from the psychological
strictures that bind her.
Undergoing the “rest cure,” the narrator is not
free to make decisions about her life as even trips
and visitors are carefully regulated by her husband, “I
tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him
the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let
me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.
But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it
after I got there.” Unable to communicate with her
husband, the narrator finds strength in writing her
thoughts in her journal, “And I know John would
think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think
in some way—it is such a relief !” Writing becomes
the vehicle through which the narrator begins the
process of freeing herself.
In the first half of the story, the room in which
the narrator is confined becomes, for her, a symbol
of her lack of freedom, “I don’t like our room a bit. I
wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza.”
The garden that she can see from the windows
of her attic room becomes a symbol of freedom,
“There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a gar-
den—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths,
and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats
under them.” As the story progresses she begins to
see a woman in the wallpaper that covers the walls of
her attic room, “Behind that outside pattern the dim
shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same
shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman
stooping down and creeping about behind the pat-
tern.” The narrator realizes that the woman in the
wallpaper is trapped by the pattern of the wallpaper
much in the same way as she is trapped in the attic
room: “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the
pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”
In the second half of The Yellow Wallpaper, the
narrator struggles to free the woman in the wall-
paper as she fights to free herself from her life of
servility as a mother and wife. She begins by tear-
ing down the wallpaper that confines the woman;
“I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled,
and before morning we had peeled off yards of that
paper.” As the narrator fights for her freedom, her
attitude toward the room changes; “I quite enjoy
the room, now it is bare again.” What earlier was a
symbol of her servility, the room, becomes a source
for her freedom. In the attic room, she is free to act
as she chooses; “It is so pleasant to be out in this
great room and creep around as I please.” The gar-
den, which had earlier represented freedom for her,
now promises only confinement. In the garden, the
narrator would not be free to act as she chooses, “I
don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks
me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground,
and everything is green instead of yellow.”
In this way, The Yellow Wallpaper can be read as a
story of liberation. At the end, the narrator is able to
free herself from the life of servility that patriarchal
culture would have her accept as normal. But what
is also clear is that this liberation is limited and her
freedom comes with a price. Ironically, the narra-
tor can be free only when she decides to confine
herself to her attic room. Through this, The Yellow
Wallpaper shows us that all struggles for liberation
and freedom are limited by the culture that sur-
rounds them.
Carmine EspositoGender in The Yellow Wallpaper
One way to read The Yellow Wallpaper is as a story
that explores the relationship between gender and
power in the United States in the 19th century. At
the start of the story the narrator tells us about the
nature of her relationship with her husband: “John
laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in