Psychoanalytical reading of Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Abstract

Charlotte Perkins Gilman created the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in order to present a world capable of transforming itself to satisfy the reality of the narrator. The story follows a woman's transgression into an alternate state of mind, relying on elements of writing such as language, structure, and metaphors in order to convey the warped psychology of the narrator. Gilman's composition enacts various psychotic afflictions implicitly for the purpose of presenting insanity to the sane with their language, which ultimately will reflect the normality of the bizarre. By analyzing the repressive nature of the text as well as the metaphorical meaning of the context, the separation of the narrator's mind from the story's universe becomes apparent which reflects the incongruities that plague the narrator's mentality. Therefore, Gilman orchestrated the plot of her story through psychosis in order to deconstruct the human mind and present the fallacies of structure when one Freudian component becomes repressed, the Id.

Initially, the problem that exists within the narrator's mind becomes apparent through the inability to distinguish her unconscious and conscious thoughts. Her perception progresses throughout the story into misconceptions of the real and the imaginary, which represents her succumbing to an eternal dream state mentality: “And all the time she is trying to climb through.