Lack of Creativity and Isolation in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents an unnamed woman who gradually spirals into a state of mental psychosis. Gilman sought to bring attention to the unfair treatment of women in the nineteenth century. She uses this story to reveal to the audience that the narrator’s insanity stems from her isolation from society, and her inability to be expressive and creative through writing. Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is locked away in an isolated room, which was supposed to cure her mental disorder but instead it makes her worse. With the windows barred and the doors locked she is secluded from society. She wishes to go visit her cousin Henry and Julia, but John forbids her by telling his wife that “[she] wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after [she] got there; and [she] did not make out a very good case for [herself], for [she] was crying before [she] had even finished” (Gilman 92). The constant isolation causes her to focus only on the room in which she is living in, and more specifically the yellow wallpaper. She becomes obsessed with analyzing and examining the wallpaper and it causes her to become further insane. She says, “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (Gilman 93). The narrator realizes that the wallpaper is an annoyance to someone with a normal mind. However, for her, she has nothing else to focus on and nothing else to stimulate her brain, therefore the wallpaper leads her to insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator believes that writing is a healthy means of expressing her inner thoughts and believes it will ultimately help her depression. However, from the very beginning of the story the reader witnesses the fact that others around the narrator