Psychological tests observe emotions and behaviors to help diagnose a patient and create a guide for treatment. However, you cannot be assessed correctly because you are not as important, you’ll be treated like a child, and your emotions are automatically invalidated. In the 19th century, that is what women went through when being psychologically evaluated, if a woman were going through depression, it would be dismissed as part of her overactive emotions or pushed to the side because that isn’t a top priority to the men around that woman’s life. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is placed into a mansion far away, where her husband/physician simply says she has temporary nervous depression but in reality, it is post-partum depression. John, her husband/physician, believes she is not sick and gives her a work-free temporary lifestyle. That lifestyle confines her in a yellow wallpapered room, resulting in her plunge into a deeper hysteria. The story centers on a woman and her struggle with mental health and gender roles. Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” the troubling nature of gender roles as they were forced onto women is revealed through literary devices.
The feeling of being trapped with an undiagnosed mental disorder is not an enjoyable experience. Many 19th century women felt trapped within the walls that men restricted them in, due to a misdiagnosed disorder, or borderline trapped by the patriarchy that was established by society. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator spends most of her time trying to understand the horrendous-looking yellow wallpaper. However, as she continues to stare, she starts peculiarly describing the ugly wallpaper. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions” (528). The quote pronounces the horrid way the wallpaper is seen and the obscenities that decorate the yellow color, irritating and confusing the narrator. The symbolism within the description connects to the gender-ruled society that she was suffering, giving the wall a dull image, a time where she was peaceful in this kind of world, but suddenly having a pattern of “unheard-of contradictions” (528). The symbolistic mannerisms that correlate to the trapped lifestyle begin when she describes herself within that wall: “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be” (533). Though she does not directly describe herself within the walls, she begins to tell only when there is moonlight or candlelight she see the woman behind bars, making herself a symbol of the moonlight shadows and the barred windows hitting against the unpleasant wallpaper. The experiences that she goes through, slowly becoming a part of the wall and the room symbolize the never-ending box in which society has placed her and many other women in her position, tormented in the hands of others without a clue.
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The hysteria that the narrator slowly suffocates in is due to the box to which she is shackled. The shackles, however, were not because of the room but because of the narrator’s husband who diagnosed her and kept her in that room without consideration of the way she felt about it, forcing her to doubt the thoughts that ran through her head before she could speak her truth. Allowing the husband to rule over her without any hesitation is her sad custom to the patriarchal rule that she, her mother, and her previous kin underwent. The narrator continues to observe the wall, she is mentally presented with different kinds of creepy images that only she can define. “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down. I get positively angry…those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere” (529).
When the narrator begins to adjust to the room, she starts to identify her surroundings, depicting the curvatures in the wall to be staring at her. The imagery of the eyes begins to irritate her, reminding her she always needs a pair of eyes to watch over her, assuming she cannot be by herself because of her “temporary nervous depression” (526). The necessity to constantly watch the narrator is the way John, her husband, translates her disorder as a child-like behavior that continues to belittle her. Time begins to pass as she reshapes the images within the yellow wallpaper more often, showing her truest emotions through imagery. “This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one…But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (530). The narrator no longer sees the eyes but what lies right in front of her, her own shadow that blends within the walls, the shadow that depicts the truth of her suffering, and the mental state she has been left with because of the gender-biased society. The deteriorating resort her mind has to go through to be able to relieve the thoughts that her husband threw to the side, grooming her to do the same. The destructive culminated state of the narrator’s disorder is the result of a manipulative man in her life who never stood by her but was on top of her.
The way the story is told in the eyes of the narrator also shines the light on those who are untold within the same worded lines as “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Patriarchy ruling the worlds of women to then be told of their invalidation is the way the author portrays through the narrator. The oppressive state of society in which the mind is adapted to be will ultimately lead to the demise of those who disagree.
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