The Yellow Wallpaper

Question 1

The Yellow Wallpaper

Key Factors

Answer 1

• Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Type of Work: Short story
• Genre: Gothic horror tale, character study, socio-political allegory
• Date of First Publication: 1892
• Narrator: A mentally troubled young woman, possibly named Jane
• Point of View: Strict first-person narration, filtered through the narrator’s shifting consciousness and her perception of reality, which is often at odds with that of other characters
• Tone: Anxious with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation
• Setting (Time): Late nineteenth century
• Setting (Place): America, primarily in one bedroom within a large summer home or an old asylum
• Protagonist: The narrator, a young upper-middle-class woman suffering from postpartum depression and whose illness gives her insight into her situation in society and in marriage

Answer 2

• Major Conflict: The struggle between the narrator and her husband, who is also her doctor, over the nature and treatment of her illness leads to a conflict within the narrator’s mind between her growing understanding of her own powerlessness and her desire to repress this awareness.
• Rising Action: The narrator keeps a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gradually intensifies into obsession.
• Climax: The narrator completely identifies herself with the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper.
• Falling Action: The narrator spends her time crawling on all fours around the room. Her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, right over his fallen body.
• Themes: The subordination of women in marriage, the importance of self-expression, and the evils of the “Resting Cure.”
• Motifs: Irony and the journal
• Symbols: The wallpaper
• Foreshadowing: The discovery of the teeth marks on the bedstead foreshadows the narrator’s own insanity and the increasing desperation of her situation, and the first use of the word “creepy” foreshadows her own eventual “creeping.”

Question 3

The Yellow Wallpaper

Summary & Literary Devices

Answer 3

• Major Conflict: The struggle between the narrator and her husband, who is also her doctor, over the nature and treatment of her illness leads to a conflict within the narrator’s mind between her growing understanding of her own powerlessness and her desire to repress this awareness.
• Rising Action: The narrator keeps a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper, a dislike that gradually intensifies into obsession.
• Climax: The narrator completely identifies herself with the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper.
• Falling Action: The narrator spends her time crawling on all fours around the room. Her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, right over his fallen body.
• Themes: The subordination of women in marriage, the importance of self-expression, and the evils of the “Resting Cure.”
• Motifs: Irony and the journal
• Symbols: The wallpaper
• Foreshadowing: The discovery of the teeth marks on the bedstead foreshadows the narrator’s own insanity and the increasing desperation of her situation, and the first use of the word “creepy” foreshadows her own eventual “creeping.”