The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
“A woman is prescribed rest and silence to cure her mind. She watches wallpaper instead. The wallpaper watches back.”
Character Analysis
An unnamed woman whose intelligence, creativity, and perceptiveness are treated as symptoms of illness. She is a writer who has been forbidden to write, a thinker who has been told to stop thinking, and an observer whose observations are dismissed as fancy. Her journal is the only space where her perceptions are recorded without male editorial control. Her descent into madness is simultaneously the destruction of a mind and the liberation of a self -- and Gilman refuses to let these be separated. The possible identification of 'Jane' as the narrator's name suggests she sheds her identity entirely in the final scene, becoming the nameless woman from the wallpaper.
Educated, literary, self-conscious about her own perceptions. Uses complex syntax and ironic understatement in early entries. Her voice suggests a woman of the professional class who has been trained to think but forbidden to produce.