Character Analysis of the Yellow Wallpaper

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Jane only has a few days left in the house and her obsession of the woman grows as does her distrust of her husband. “There are two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes. He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!”.(389) She has begun to cut herself off from her husband, avoiding him, hiding her thoughts and feelings from him. She doesn’t trust his intentions and right now her whole focus is on getting the woman out of the wallpaper. During the last night at house Jane is alone and decides that this is the night she will free the woman. “As soon as it was moon-light and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper”. (389) As the final day at the house continues Jane is determined to free the woman. She locks herself in the room and throws the key outside onto a path. Her plan is to free the woman and tie her up for John to see, then she will be right and she can prove to him that she wasn’t crazy. As Jane makes the final push to free the woman and tears off the last bits of paper something changes in the text of the story. Jane becomes the woman who was trapped in the wallpaper without any recognition of the change. “I don’t like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they came out of the wallpaper as I did?”. (390) So now Jane has become the woman from the wallpaper. The woman feels free and never wants to have to hide in the wallpaper again. She feels happy to be able to walk around the room and creep as she pleases.

As the woman is happily creeping around the room she hears John pounding on the door trying to open it, but it’s locked. The woman tells Joh that the key is outside on the path in a calm and soothing voice. John retrieves the key and opens the door and is startled to see his wife creeping around on the floor. He cries to his wife what is wrong with her, what was she doing. “I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. I’ve got out at last, said I “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most the paper, so you can’t put me back!”. (391) Jane has had a full mental breakdown by this point. She has lost herself in the wallpaper, she has lost her timid and submissive ways and she feels free.

By the end of the story and Jane has had quite the transformation of self worth and even identity. She went from loving mother and housewife doing her duty to her husband to becoming angry and distrustful of him to paranoid at him and her surroundings, she fought these emotions until her final meltdown where she seemed to split apart from herself and become the woman in the wallpaper. The woman who felt free and had no concern over making John happy. She was playing by her own rules now and nobody was going to stop her, not even Jane. Jane identified with the woman, she was trapped in the house with yellow wallpaper and the woman was trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. She pushed herself obsessively to feel like this woman so much that her breakdown led to what she wanted all along. To be free and happy.

Works Cited

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper” Compact Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. 9th

ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen Mandell. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015. 379-391

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