The short story, “The Yellow Paper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an interesting read. It seems to be an articulated look at the psychology of a paranoid, clinically depressed woman who becomes suffocated by her husband’s dominance. Slowly, the fragile mental state of this unhappily married woman becomes evident as she slips away from reality and becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her bedroom. Her depression with bouts of hallucinations progress through the story. The vivid details of the agonizingly hideous wallpaper engulf her as she concludes the wallpaper is evil and harbors a woman held against her will. Behinds the imaginary bars of the wallpaper, the woman behind bars shakes and stirs about, eventually getting out. The author’s despair of her own prison is mirrored in the wallpaper. She goes into great detail describing the torturous nights staring and watching the moonlit wall animate her own real life mental anguish of being a kept woman. Her freedom from the obsession, as the author would like us to believe, morphs into a complete psychotic breakdown in the end, as she assimilates back into the wall paper. The author teaches us that depression from oppression can bring about an alternate sense of reality. Gilman’s own depression gives us a sense of how she was able to transfigure the main character’s mentality and describe its evolution.
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