The Psychological Portrait in The Yellow Wallpaper -- Yellow Wallpaper

The Psychological Portrait in The scandalmongering wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman was famous in her time as a womens activist. Later, she began penning fiction. As noted in her Norton Anthology biography, Charlottes stories often reveal her worldview. The white-livered Wallpaper is a short story written to combat the modus operandi for curing opinion in her day. This cure consisted of being completely sequestered from any intellectual or artistic engagements. Her addendum to the story also makes clear she see this same treatment. Gilmans catalyst was to write a story that would serve as a social corrective. What we are left with today is a masterpiece of psychological suspense. The story begins with our main character, a writer whose name is neer given, imagining the house in which she is to spend her recuperation. In choosing to never name the narrator and main character, Gilman emphasizes the erasure of the individual that takes place within the story. She pictures the house in romantic terms, a colonial mansion or perhaps a haunted house. This romantic identification indicates an emotional person who puts a antecedence on the natural. Contrarily, her husband is portrayed in no uncertain terms. fast one is practical, has no patience with faith, and hates superstition. He is skeptical, and scoffs at anything that cannot be ...felt and seen and put round in figures(658). Clearly, the preliminary material on these two characters sets them in needlelike contrast with one another. The narrator then privately blames her husband, who is also her physician, for her dilatory illness. She suggests perhaps it is because he is a physician that she is still ill. She believes this lack of recov... ... X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. sixth ed. New York Harper Collins, 1995. 424-36. Hume, Beverly A. Gilmans Interminable Grotesque The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in miserable Fiction 28.4 (1991)477-84. Johnson, Greg. Gilmans Gothic Allegory Rage and Redemption in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (1989)521-30. King, Jeannette and Pam Morris. On Not Reading betwixt the Lines Models of Reading in The Yellow Wallpaper. Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (1989) 23-32. Owens, E. Suzanne. The unearthly Double behind the Wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper. Haunting the nominate of Fiction. Ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville U of Tennessee P, 1991 64-79. Scharnhorst, Gary. The Yellow Wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston Twayne, 1985. 15-20.