Setting and Symbolism in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

(This 900-word essay is a literary analysis of the setting of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It draws a parallel between the main character's deteriorating mental condition and her perception of the room where she's imprisoned.)

The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper” could be described as a series of concentric circles, beginning with the grounds and proceeding inward to the house itself, the bedroom, and finally, the titular wallpaper. The wallpaper receives the most attention, both in the story and in interpretations of the story, but the bedroom also deserves the reader’s attention. Is it really an innocent place, a room where children once lived and played? Clues scattered throughout the story suggest it was not. This reality emerges in step with the narrator’s mental breakdown and show that the room is literally a prison cell and the narrator isn’t its first unwilling guest.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator is concerned about her own mental health and doesn’t agree with her husband’s prescribed treatment although she has agreed to go along with it. Her initial description of the house where they will spend the summer shows her generally optimistic attitude at this point. “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.” She is pleased at the prospect of living in a romantic, potentially haunted house. She isn’t as pleased with the bedroom where she’ll sleep, mainly because she hates the wallpaper, but she still sees it as a harmless place, a children’s nursery. “It was nursery first and then playground and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” If she had been afraid at this point, the bars on the windows and rings in the walls might have increased her foreboding, but the hopeful attitude she still has leads her to ignore their real meaning.

Over the course of the summer, the narrator’s mental condition worsens. The fourth of July passes, marking the midpoint of the summer holiday, and the narrator is getting weaker and weaker. “Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now. But it tired me all the same.” Even the small effort of having a few guests is more than she can stand up to, mentally or physically. She spends more time in bed which leads her to discover another odd feature of her bedroom: the bed is nailed to the floor. “I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe….” Why would there be a large, heavy bed in a children’s room to begin with, and why would it need to be nailed down? This feature hints that the room where the narrator is confined was never an innocent children’s bedroom at all.

Toward the end of the summer, the narrator becomes even more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. She is convinced that a woman is trapped inside its ugly pattern. And as she spirals away from reality, she mentions another detail about the damaged bedstead—it has been gnawed. “How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed!” She continues to assume that the room was previously a nursery, but how often do children, even in their wildest play, gnaw the furniture? The reader is led to form a more disturbing picture. It seems less and less likely that this room was meant for children.

By the end of the story, the narrator has become completely obsessed with the wallpaper, to the point where she locks herself in the bedroom to have time and privacy to finish destroying it. But the arrangement of the furniture frustrates her.  “This bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.” What kind of person previously occupied the room? How did the bedframe become so damaged? Here the narrator shows the reader how the bedframe came to its current condition. Someone else gnawed on it, someone with strong, adult teeth.

The narrator’s need to destroy the wallpaper leads her to lock the door and throw the key out the window. She begins to crawl around the room, rubbing her shoulder along the wall. “But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” The way the narrator’s shoulder fits the mark on the wall, going all around the room, allows the reader to visualize its previous occupant. To make such a mark would require the same, continuous motion repeated over and over. Such an activity would not likely be carried out by someone in a stable mental condition. Instead, some other imprisoned person has crawled along this floor, circling the room until his or her movements wore a groove into the wallpaper.

The narrator never puts together the clues herself. Throughout the story, she continues to see the room where she is confined as a harmless, innocent children’s nursery. But the details she gives—bars on the windows, rings set into the walls, the gnawed bedframe nailed to the floor, and the shoulder-height mark on the wallpaper all around the room—allow the reader to see more clearly and understand that this room was a cell long before she walked into it.