The Yellow Wallpaper (week 1)

To be completely honest, it was difficult for me to understand how The Yellow Wallpaper was supernatural. At the end of my first initial reading of it, I had accepted the events of the story as events that could truly happen to a person going psychologically insane. A woman with a history of mental illness isolated in the countryside and stuck in a room with nothing but a bed and old, stained wallpaper; how could one not imagine seeing creatures moving on the walls. It is scary where the mind can take you with a little imagination. But after reading it again from an analytical gothic standpoint, I began to see that this story is indeed supernatural throughout the entire thing.

To begin, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, creates an atmosphere in the story through the text that begins pleasant enough, but gains a momentum of terror and suspense as the reader moves along. The narrator is essentially writing journal entries which showcases her psychological state of mind which the reader can accept as an overactive imagination or a psychological disorder of great proportion. So, what makes this story gothic and supernatural? Well, for one, the protagonist is a tortured character. What do I mean by that? She is tortured by the ugly, yellow wallpaper which she even goes to blame as a negative influence on her, “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (Gilman 5). She beings to develop an obsession that springs from a constant haunting by the women from behind it. This torture pretty much drives her to the brink of her sanity because she is convinced that the women are constantly trying to get out and she is only one who can save them.

Simply the underlying suspense gives away that this is a supernatural gothic short story, but the theme of isolates imprisonment for mental healing is also a gothic theme that is present throughout it, as well. As a reader, I saw how the narrator slowly started to become insane, and my initial reading of it had me accept is as just a story because I was left unsure of how much of the narrator’s thoughts were in the narrator’s head or actually happening. As a reader, one can decide if this is story is a series of journal entries written about the mind going crazy (it’s all in the narrator’s head) or if this is a supernatural story in which these events are actually happening.