Prof. Derek P. Royal

ENG 442 – Survey of American Literature II

Study Points for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper”

Ø What is the significance of the story’s point of view? And along with this:

o The story isn’t told in just any first person point of view—it’s told through personal journal entries. Why might Gilman use this particular style of narration?

o How might the story be different if it were told from a third person point of view?

o How might the story be different if it were told from the husband’s, John’s, point of view?

Ø Why does the narrator write in a journal? What might writing symbolically signify in the story? Why do John and his sister not want the narrator to write?

Ø The narrator describes the room in her entries, bit by bit, and continues to speculate about the barred windows, the rings in the walls, the lack of furnishings, the chewed bedpost, and the torn wallpaper. When did you first begin to realize that the room wasn’t a “nursery first and then a playroom and gymnasium” for children? How does the narrative style contribute to your ongoing realization?

Ø The narrator comments early on that Mary attends to her baby. Why can’t the narrator attend to her own child?

Ø As the story unfolds, we learn that there is a difference between the way the wallpaper looks during the day and the way it looks at night. What is the significance of this sun-moon binary in the story? Consider these points and their possible significances:

o The wallpaper irritates the narrator by day, but fascinates her at night

o In sunlight, the narrator notices a “lack of sequence” in the pattern of the wallpaper; in moonlight, the pattern distinctions become vibrant

o Traditionally, the sun has been associated with man, and the moon with woman

o The moon has also been associated with mental derangement: lunar-lunacy

o The moon is many times connected to art, inspiration, and the imagination (and along with this, what might be the links between art/imagination and mental derangement?)

o At one point, the narrator writes, “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is it changes as the light changes.” Reread this sentence within the context of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s observations of the custom house in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Is “The Yellow Wall-paper” a Romance?

Ø What significance do you find in the color yellow? Notice as the story progresses, the narrator makes more and more references to that color.

Ø The narrator seems to write more in her journal toward the end of the story, at the same time she’s noticing more fascinating details in the wallpaper. Why is this?

Ø In the brief essay that follows the story in our textbook, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’”, Gilman writes, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy.” What does she mean by this? How does the revelation of her personal history in this brief essay change, or influence, your reading of the short story?

Ø In a larger sense, what does Gilman’s story have to say about late-nineteenth-century domesticity? What does it say about the place of women at that time?