Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a
story fraught with the inner terror of the narrator. As such many of the passages
describe the ruin of those things around her, as well as the omnious feelings of
someone's physical presence. This presence manifests itself in the mind of the
despairing narrator as someone caught in the hideous yellow wallpaper of the room to
which she has been sequestered. Lying in this room without any other stimulus,
Gilman'snarrator can only think,
I wish I could get well. But I must not think
about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it
had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like
a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside
down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it
and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd,
unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and
the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the
other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing
before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child
and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furntiture that most
children could find in a
toy-store.
This
passage, certainly, adds emotional impact to the narrative as given an intimate account
of the protagonist's growing feelings of confusion and obsessiveness with lack of
symmetry in the pattern of the yellow wallpaper.
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