Charlotte Perkins Gillman uses the setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" to reflect the deteriorating mental state of the narrator as she struggles to cope with her bed rest prescription. The most obvious example of this reflection is the yellow wallpaper of the room that the narrator is confined in. She becomes fascinated with the intricate designs printed on the wallpaper, and her obsession finally manifests itself into hallucinations of seeing another woman trapped within the designs. Her desire to free this woman is a metaphor for her desire to free herself and is the most notable use of setting in Gillman's short story.
However, there are several other more subtle examples of how the setting of "The Yellow Wallpaper" reflects the narrator's own delusions. She notes several times that there are bite marks on the furniture and bars on the windows and concludes that these must be remnants of children who once occupied this room. As the story progresses and the narrator's hysteria grows, it becomes apparent that the house is a hospital that children would not have been in, and the bite marks are her own from attempts at possible gnawing her way to freedom. The narrator's rejection to see her immediate surroundings for what they really are and her continuous destruction of them mirror the slow deterioration of her mental health.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" as an indictment of the "rest cure," which, during Gilman's lifetime, was a common treatment given to women suffering from disorders that in the present world would be defined as forms of anxiety and depression. Under the rest cure, women were required to severely limit their activities, including reading and visiting with or even writing letters to family and friends, and they were ordered to spend the vast majority of their day in bed. Perkins herself was prescribed the rest cure during a severe bout of what would now be recognized as postpartum depression. She found that such extreme restriction of activities stripped her life of meaning and did her much more harm than good. Because Gilman's goal was to illuminate the adverse effects of this type of treatment, her choice to restrict the setting to one room is integral to the story's message and the best way to show the maddening, skin crawling effect such confinement and social isolation would have on a person, especially one who was already in an emotionally fragile state. The setting is anything but boring and instead lends itself to suspense and elements of psychological horror.
Some specific ways Gilman builds suspense and terror into her story, via the single room setting, include:
The gothic, foreboding description of the room, which is meant to emphasize the feeling of confinement. It contains barred windows, a splintered floor, an iron bed that has been nailed to the floor, and of course, the ripped worn wallpaper of the title.
The room itself begins to drive the woman from merely depressed to actually mad. With nothing to do all day except secretly writing in a forbidden journal, she resorts to staring at the hideous pattern. Its pattern begins to take on disturbing shapes in her mind reminding her of macabre human faces and in one spot of a strangled infant. The sickly yellow color drives her crazy and, in her confused state, it seems to change shades and eventually she even hallucinates strange odors coming from it. She eventually begins to see a woman, her "double," in the pattern of the wallpaper. She imagines the woman is trapped in the walls of the house and trying, but failing, to break through the paper.
Although the action takes place entirely inside the room in which the narrator is imprisoned, she can glimpse a beautiful garden through the bedroom window. It's lush and beautiful, filled with "old fashioned flowers" and "mysterious deep shaded arbors." In the nineteenth-century, garden imagery like this was often used by women authors to depict feminine power and creativity, something which the narrator of the story has been denied in her extreme confinement.
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