Overactive Imagination

For any writer, a vivid imagination can be not only the greatest gift, but also the most terrifying curse. Catch a writer daydreaming and immediately, one can assume that said writer is creating entire worlds behind the typical distant gaze. The slightest inspiration can spark entire volumes of fictional characters and situations. Unfortunately, such an ability can prove dangerous. As exemplified in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an imagination stuck on just one subject can insight anywhere between a loss of focus to total insanity. The main character, left with no outlet for her creativity, was forced to occupy her mind with a horrid pattern on the yellow wallpaper that covered her room; in the end, it drove her to insanity.

The narrator’s husband, a physician named John who loves his wife dearly, is unknowingly the cause of her downfall. Because she suffers from “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (9), her husband has commanded that she does not write at all and remain in bed for as much of the day as she can. Such orders have devastating consequences for a woman with such a big imagination. Our first clue about her creative ability comes in the very beginning of the story, when she clings to the idea that the mansion they have moved into is haunted. Forced to rest all the time, the poor woman is looking for anything to occupy her mind. Once she is moved to her room, the narrator immediately tells us about the wallpaper, “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (32). As the story picks up, the narrator talks less about the house or John and more about the wallpaper. We are forced to stare at it with her, trying to follow its terrible curves and drops and stops, all the while writhing in the wretchedness of its yellow color. As time passes on, the wallpaper gains a disgusting allure; the narrator “[follows] that pattern by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics” (93). When she is not talking of the decoration, the narrator tells us about how she is not supposed to be writing. She has to hide her work whenever John or one of the servants comes to check on her. While she secretly writes on occasion—“But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (105)—we can easily detect the guilt she feels for doing so. Thus deterred from using writing as a relief and release for her imagination, the narrator spends more and more time trying to decipher the wallpaper.

Near the final month of the couple’s three-month lease on the house, we finally learn of the narrator’s growing hallucinations. Her insanity begins when she imagines seeing a “woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (121). At first, the creeping woman is a casual mention, something easy for us to understand. Our eyes can easily play tricks on us if we stare at an object for too long. The narrator, however, begins to talk more about the shapes she is discovering in the wallpapers; she becomes more convinced that the woman in the wallpaper is real, not just a trick of the eyes. Her imagination, forced to contain itself almost entirely in her upstairs room, clings to the idea of the wallpaper containing a deeper mystery. She has lost control. The narrator, so imprisoned by an illness that no one can make sense of, is consumed by the idea of another woman imprisoned by a pattern that no one can make sense of. The creeping woman hides in the daylight, but “in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (187); similarly, the narrator pretends she is not miserable when anyone is around, but as soon as she is alone, she too shakes her metaphorical bars. Every piece of information that we are told about the creeping woman can be paralleled by the narrator’s life.

By the end of the story, the narrator has been driven completely crazy by the multiple physicians’ attempts to suppress her imagination. She has completely lost touch with reality and can no longer distinguish between herself and the woman trapped inside the wallpaper. Her desperation to escape her own prison of boredom drives her to “free” the woman. In a sense, she is living out her own desire through the character of her imagination. By slipping into the mind of the creeping woman, the narrator’s room turns from a symbol of imprisonment to a symbol of freedom. The power of the narrator’s imagination—focused only on her delusions of another being longing for escape from the patterns in the wallpaper—leads to her ultimate downfall. (809)