CUNY Academic Commons

Anahis Lorenzo; Annotated Image

This image is from the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator of the story is driven to craziness because of this yellow wallpaper in her room. She is under order to take bed cure, meaning she is not allowed to leave her house, write, etc. Now this yellow wallpaper has something to it besides the color that made the narrator hate the wallpaper more. She seemed to see a woman trapped in the wallpaper’s design. During the daytime, she would not see her on the wall, but in the night she would. She tries to help the woman escape, but in reality, she was trying to help herself avoid being treated as a child. Her husband put her in a nursery room; he would carry her. When the woman finally was out, the narrator says, “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” All along the woman inside the wallpaper was her (the narrator). She needed to escape, to be free from John, his sister, and the house they were staying at.