What does the woman behind the wallpaper represent? Why does the ...

[gbarreiro]

What does the woman behind the wallpaper represent? Why does the narrator come to identify with her?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Where precisely in the story do you think it becomes clear that she has begunto hallucinate?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[Sweetkitty24130]

Answer to Question 1

• The narrator identifies with the woman in the wall because they are in the same situation. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman uses the traditional figure of the doppelgnger (a German term that, translated literally, means double-goer) in an original, feminist way. In Romantic literature the double usually represented an evil self that had broken free of the dominant, moral, conscious self. The evil double often battles the real self for control of the persons life. In Gilmans story, the repressed self that is finally liberated also wants to take over the narrators life, but the double is neither obviously evil nor morally dangerous. Once free, the double seems to merge into the narrator. I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did? she suddenly comments. Although the narrators outer life is crumbling, she is achieving a new authenticity in her inner life. Robert Louis Stevensons classic doppelgnger story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was published with immense acclaim in 1886only four years before Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. One wonders if Gilman knew it. She seems to take Stevensons conventional moral themes and revise them radically from a feminist perspective.

Answer to Question 2

• After only two weeks in this haunted house, the narrator begins to see two eyes attached to a broken neck in the wallpaper (par. 64). This seems to be the beginning of a deeper decline in frame of mind. However, by paragraph 121, the narrator sees, behind the pattern, something like a woman stooping down and creeping about. Ask students to consider who this woman might be. If this were a supernatural tale, the reader might eventually assume that a ghost or demon inhabits the yellow wallpaper, and there are overtones of the macabre in Gilmans story.

However, Gilmanlike Poe before heruses the outward narrative forms of Gothic and supernatural fiction to explore uncomfortable psychological territory. The woman imprisoned in the wallpaper is the narrators double, probably the parts of her being confined and repressed by her suffocating life. Only as the narrator sinks into madness do her own inhibitions drop sufficiently that she can liberate these forbidden or unacknowledged aspects of her psyche.