Quotes from The Yellow Wallpaper

“John is a physician, and perhaps, perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”

The narrator's third paragraph, addressing her own diary. The doubled perhaps is precise: she is allowed to suspect, but not allowed to know. Gilman is showing how a woman in 1892 had to phrase a true thing about her husband. The whole story will be a slow unfolding of what the second perhaps is concealing: the cure is the disease.

“If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency, what is one to do?”

A few lines later. The sentence is structured as a rhetorical question, but the answer is buried in its grammar: one does what the physician says. Gilman's point is institutional: the diagnosis is not just a clinical description, it is a social fact, signed by a husband and a relative, and there is no procedure available to the patient for disputing it.

“Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

The narrator stating her own theory of her illness. The repeated personally is the most important word in the sentence. She is conceding, before stating her view, that her view will be received as personal, not medical. Gilman is showing the rhetorical hoops a woman had to jump through to introduce a contradictory idea. The narrator is correct, and her correctness will not be permitted to matter.

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

The narrator describing the wallpaper of the bedroom she has been confined to. The verbs (commit suicide, plunge, destroy) are doing the story's central work: the wallpaper is being described in the vocabulary of mental breakdown, before the narrator has admitted she is breaking down. Gilman uses the room as the diary, and the diary as the room; what is happening to the narrator is being projected onto the wall before she can see it.

“There is a woman behind it, and she is just as quiet as can be.”

The narrator, weeks in, beginning to see a woman in the pattern. The grammatical certainty (there is) is the shift. She has stopped speculating. Gilman makes the hallucination behave like a discovery: the woman has been there all along, and the rest cure is the means by which she has become visible. The story is partly an argument that imprisonment, sustained, produces the very pathology the prison was meant to prevent.

“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.”

Later in the story. The wallpaper has resolved itself into prison imagery (bars) with a woman behind it. Gilman's symbolism is unsubtle by design; the story is short and it cannot afford ambiguity at the level of metaphor. The woman is the narrator, the bars are her marriage, and the moonlight is the only time she is allowed to see clearly because John is asleep.

“I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!”

The story's final lines, spoken to John, who has just unlocked the door and fainted at the sight of her. Two textual puzzles. First, who is Jane? Critics suspect she is the narrator's own pre-illness self, whom the breakdown has dispatched. Second, who is speaking? The narrator has identified with the woman in the wallpaper so completely that the I is no longer reliably her. The story ends on the costliest victory in nineteenth century American fiction.

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

The last paragraph. The narrator, having crawled out of the bed where John keeps her, is now creeping in a circle around the room, and her husband has fainted in her path. The horror of the ending is not the breakdown; it is the matter-of-fact tone. Gilman gives her narrator, at the end, a voice that does not register horror, because the situation has, in her experience, no horror in it. The diary is being kept by a person who is, finally, free of the requirement to call her life what it is not.