The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a very important piece of early feminist works. With this writing, Gilman has helped create opportunities for more female writers. Not only is "The Yellow Wallpaper" an early piece of feminist work, but it is also a great horror novel. One of the main reasons as to why this writing is a great piece of horror literature is because "The Yellow Wallpaper" misleads you as a reader. "The Yellow Wallpaper" misleads you by being written in the main character's perspective, creating an emotional connection between the reader and the main character actively lies to the reader.

The perspective "The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in is one of the main ways the writing misleads you. In "The Yellow Wallpaper",

In the story, the author writes "But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself - before him, at least, and that makes me very tired" (Gilman 26). This quote tells us that the author is having trouble controlling herself due to her nervous depression, and she is tiring herself in the process. This makes you empathize with the main character because they are admitting that their nervous depression is tiring them out, and the reader feels sorry for them, especially since the main character is not able to take care of their own child. Another quote in the story says "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?" (Gilman 10). This lets the reader know that the main character's husband is undermining her disorder, and she feels like she is stuck not being able to get treatment because of her husband. The reader also empathizes with the main character because she feels like she has no say because of her husband being a physician and her nervous depression. Her condition is causing her distress and we sympathize with the main character's pain, which helps the book mislead

In the text, the main character tells us "I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was" (Gilman 165). She tells us that she is recovering from her nervous depression and is getting better. As a reader, we are inclined to believe her when she says this because of the aforementioned perspective the story is written in and the emotional connection. However, we know that this cannot be trusted, since later in the text she writes "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things" (Gilman 172). This quote happens after the first quote and it shows us that she is still fixated on the wallpaper. Even though she tells us she is getting better, quotes like this clearly show that we cannot trust the fact that she is, since she is still focused on the wallpaper in her room. The main character misleads and lies to the reader throughout "The Yellow Wallpaper" to try and convince us that she is getting