Critical Response to The Yellow Wall-paper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” is set in the late 1800s in a “colonial mansion”(1657). The mansion sits back from the road, surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock” (1658). It is also bordered by separate houses made for gardeners and other servants, a garden brimming with grapes, and greenhouses, which have been long forgotten (1658). It seems to be a beautiful old place, a perfect place to get away from the world …

…and is often filled with sunlight, we are depressed because we know that she is slowly going mad. Each entry in the story becomes darker, going from “air and sunshine galore” (1659) to “a week of fog and rain”(1666). This is representative of her downward spiral into madness. Works Cited Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wall-paper.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fifth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999. 1657-1669.