The main character in The Yellow Wallpaper is a woman whose mental illness is treated improperly and thus causes her to recede into a childlike state. After the woman gives birth and her husband senses she’s acting strange, he takes her to a secluded house for the summer. In this house her husband John, who is a doctor, keeps her confined to a room much like a child in trouble.  If the woman’s mental illness had been treated in a more efficient way then the woman may have returned to what the husband believed to be her normal state, but instead she begins acting like a young child and even less like herself.

In the beginning of the short story, the woman complains about her husband’s actions yet responds to them with “what is one to do?” (Gilman 300). The woman lets her husband control her and make the majority of decisions for her like a child who doesn’t know any better.  His job as a physician and his place of power in society gives John an authoritative personality where he thinks his opinion is best and that his wife must do as he says. Similarly, that is how parents act towards their children and for the most part children respect their parent’s decisions and obey their demands, like the woman does with her husband John. This type of behavior can be seen again when the woman wants to stay in a room on the first floor of the house, one that was more open and was decorated with roses on the window. However, John specifically makes her stay in an old nursery with bars over the window, a bed bolted down, and an intricate wallpaper that completely tantalizes the woman. She obeys despite how much discomfort the room causes her and her husband almost refuses to allow her to leave the room, trapping her in there like a young kid who has been grounded. 

The audience is shown the woman starting to adopt childlike behaviors in The Yellow Wallpaper. The woman claims that she has become more sensitive and acts out when she says “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive.” (Gilman 300). She admits to the change in her behavior and describes herself as having unstable emotions. This kind of behavior is very much like a child’s in the sense that they can become angry and upset over small and unimportant events. The woman also tells the reader “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (Gilman 304). Crying is most commonly associated with the behavior of a baby, who will cry continuously due to the inability to communicate with its caretaker. In the case of this woman, she is crying because she cannot communicate with her husband about her emotions and discomfort with living in that room, so she cries in hopes of catching their attention. Unfortunately, her behavior doesn’t change the way John treats her or her illness and the woman is still kept in the old nursery and is secluded from other people.  

Towards the end of The Yellow Wallpaper, the woman begins to perform certain actions that are typical of a young child. Even her husband John partakes in these actions as she describes “dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till I tired my head.” (Gilman 305). John somewhat encourages these actions by treating her like that, not only once but again when the woman says “then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose” (Gilman 302). At another point in The Yellow Wallpaper, John also addresses the woman, in quite an authoritative way, by asking her “What is it little girl?” (Gilman 306). This kind of speech and the nicknames John has for his wife are not those that are stereotypical of a couple but of a father and child. It can be said that John doesn’t notice that these actions are reinforcing her into believing she is a child, possibly because he also has a new infant to take care of. So, he is treating both the child and his wife with the same loving yet authoritative behaviors. However, it is said in The Yellow Wallpaper that John and his wife have a nanny named Mary who watches over and takes care of the baby. The story ends with the woman crawling around the room and John passing out at the sight of her doing this. The woman had receded into such a childlike state by the end of the story that she stopped using her ability to walk and instead, was crawling around the room she was confined to.

The Yellow Wallpaper is from the perspective of a woman who is writing in a secret journal about her experience at a house in which she is kept away from others as her husband’s attempt to fix her mental illness. His approach to curing her essentially backfires and the woman ends up expressing the behaviors of a child instead of those of a typical adult, wife, and mother. From obeying her husband’s commands, crying without a stimulus, and crawling around her room, the main character of The Yellow Wallpaper ends up acting more like the child at the end of the story than when it began.

 

 