In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the color yellow to specifically describe the narrator of the story. Yellow is a symbol for many different moods and or feelings. Out of all the different emotional states, one of the first that comes to an individual’s mind is the feeling of warmth and cheeriness.  The color yellow signifies the opposite of warmth and cheer: sickness and fatigue. Both feelings are expressed throughout this short story. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” perfectly represents all of the different feelings or effects that the color yellow can have on someone.

The narrator’s relationship with her husband John, isn’t the most pleasant of relationships. The story gives off the feeling that she is stuck living under his possessive control.  John is a physician who works with sick and mentally unstable people daily. As a husband, He should care more for his wife rather than one of his patients, but that is not the case. At the time this story took place, men were stereotypically superior to women and John displayed that it almost every aspect. The narrator feels sickly throughout the story and continues to only get worse. She complains about two of the feelings that yellow represents: sickness and fatigue. Now, it is obvious that John could be a main source for this feeling of tiredness and depression. The narrator explains “John is a physician, and perhaps- ( I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)- perhaps, that is one reason I do not get well faster.”(299)  Here it is easy to get the obvious feeling that the narrator feels as if her husband isn’t taking proper care of her and wants her to remain sick so she will continue to be too tired to try and do anything that he wouldn’t approve of or disobey him and continue to live under his standards. The narrator also states, “I did write for a while in spite of them, but it does exhaust me a good deal- having to be so sly about it…,” (300) and “we have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day.” (301) Both of these examples show that both John and the new lifestyle and setting they now live in have made her constantly tired to the point where she isn’t even able to do things that she once loved doing. All of these hobbies she used to partake in would easily relieve her of the depression she is going through due to the unideal life she has been forced to live.

Although John seems to be the one to blame for his wife’s poor mental health, their new living space also plays a part in the constant fatigue and depression she deals with. She talks about how much she cannot stand the new ‘yellow wallpaper’ in her room. She says, “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it. It is stripped off- the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed… the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow… No wonder the children hate it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.” (301) She says this without knowing that for her time being there, she would be locked in this room the whole stretch having to study this wallpaper due to there being nothing else for her to do! Day by day she would study the paper and it would make her more exhausted as time went on. After weeks of watching the wallpaper and taking in its patterns, she comes to a point of being completely drained as she says “Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much” (305). 

Not only is the house negatively altering her mood , it is also bringing out the most typical representations of the color yellow out in her: warmth and cheeriness. She talks about how much she loves the house at first sight, claiming “The most beautiful place!” (300) and “There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden!” (300) With compliments like these it is shocking that she felt the way she did after staying at the house for a few weeks. It was obvious that the narrator was intrigued by the wallpaper. In fact, she was so interested, that she would end up studying it very often each day. She studied it day after day, week after week, because she knows that there was something to it!  Her husband John has forced her into a sheltered lifestyle, when all she has wanted is to go out and explore the world. Behind that wallpaper is the women she wants and used to be. 

Towards the end of the story, she begins to get a closer look at the wallpaper. Tearing it piece by piece, the narrator fights against the struggle to see what is behind that wallpaper. She has asked for help from her husband and her brother, who is also a physician, but has received nothing. Now it is up to her to help herself. 

Behind this “yellow” wallpaper is her true yellow side. Her happy, warm, and cheery side. She no longer wants to live under her husband and his every word. She doesn’t want to be trapped in this room full of lethargy. She doesn’t have to be trapped anymore, both in this house and in the wallpaper, “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 smoldering unclean yellow wallpaper has now been torn away only to show the new deep, happy, and full of life yellow wallpaper.