Walls as Reflections

Walls surround us, they contain us. We use them to make our homes or to hide things we don't want others to see. Walls show our personalities and our life experiences. From pictures that freeze moments in time, to colors and decorations we use.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator describes her time in a room that "was a nursery first...for the windows are barred..."(Gilman 1). Her main focus in the room is the wallpaper "it is stripped off...in great patches all around..."(1). In the piece the wallpaper represents what the woman is going through. She continuously describes a woman inside the wall, who is confined by the wallpaper, "and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern- it strangles so..."(5). The analysis of the wallpaper reveals that the woman she is describing is her. The wallpaper represents the oppression of woman, more specifically the oppression the woman experienced from her husband. Not only does it describe that situation but it also takes on the characteristics of the post-partum depression the narrator is experiencing, "the paper stained everything it touched" (5). From this line it seems as if the narrators depression taints everyone around her; her condition is considered a nuisance by everyone. The appearance of walls define people. When a stranger walks into a house they are able to categorize the people that live there by what color the walls are, whats on them and how those objects are arranged. Walls are an excellent way to express interests.

Living in a college dorm room is a great example of how walls represent who we are. When someone walks into your room they can tell what your interests are if you like sports or what your favorite color is. How we decorate our walls is a direct correlation to how we define ourselves as people. This is exactly what Gilman does with her narrator. The woman's description of the woman in the wallpaper is an indirect representation of what she was experiencing in life. Our walls say a lot about us, they are a reflection of ourselves.