Our protagonist is convinced that he’s treating serious cases the whole time, though he could also be avoiding his increasingly unstable wife (and perhaps a room with yellow wallpaper in it). As the story goes on, John increasingly spends days and even nights away from home. He expects a wife of the times, when what he has instead is a flighty, intellectual, easily bored companion who craves his respect. He will, unfortunately, turn out to be dead wrong about that. John is the protagonist’s husband, a physician who thinks he knows how to cure his wife. Over the course of the story, our protagonist becomes more and more convinced that being isolated and bored (primarily in a room with hideous wallpaper) is in fact exacerbating her mental breakdown, but she’s not able to convince her husband of the fact. Suffering from a “nervous depression” in the opening of the story, the protagonist’s husband, John, brings her to an old country estate to take the “rest cure”, which as the protagonist describes it involves “tonics” “air” and “exercise” as well as an injunction not to work or visit friends-to do anything stimulating. The protagonist is a writer who not only doesn’t have “any advice and companionship about work” but is treated by John’s sister, Jennie, as though “it is the writing which made sick!” The protagonist is a middle to upper class mother of a young baby the woman either works as a writer, or writes extensively enough that she considers it her life’s work.

Our unnamed protagonist is the narrator of the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a short story published in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which uses the conceit that the protagonist is writing the entire story in a journal. The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Graphic Novel by sarabarkat

Go here if you just want a summary of The Yellow WallpaperĪnd here for the full text of The Yellow Wallpaper Full list of every character in The Yellow Wallpaper & who they are - narrator, John, Jennie, Jane, Mary, baby, brother, mother, cousins & Weir Mitchell!

Gilman the yellow wallpaper