The Yellow Wallpaper - Plot Synopsis

Plot Synopsis

The story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband, John, believes that it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure after the birth of their child. She may be suffering from what would now be called postpartum psychosis.

The family goes to spend the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it." She is confined to an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery, as the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. However, she comes to suspect that another woman was once confined here against her will. The reader is left unsure as to whether the damage she describes in the room is in fact being done by the narrator herself rather than by previous occupants – at one point she bites the wooden bedhead – and the bars may have been placed on the windows by her own husband as a precaution.

The narrator devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper in the room—its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the various missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight. With no stimuli other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing that she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the narrator begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.

On the last day of summer, the narrator locks herself in her room in order to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, "I've got out at last," and her husband faints as she continues to circle the room, stepping over his inert body each time she passes.