Tearing Sanity Apart with A Yellow Wallpaper

In Freud’s lectures, he mentioned that although humans possess the ability to take undesirable thoughts out of their conscious awareness, these thoughts do not simply disappear and rather take a place in one’s unconscious mind, from where they still influence their behaviors, even though this might be unknown to the human.

This same concept of repression can be applied to the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper, who believes she is sick in a way that no one else can understand and who, feeling aloof, misunderstood, and often being treated by her loved ones for the wrong diseases and given the wrong cures, feels a repression of her true abilities. She understands things in a unique manner and being a writer who is not able to let her creativity flow freely, she indulges in her imagination secretly. In secret, there is no one who can reject her ideas and make her believe anything other than what she wants to believe.

This is where the concept of fantasies by Freud comes in. Unable to fulfill her mind’s potential in real life, the woman indulges in solving the psychological complexity of a yellow wallpaper in her room as a way to complicate her mind into becoming more sick so as to prove to her husband and the others that her fantastical theories are true. It could even be said that perhaps the yellow wallpaper is her mind itself, a complex and constantly shifting thing that does not let her focus, where her thoughts are running around, too fast for her to be able to catch them. This could relate to why she feels so tired throughout the whole story, because her mind is in too many places and she can’t get it to think on one thing for too long and needs to sleep whenever the burden of her mind becomes too much.

She is sick because she refuses to let anyone into her creative world where she has formed too many stories so now thinking about these ideas makes her head ache since these ideas have shuffled around and took a distorted form, unable for her to decipher and this is where the narrative desire of the story can be pinpointed. Wanting to break free from those stopping her from indulging in her stories like a writer, leads to her seeing and wanting to help the ‘supposed’ women stuck inside the wallpaper who are similar to her, wanting to break free of the chains of others who stifle their creativity and freedom. She does not understand that this is her unconscious mind urging her to fulfill her repressed wantings of being a writer or perhaps, of being understood. She does not think she is sick but rather that she is the most sane of all, because she just wants to solve the complexities of the wallpaper by herself and help the women that she feels are trapped within the wallpaper.

Further, the woman uses the idea of transference to project her repressed wants and frustrations onto the wallpaper. She interprets the figures in the wallpaper as imprisoned women attempting to escape, projecting her own sense of powerlessness and imprisonment by her husband and loved ones onto them. She uses this projection as a coping strategy to help her express and face her internal conflict.

Lastly, Brooks’ concept of narrative resolution to the psychoanalytic "talking cure" can be seen in the woman’s final act of tearing down the wallpaper. This is her way of confronting her repressed feelings and breaking down the layers of her complex mind. However, unlike the resolution aimed for in the talking cure, the story ends tragically, suggesting that while the woman achieves the freedom she wished for, it comes at the cost of her sanity.