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Tearing Sanity Apart With A Yellow Wallpaper

The document analyzes the themes of repression and creativity in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' linking the protagonist's struggles with Freud's concepts of unconscious thought and fantasy. It discusses how the woman projects her feelings of powerlessness onto the wallpaper, interpreting it as a reflection of her own confinement and desire for freedom. Ultimately, her act of tearing down the wallpaper symbolizes a tragic confrontation with her repressed emotions, leading to a loss of sanity rather than the resolution she seeks.

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28 views2 pages

Tearing Sanity Apart With A Yellow Wallpaper

The document analyzes the themes of repression and creativity in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' linking the protagonist's struggles with Freud's concepts of unconscious thought and fantasy. It discusses how the woman projects her feelings of powerlessness onto the wallpaper, interpreting it as a reflection of her own confinement and desire for freedom. Ultimately, her act of tearing down the wallpaper symbolizes a tragic confrontation with her repressed emotions, leading to a loss of sanity rather than the resolution she seeks.

Uploaded by

Fernanda
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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02/02/2025, 12:57 Tearing Sanity Apart with A Yellow Wallpaper

Yashika Vahi Jul 8, 2024 3 min read

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

https://www.psychosandpoets.com/post/tearing-sanity-apart-with-a-yellow-wallpaper 1/2
02/02/2025, 12:57 Tearing Sanity Apart with A Yellow Wallpaper

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.

https://www.psychosandpoets.com/post/tearing-sanity-apart-with-a-yellow-wallpaper 2/2

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