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Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
First Entry
Explanation and Analysis—The Room:
Jane’s bedroom is meant to be a sanctuary, a place where she can relax and heal from her postpartum depression. However, imagery reveals why the room actually impedes her recovery and contributes to her mental breakdown later in the story:
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The visual imagery in this passage portrays the room as paradoxically open and confining. While large, bright, and well-ventilated, there is also a sinister air to the room, as its windows are barred and there are strange “rings and things” attached to the walls. Though Jane assumes that these features mean the room was previously a children’s playroom or gymnasium, the reader can infer that the bars and rings may have been used to keep other mentally ill people confined to this room in the past.
Indeed, Jane’s ongoing description of the walls continues to imply that people before her were perhaps kept here against their will:
The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach[.]
And her description of the damaged floors is further evidence that people may have been forcibly held here:
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there[.]
Again, the imagery reveals that Jane may not be a particularly reliable narrator, as her judgment of the room doesn’t seem to line up with reality. Besides natural deterioration from neglect, the room appears to have been intentionally damaged by a person (or several people), suggesting that other mentally ill people may have been confined here in the past. The “stripped” wallpaper, “scratched and gouged and splintered” floor, and “dug out” plaster paint a vivid picture of a previous tenant desperately trying to claw themselves out of the room. Jane is unable to fully draw this connection, telling herself that rowdy children must have caused the damage. But the imagery allows the reader to determine that there is more to the room than what Jane describes, and that she, too, may become desperate to escape it.
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Explanation and Analysis—Unclean Yellow:
Imagery helps establish the wallpaper as both a trigger of Jane’s mental decline and a symbol of how her depression haunts and confounds her. Confined to the house and unable to socialize, Jane diverts all her attention to the grotesque wallpaper:
I never saw a worse paper in my life […]
It is dull enough to confuse the eye following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
Jane describes the wallpaper as so ugly, with its “unclean” and “repellant, almost revolting” yellow color, that it’s actually disturbing to her. The pattern “confuse[s] the eye,” “irritate[s]” her, and “provoke[s] study,” giving the reader the sense that the wallpaper—and, by extension, the room as a whole—is exacerbating rather than healing Jane’s mental illness. In fact, Jane views the wallpaper in much the same way that she views depression and captivity in the room, as both the wallpaper and her situation vex and entrap her. Her husband, John’s, refusal to change the wallpaper despite Jane’s hatred of it parallels how he dismisses her concerns about her own mental health, infantilizing and controlling her throughout the story. The image of the curves in the wallpaper’s pattern “suddenly comitt[ing] suicide” and “destroy[ing] themselves” deepens this association between the wallpaper and Jane’s helplessness and worsening mental state.
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Fourth Entry
Explanation and Analysis—Stooping and Creeping:
The emergence of the mysterious figure in the wallpaper represents the final stage of Jane’s mental illness, as she begins to obsess over the wallpaper and seemingly hallucinates that there’s a figure trapped behind its pattern. She uses both visual imagery and a simile to describe what she sees:
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.
The mysterious form in the wallpaper starts with blurry shapes that “get clearer every day,” eventually morphing into a single woman trying to escape. The imagery at this point in the story establishes that Jane has deteriorated severely—perhaps past the possibility of recovery. Although faint, there has been some hope throughout the story that Jane could heal and return to normalcy. However, the introduction of the shadowy figure ends any chances of that, because it is an indication of Jane losing her grip on reality.
Moreover, the simile in this passage—in which Jane compares the shape behind the wallpaper to a woman—allows the author, Gilman, to insert social commentary. Jane depicts the wallpaper as a prison holding a female figure whose agency and ability to communicate have been taken away. The image of the woman “stooping down and creeping about” is meant to parallel Jane herself, as she’s essentially held captive in the room and forced to figuratively tiptoe around her husband, John, minimizing her own concerns in order to placate him. In this sense, the simile in this passage makes it clear that Jane’s hallucination of the woman in the wallpaper is an externalization of her own true feelings about her situation. The wallpaper represents Victorian social norms as a pattern that restricts, isolates, and undermines women, while the mysterious figure beneath embodies all women struggling to escape it.
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