You might be wondering: Who is the main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper”?
Well, it’s not the narrator’s husband, John. He’s just telling us the story. The main character is actually his wife, who suffers from post-partum depression and is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper.
You see, she starts to believe that there’s a woman trapped inside the wallpaper and that she needs to free her. She starts acting like the woman in the wallpaper, and eventually John has it removed—but by then it’s too late! The narrator has become so obsessed with freeing this imaginary woman that she runs into the wall and tears off her own skin! She ends up being committed to an asylum where she dies. The story is narrated by John and serves as a symbol of how women were oppressed during this time period.
