Every author has the power to control how information they write reaches their reader. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of The Yellow Wallpaper, used many literary devices to strengthen her story and develop the character of the narrator. The story is written in a first person point of view. The speaker/Narrator is portrayed as an anxious, depressed woman who is delusional.
The author used the element of repetition in describing the yellow wallpaper, this shows that the wallpaper is of importance and how the speaker is paranoid and imaginative. The description of the wallpaper as “a smoldering unclean yellow...” helps the reader paint a mental picture to see how the woman was uncomfortable with the wallpaper. The personification of the wall “having curves and the lines being alive,” was used to tell the reader that the woman was imaginative and obsessed with the wallpaper.
The woman likes to write but is forced not to by her husband, Doctor John. We see she is determined to have her way through her secretly keeping a journal. The woman is crazy and believes that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper. She fights to recognize that the woman in the wallpaper is an external symbolic version of her mind and situation.
The author used the illusion of the woman in the wallpaper to portray the narrator, being that the woman in the wallpaper is “trapped” such as the narrator. This image of the trapped woman is Gilman’s way of showing the reader and telling the narrator that other woman are also