The Yellow Wallpaper
Glossary
C
- Cousin Henry and Julia
- Relatives the narrator hopes to visit once she is well, whom John calls "stimulating people" he would as soon keep away from her as "put fire-works in my pillow-case." They never appear in the story directly; they stand for the society and conversation the rest cure denies her.
- Related: The Rest Cure, John
- Creeping
- The narrator's word for the woman's movement behind the wallpaper, and eventually for her own movement around the room's perimeter, where her shoulder fits into a long smooch worn into the wall. By the final entries she creeps herself, locked in the nursery, identifying herself with the figure she has spent the summer watching.
- Related: The Woman Behind the Wallpaper, The Pattern
J
- Jennie
- John's sister, who keeps house during the summer and looks after the narrator with cheerful, watchful care. The narrator comes to suspect that Jennie, too, has noticed something odd about the wallpaper, catching her with a hand on it and hearing her explain away the yellow stains it leaves on clothing.
- Related: John, The Pattern
- John
- The narrator's husband and physician, who diagnoses her condition, prescribes and enforces the rest cure, and controls nearly every detail of her days. He is affectionate but dismisses her account of her own symptoms as fancy, insisting she use "will and self-control" instead of taking her seriously.
- Related: The Rest Cure, Nervous Depression, Jennie
N
- Nervous Depression
- The diagnosis John and the narrator's physician brother give her — described as "a slight hysterical tendency" and nothing more serious. It is the label under which every symptom she reports, including her growing fixation on the wallpaper, gets dismissed or reframed as "silly fancies" rather than taken seriously.
- Related: The Rest Cure, John, Weir Mitchell
T
- The Journal
- The secret diary in which the narrator records her thoughts, hidden from John because he "hates to have me write a word." It is the story's frame and its only sanctioned outlet for the narrator's mind, referred to at one point as "dead paper" safe enough to confess to what she would not say aloud.
- Related: John, The Rest Cure
- The Nursery
- The large, airy top-floor room John chooses for their summer stay, over the narrator's objection to a prettier room downstairs. It was previously a nursery and gymnasium, which explains its barred windows, rings in the walls, a heavy bed nailed to the floor, and paper torn away in patches — details the narrator first reads as mere wear and later as something more deliberate.
- Related: John, The Pattern
- The Pattern
- The wallpaper's chaotic, sprawling design, which the narrator obsessively studies for weeks — a "debased Romanesque" of "bloated curves" that seems to defy any principle of radiation, alternation, or repetition. She comes to believe it moves, changes with the light, and imprisons a figure that shakes it from behind, especially by moonlight.
- Related: The Nursery, The Woman Behind the Wallpaper, Creeping
- The Rest Cure
- The treatment John prescribes for the narrator: total forbidding of work, writing, and stimulation, paired with enforced idleness, tonics, and fresh air. She is required to lie down after every meal and is not permitted to visit the stimulating company of Cousin Henry and Julia. The narrator privately believes the opposite — congenial work and society — would help her more.
- Related: John, Nervous Depression, Weir Mitchell
- The Woman Behind the Wallpaper
- A figure, or sometimes many figures, the narrator perceives creeping behind the paper's outer design, shaking the bars of the pattern as if trying to climb through. By daylight she is subdued and still; by moonlight or in dim light she becomes active, and the narrator begins watching for her at every window and eventually helps her — or becomes her — by tearing the paper down.
- Related: The Pattern, Creeping
- The Yellow Smell
- A faint, subtle odor the narrator notices coming from the wallpaper during a stretch of damp weather, one she cannot identify except by comparing it to the color of the paper itself. It seeps through the whole house, follows her outdoors, and wakes her at night — one more sensory detail that convinces her the paper is not merely ugly but somehow alive.
- Related: The Pattern
W
- Weir Mitchell
- The specialist John threatens to send the narrator to if she does not "pick up faster." She dreads this, having heard from a friend who was under his care that he is "just like John and my brother, only more so." Silas Weir Mitchell was a real Philadelphia physician famous for the rest cure, which he also prescribed to Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself.
- Related: The Rest Cure, John, Nervous Depression