Question

What is the author’s likely purpose for the narrator’s lengthy and changing descriptions of the wallpaper? A. To help the reader visualize the setting in a more vivid way B. To suggest that the wallpaper’s designs reveal visual aspects of the narrator’s own life C. To reflect the narrator’s gradual descent into insanity D. To reveal that there is no wallpaper, and everything the narrator sees is a figment of her imagination

Answer 1

C. To reflect the narrator’s gradual descent into insanity

Step-by-step explanation:

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides extensive and unstable descriptions of the wallpaper to show how the narrator's mental health deteriorates as the story develops. In fact, the narrator's doctor husband claims that she is going through a "nervous depression." However, he fails to see her torments as she feels extremely pressured to fill society's expectations to be a mother an wife. Finally, her psychological state decays as she begins to see the figure of a woman trying to liberate herself from the wallpaper, and the narrator tears the wallpaper to free her.