The Agency of “The Yellow Wallpaper”

This article argues that the agency of the wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s eponymous story reshapes the protagonist’s identity. Irreducible to a passive object, the wallpaper metamorphoses with its environment, challenges human visual mastery, and destabilizes the anthropocentric self. Moreover, its yellow smell dismantles the classical subject–object divide and embeds the heroine within a dynamic relationship with her surroundings. Finally, the agency of the wallpaper reveals a covert defiance of scientific and medical reductionism at the fin de siècle.