Emotionally Unavailable by Design: An Analysis of Narrator Reliability in Nevada and The Yellow Wallpaper

Abstract

What readers consider a “reliable” narrator often reveals more about their assumptions than about the narrator’s truthfulness. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper prompt readers to critically examine their internalized biases regarding narrative reliability. Each text achieves this through distinct approaches to narrative structure, perspective, and the portrayal of emotional vulnerability. Nevada employs third-person indirect discourse to follow Maria on a road trip, while The Yellow Wallpaper unfolds through the first-person epistolary format of an unnamed narrator. Despite the immersive intimacy of the first-person voice, Gilman’s narrator remains unnamed. By contrast, Maria is named early, with her gender and social context made clear. Yet the narrative structure flattens her personhood through emotional detachment and stereotyping. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper appears more emotionally accessible and credible to readers, despite lacking the most basic marker of personhood—a name. Meanwhile, Maria is difficult to empathize with, due to the narrative distance mirroring her dissociation. This disparity raises important questions about whose pain is believed, and which ways of expressing that pain are accepted as valid or deserving of empathy in literature.