Narratives of Madness: A Functional-Cognitive Analysis of Inner Speech in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

This study presents a functional-cognitive linguistic analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Drawing on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Vygotsky's cognitive approach to inner speech, the study examines how the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language reflect the narrator's psychological decline and the oppressive gender roles of her time. The ideational metafunction decodes the mental processes experienced by the protagonist, while the interpersonal metafunction reflects the deterioration of identity and relationships under the immense strain of stress. Furthermore, the textual metafunction highlights the thematic progression and the cohesion strategies that mirror the protagonist's descent into psychosis. Qualitative analysis of mental processes, modal verbs, syntactic fragmentation, and repetition reveals a gradual breakdown in linguistic structures that mirrors the narrator's descent into madness. The features of inner speech (ellipsis, compression, and subject omission) are analyzed as they serve as linguistic markers of cognitive decline. The Yellow Wallpaper emerges as a symbolic text onto which the narrator projects her inner turmoil and resistance to societal norms. By aligning linguistic form with cognitive function, this research contributes to interdisciplinary discussions in linguistics and psychology, offering insights into how language encodes mental illness and the marginalization of women's roles.