“This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.”
— “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Technique
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the objective correlative technique to express the narrator’s emotions on the wallpaper in the bedroom. It projects the narrator’s emotions onto the wallpaper, mixing her anger with her imagination to turn an inanimate object into an animate object.
Use
- In the same way that kids see shapes in the sky, let your characters use their imagination to create or superimpose imagery.
The Periplous 