61 pages • 2 hours read
Paul G. TremblayA Head Full of Ghosts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Yellow Wallpaper
Content Warning: This Symbols & Motifs section contains references to mental health conditions.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the name of a celebrated short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892), referenced by “Karen Brissette” in her blog. It is also the actual wallpaper affixed to the walls in the front hall of the Barrett home. “Karen” believes that misogyny and patriarchal authority enabled Dad, Father Wanderly, the male-led production crew, and Dr. Navidson to exploit Marjorie Barrett, and that they constructed her illness according to their values.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a young woman with postpartum depression is forced to defer to the treatment implemented by her physician-husband. Amidst veiled threats of being committed to a psychiatric hospital, he encourages her to rest. He dismisses her concerns and need to be free of the room wallpapered in yellow, which once detained another person with an illness and is slowly contributing to her growing psychosis.
Like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Marjorie’s concerns about her illness are swept aside as “hysterical” and “irrational,” largely due to her youth and the perceived expertise of the men involved. She too worsens until, like the protagonist in the short story, her prime tormentor is dead.
The yellow wallpaper in A Head Full of Ghosts invites comparisons between these two women’s experiences. It also takes on a symbolic quality when it is transformed by the production crew. When the crew sets up the “confessional,” the upper hallway is cordoned off and decorated with backdrops for filming purposes. The obscuring of the yellow wallpaper reflects how the exorcism and filming similarly obscure Marjorie’s very real mental illness.
The Cardboard House
In his interview with Jason Law, Tremblay described Merry’s cardboard playhouse as “the haunted house within the haunted house” (“Boyden Library Speaker Series: An evening with Author Paul Tremblay October 21, 2021.” YouTube.com). Despite Merry’s constant need for attention and praise, she often requires time by herself; it is into her cardboard cocoon that she retreats when she wants to be alone. It is here that she feels safest, with an extra layer of protection inside her bedroom.
The playhouse becomes a battleground between the sisters, and the focal point of Merry’s anger at Marjorie. At first, Merry tries to reclaim ownership of it, using it to stage her stakeouts in the hopes of catching her sister in the act of trespassing so that she can tattle on her. Once Marjorie draws vines over every available space, the playhouse becomes corrupted in Merry’s mind, a constant reminder of the impending danger that Marjorie insists is lurking in the shadows. Merry rejects the house by bringing it down to the basement, as it is no longer a safe space. Merry’s rejection of the house reflects that there is truly nowhere she can hide from the chaos around her. Merry is angry when the house is brought back into her room, left there by the crew when they filmed their dramatizations.
Symbolically, the house is destroyed by Marjorie. This foreshadows her later decision to destroy the family home through her own death and the deaths of her parents. The vines on the decimated cardboard house foretell that her future actions are in service of protecting her younger sister.
Finding Bigfoot/Survivorman/River Monsters
When the Discovery Channel film crew arrives at her house, Merry is a fan of programming similar to The Possession, although her own preferred shows are not as controversial. Merry admits to Rachel that she was convinced, or at least enjoyed the idea, that Bigfoot could be real. This suggests that her interest in this kind of programming may have contributed to her inability to make a distinction between “reality TV” and reality.
Merry’s tastes, like the network’s programming, run the gamut between actual demonstrations, as performed in Survivorman and River Monsters, and speculative fantasizing and pseudoscience, such as in Finding Bigfoot. Survivorman and River Monsters are edited programs, but participants are legitimately engaging in activities. Survivorman Les Stroud really did shoot one-man survival excursions, manning his own cameras and creating shelters and animal traps out of found materials, and Jeremy Wade, host of River Monsters, has a degree in biology and finds and exhibits real fish on the show. In contrast, in Finding Bigfoot, hobbyists search for a creature whose existence has never been confirmed.
As an eight-year-old with undiscerning parents, Merry would likely have a very difficult time distinguishing between authentic and pseudoscientific content; this would obscure her sense of “reality” when the crew arrived at her house.
