The Importance of Setting in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    "The Yellow Wallpaper" takes a close look at one woman's mental deterioration. The narrator is emotionally isolated from her husband. Due to the lack of interaction with other people the woman befriends the reader by secretively communicating her story in a diary format. Her attitude towards the wallpaper is openly hostile at the beginning, but ends with an intimate and liberating connection. During the gradual change in the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper, the yellow paper becomes a mirror, reflecting the process the woman is going through in her room.

The woman behind this work of literature portrays the role of women in the society during that period of time. "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a well written story describing a woman who suffers from insanity and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The author uses her own experience to criticize male domination of women during the nineteenth century. Although the story was written fifty years ago, "The Yellow Wallpaper" still brings a clear message how powerless women were during that time.

The essay, "Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was written primarily for the purpose of explaining the meaning and reasoning behind her semi-autobiographical short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". Before stating these reasons, Gilman explains that she had been suffering from a "severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond" (Gilman, 1913). After three years of this torment, she decided to go see a specialist in nervous diseases. The doctor she went to was named Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell advised Gilman to be put to bed and to apply the rest cure, along with living a domestic life with limited amount of intellectual interaction and to never "touch pen, brush, or pencil again" (Gilman, 1913). As intimidating as this sounded, Gilman took the advise of her doctor, and followed his every suggestion for about three months. She had reached a point of almost complete mental ruin at the end of these three months, that she had to cast aside the specialist's advice. Instead of following his instructions, she began to work again. Ultimately, this is when and where "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written.

While, the narrator refers to the room as a nursery, the circumstances suggest that the room was really used to “treat” women like the narrator from similar illnesses. The room has a bolted down bed that “is fairly gnawed” (Gilman 517), which the narrator bites a piece off of in frustration, suggesting it was under similar circumstances that the bed came to be gnawed. Therefore, the narrator’s creeping inside the room is the only way for her to be part of society, as in the room she can “creep smoothly on the floor, and [her] shoulder fits... so [she] cannot lose [her] way” (Gilman 518). She has to suppress and hide her true self in front of others, even her husband, as many women had to during those times.

The bed represented that women were used only when men wanted to have an intimate relationship with them, like a woman chained up to a bed and was ferociously forced to have sex with men. It is associated to the Victorian age because women were forced to have sex even if they didn’t want to, especially if the women were married to her husband. “Not only did the husband have almost complete control over his wife’s body, since beatings and marital rape were legal, their children also belonged to him, as did any property and money that the wife brought into the house” (). Even though in the story the wife was not physically forced to have sex with her husband, the bed was a clue to the readers that during the Victorian era women had to obey their husbands and to please them as they were told to do so. The wife in the story was told by her husband/doctors to be in bed to get plenty of rest to cure her depression “quote from story”.

In contrast, by implying in her short story that Connie is already sexually active, author Joyce Oates deepens the terror of the screen-door meeting by focusing not on just the sexually persuasive nature of Arnold Friend but also on the demonic trance-like state he uses in order to control his victims.

Within the story, Gilman represents the domestic sphere as a prison(Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism). The narrator is considered to be in prison but in a nursery because she cannot handle her duties as a mother to watch her children or a wife to clean(Delashmit). The windows in the room symbolize the windows in a prison cell. She feels as though, since someone is behind the wallpaper, she is being watched(MacPike).

“Later that night when Thomas roller over and lurched into her, she would open her eyes and think of the place that was hers” this proves the point that she cannot even express herself sexually because she does not feel as if she has control in the situation.  Her mind wanders elsewhere, in a place where she is her own master, instead of what is reality. Additionally, the main character’s husband shows some selfish tendencies in the fact that he may not notice his wife’s discontentment with his affection.  However, this may also present the lack of communication between man and wife and therefore may cause a sense of isolation from her husband.

The narrator’s feelings of inferiority and powerlessness parallels the female figure she sees trapped behind the pattern in the wall-paper adorning her room. She gradually withdraws from both John and reality by locking herself in the room and ultimately merging with the figure. Through the changing image of the pattern from a “fait figure” (Gilman 46) to a “woman stooping” (Gilman 46) behind the paper and “shaking the bars” (Gilman 46) as if she wanted “to get out” (Gilman 46), we can see her becoming one with the figure: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.”(51) Her collapse into madness as reflected in her behavior with the “bedstead [that] is fairly gnawed” (Gilman 51) and her “creeping all around” (Gilman 50) is a direct result of her passive submissiveness to John’s control of her life.

It not only threatens, but also breaks through. Betrayed by love once in her life, she nevertheless seeks it in the effort to fill the lonely void; thus, her promiscuity. But to adhere to her tradition and her sense of herself as a lady, she cannot face this sensual part of herself. She associates it with the animalism of Stanley's lovemaking and terms it “brutal desire”. She feels guilt and a sense of sin when she does surrender to it, and yet she does, out of intense loneliness. By viewing sensuality as brutal desire she is able to disassociate it from what she feels is her true self, but only at the price of an intense inner conflict. Since she cannot integrate these conflicting elements of desire and gentility, she tries to reject the one, desire, and live solely by the other. Desperately seeking a haven she looks increasingly to fantasy. Taking refuge in tinsel, fine clothes, and rhinestones, and the illusion that a beau is available whenever she wants him, she seeks tenderness and beauty in a world of her own making.

“I don 't like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” the woman behind the pattern was an image of herself. She has been the one “stooping and creeping.” The Yellow Wallpaper was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story, three characters are introduced, Jane (the narrator), John, and Jennie. The Yellow Wallpaper is an ironic story that takes us inside the mind and emotions of a woman suffering a slow mental breakdown. The narrator begins to think that another woman is creeping around the room behind the wallpaper, attempting to "break free", so she locks herself in the room and begins to tear down pieces of the wallpaper to rescue this trapped woman. To end the story, John unlocks the door and finds Jane almost possessed by the woman behind the wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist background gives a feminist standpoint in The Yellow Wallpaper because the narrator’s husband, John acts superior to the narrator.

Constricted by the dirty beige walls that used to be pearly-white, inflicted by black discrete scratches from 1 year ago by furniture he bought off of craigslist with his alimony money. Every night, room number 7 exudes an aura of balanced evil and hatred. The only company provided is the gossip overheard from the two women on the stairs leading to my room and the occasional police sirens fading in the distance. “Did you hear Esmeralda? Number 8 is going to be evicted.” The second lady responds, “So crazy. That’s the second family to be evicted from that room.” He closed his eyes and tuned them out. He laid in the comfort of his bed, which was placed horizontally in the top left corner of the room, strictly sleeping on the right side

John knows perfectly well that he is in control. As she continues to examine the wallpaper, she is able to distinguish two different patterns: “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern” (Gilman 16). For the first time, she is able to see herself as an independent person, not as her husband’s possession or object of gratification of her culture. Later, feelings of frustration and anger emerge as a result of the discrepancies between her desires and her obligations: “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” (Gilman 9). The narrator proceeds to acknowledge her entrapment: “the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 14). The climax comes when the narrator visualizes the figure as a woman who finally rebels: “The front pattern does move –and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it” (Gilman 20). At this point she is fully aware of the effect, “pattern” is having on the woman, and on herself. The trapped woman is being strangled because of her “defiance"; she is being trapped and strangled by society’s conventions for work, words, roles and behavior. It is only after this process of self-recognition and acknowledgement that the narrator will be able to take a step forward towards her liberation.

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman creates a character of a young depressed woman, on the road to a rural area with her husband, so that she can be away from writing, which appears to have a negative effect on her psychological state. Lanser says her husband “heads a litany of benevolent prescriptions that keep the narrator infantilized, immobilized, and bored literally out of her mind. Reading or writing herself upon the wallpaper allows the narrator to escape her husband’s sentence and to achieve the limited freedom of madness which constitutes a kind of sanity in the face of the insanity of male dominance” (432). In the story both theme and point of view connect and combine to establish a powerful picture of an almost prison-type of treatment for conquering depression. In the story, Jane battles with male domination, because she is informed by both her husband and brother countless brain shattering things about her own condition that she does not agree with. She makes every effort to become independent, and she desires to escape from the burdens of that domination. The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the character’s point of view in a structure similar to a diary, which explains her time spent in her home. The house is huge and old with annoying yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. The character thinks that there is a woman behind bars in the design of the wallpaper. She devotes a great deal of her

Through this comparison, however, he subliminally reveals that he is actually aware the girl at the inn has an interior, one that he admits he deliberately disregards. Likewise, the Magistrate is completely aware that the barbarian girl, too, has an interior. He degrades her by saying she does not, yet his quest to figure her out consumes him. Also, instead of blatantly stating that she has no interior, he uses the words “as if.” In this way, he suggests that there is an interior, perhaps one that he just has not found yet. His failed attempts, then, bring him to refer to her as a “body” that has fallen into his bed that he seems “responsible [for], or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it?” Unlike how he refers to the inn girl specifically as a sexual object, the barbarian girl is only sought as an object because the Magistrate grows frustrated from her reluctance to open up to him. When he says, “But of this one there is nothing I can say with certainty,” he refers to the barbarian girl as “this one.” This shows that he thinks of women as attainable objects that he can easily control. In contrast to the girl at the inn, the barbarian girl is impervious to his force. Because the Magistrate is not able to assert his dominance to gain control over the barbarian girl, he grows frustrated and his curiosity morphs into an obsession. The