Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The symbols that the narrator sees in the wallpaper also symbolize gender roles and how women are viewed during this time period. Perkins introduces this claim by writing, “And she is all the time trying to climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Perkins 6). The author once again discusses the narrator’s visualizations of the trapped women and how they continuously try to break free from the wallpaper. Perkins further conveys that women are suffering from the “strangling” feeling that comes from male influence and how it leaves womankind in a state of instability to move or breath as an individual. Also, the author includes victorious commentary from the narrator after she escapes from John by saying, “I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘In spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back” (Perkins 5). This triumphant exclaim referencing the wallpaper can go two ways. She begins understand that figuratively, the wallpaper embodies John’s double as it symbolizes male dominance. Through this, she assumes the position of the female leader who has freed herself and the figures from the imprisoning males. Lastly, the critic, Elaine Hedges, comments on

In the short story, the reader gets the sense that the narrator feels like the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Its symbolism progresses throughout the story. At first, it is just ugly and unappealing to look at because it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” It eventually captivates the narrator as she tries to figure out the seemingly formless pattern. The narrator eventually begins to hallucinate an eerie sub-pattern behind the main pattern. Ultimately, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a frantic woman, continually crawling and hunched,

The exterior portion of the wallpaper represents the narrator’s disease and how it holds her captive. At night, the disease “becomes bars” (15). The exterior portion of the wallpaper seemingly becoming bars to the narrator, at night, symbolizes a jail cell and how it keeps her metaphorically locked up and therefore, unable to become well again. Adversely, during the daytime, the exterior portion of the wallpaper is simply just another piece of the wallpaper. The changing in apparent appearance of the wallpaper relates to how there are bright and dark spots in her days and how in the bright spots, her disease is bearable but in the dark spots, it completely consumes her. The narrator also describes the pattern as “torturing” (15) saying that the wallpaper itself is “hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough” (15) but it’s the pattern that ultimately makes her suffer. It can be thought of

Author Charlotte P. Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a complex short story that discusses the thoughts and feelings of a woman who is kept confined in a small upstairs bedroom by her husband. The woman suffers from depression and anxiety, yet her spouse whom is a physician claims that she is not terribly ill. Despite all the strange thoughts she acquires, she continues to force herself to accept her new life style and awkward place of living. As she comes to find herself overwhelmed with her personal bedroom, we soon discover that the room’s yellow wallpaper is what affects her directly and is the reason for her many interpretations. The symbols in the story take a great part in the overall plot and

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a woman driven insane by postpartum depression and a dangerous treatment. Nevertheless, when you study the protagonist, it shows that the story is more about finding the protagonist’s identity. The protagonist’s proposes of an imaginary woman, which at first, is just her shadow against the bars of the wallpaper. The pattern shows her identity, expressing the conflict that she experiences and eventually leads her to a complete breakdown of what is her identity and that of the imaginary shadow.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she discusses some of the issues found in 19th century society such as women’s oppression and the treatment of mental illness. Many authors throughout history have written stories that mimic their own lives and we see this in the story. We see Gilman in the story portrayed as Jane, a mentally unstable housewife who cannot escape her husband’s oppression or her own mind. Gilman reveals a life of depression and women’s oppression through her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The unequal relationship between the narrator and John is a miniature of the larger gender inequity in society. Gilman makes it clear that much of John’s condescending and paternal behavior toward his wife has little to do with her illness. He dismisses her well-thought-out opinions and her “flights of fancy” with equal disdain, while he demeans her creative impulses. He speaks of her as he would a child, calling her his “little girl” and saying of her, “Bless her little heart.” He overrides her judgments on the best course of treatment for herself as he would on any issue, making her live in a house she does not like, in a room she detests, and in an isolated environment, which makes her unhappy and

Written in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the experience of a nervous woman named Jane who falls into psychosis during the “rest cure” treatment prescribed by her husband John. The rest cure admits the patient to bed rest with limited activity for the body and mind allowed; Dr. S. Weir Mitchell advocated the rest cure and is mentioned by name in the short story by Gilman who had him as her doctor (Gilman 80). During Jane’s rest cure, she is banned from creative work like writing her thoughts but finds “great relief from writing on dead paper”, even if it includes hiding her banned writings from being discovered. The one main complaint Jane has in her writings is the yellow wallpaper that surrounds the room without pattern or end and slowly grows more bothersome to Jane during her rest cure. Jane describes how the colors remind her of disgusting yellow things, how even the wallpaper smells up the rental house, and shakes by a woman within the wallpaper (Gilman 85-86). With nothing to occupy Jane’s mind the wallpaper becomes an obsession that torments her anxiety and consumes her sanity towards the end of her rest cure. Gilman experiences the same madness from her rest cure treatment as Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The horrid treatment of “rest cure” from doctor Silas Weir Mitchell led author Charlotte Perkins Gilman into writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” sharing her experience of madness resulting from her treatment to represent the

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brilliant work, The Yellow Wallpaper, readers explore the consequences of the ignorance of mental health, as well Gilman’s underlying message of the restriction of women, in nineteenth century America. The author of this story doesn’t want readers to focus on the progression of the woman when realizing her real situation, but in my opinion, how Gilman comments with this piece of fiction to the real oppression of women, and lack of weight Medicine held on the patient 's opinions in Charlotte’s society.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells a psychological horror story depicting the narrator's descent into madness while struggling to recover from an episode of depression.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, reveals to it’s readers the unethical and at times tortuous treatments for women during the late eighteen to mid nineteen hundreds, specifically the resting cure. Part of Gilman’s great success in portraying the personal feelings and thoughts of the narrator during this treatment can be attributed to her own tragic encounter with the resting cure shortly after her first child’s birth. Throughout Gilman’s life, she became a strong asset to the women’s rights movement, and the destruction of the resting cure by using her writings such as The Yellow Wallpaper to do so. At first glance, Gilman’s story begins in a innocent manner, but slowly escalates as the main character Jane’s

In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses this story give a voice to the women that were dealing with oppression from men. Women during the time when this story was written were almost exclusively under the dominance of males. They were mainly house wives, and did what the male forced them to do. Many women were working in the house, and not allowed to leave, consequently making them lonely and depressed. Because of this, women were not as educated as men were, and did not have the power to do what they wanted to accomplish. The narrator is locked into an upstairs room with this wallpaper that she describes as “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight”( p.480) . The color yellow means “the color of sickness” The wallpaper symbolizes her oppression.

The yellow wallpaper within the protagonist's room serves as a symbolic representation of her deteriorating mental state. Initially described as "sick" and "unpleasant," the wallpaper becomes a fixation for the protagonist as she perceives a woman trapped behind it. This symbolism reflects the protagonist's own entrapment in the societal expectations and gender roles of the time. The pattern of the wallpaper mirrors the restrictive nature of her existence, with its chaotic and unending design reflecting the confusion and turmoil within her mind. The act of tearing down the wallpaper in her frenzied state can be interpreted as a desperate attempt to break free from the psychological constraints that have pushed her to the brink of insanity.

The wallpaper shows how inescapable the oppression of women in society is. It is to be felt everywhere. The narrator describes it as, “[t]he smell [,…i]t creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, sulking in the parlour, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs” (534). Gilman uses the wallpaper to show how oppression is unavoidable as it is a part of the air we breathe. The narrator goes even further to say that, “it turns a

with a rest cure. The doctor in the story is much like the doctor that