The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ both serve a highly horrific purpose which is both good examples for the gothic. The strongest example of gothic is ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ as it established the extreme horror intense and shows the gothic scene of the house.

The narrator then tries to rip off the wallpaper to let the women free. By the end of the story, the narrator is fully insane and is convinced that women are creeping around the room. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays the patriarchal view of women’s mental health and how it negatively affects women. In the nineteenth century, the time period The Yellow Wallpaper is set in, men had much different roles than women.

     Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is as a wonderful example of the gothic horror genre. It was not until the rediscovery of the story in the early 1970’s that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was recognized as a feminist indictment of a male dominated society. The story contains many typical gothic trappings, but beneath the conventional façade hides a tale of repression and freedom told in intricate symbolism as seen through the eyes of a mad narrator.

The Yellow Wall-Paper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (pages 792-803) uses many literary elements throughout the story. The protagonist left unnamed, is writing letters to show the feeling of what she is going through inside her own head and to try and explain her mental condition to society. The setting, use of imagery, and application of symbols seen throughout the story are significant to really understanding the true meaning behind The Yellow Wall-Paper. The setting of the story is significant because it gives the readers a sense of how the protagonist feels throughout the story, which is alone and trapped.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator uses the psychological gothic genre to present the portrayal of women, women faced in a marriage, within the time frame of the 1890s. Women were seen as the “shadow” as men dominated society. This is presented throughout the book as many readers first interpitation

The vivid descriptions in “The Yellow Wallpaper” help to bring the reader along in the narrators decent into a kind of psychosis. It starts mildly, with her describing the color of wallpaper as “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 528). As more time passes she begins to see more things in the paper such as “a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes start at you,” and for it have “so much expression in an inanimate thing” (Gilman 592). As the pattern and descriptions get more twisted, we get visual clues of the madness that is slowly consuming the narrator. The color of the paper even begins to become a physical thing she can smell descried as, “creep[ing] all over the house...sulking...hiding...lying in wait for me…It gets into my hair” (Gilman 534). In the end we get a graphic visual representation of her full psychosis

Her original distaste turns into full on mania about paper until she begins to see a woman in the wallpaper and seeks to free her. The yellow wallpaper is a symbol of her insanity (Symbolism), the response to her oppression. The setting of this short story serves an extremely important role in the story, acting almost as a character itself. Though full of surface similarities, the settings of the two stories hold vital similarities in their application. The settings both have similar descriptions, old dilapidated houses that once stood grand and proud but have fallen away.

   Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a deceptively simple story.  It is easy to follow the thirteen pages of narrative and conclude the protagonist as insane.  This is a fair judgement, after all no healthy minded individual becomes so caught up with "hideous" and "infuriating" wallpaper to lose sleep over it, much less lock herself in a room to tear the wallpaper down.  To be able to imagine such things as "broken necks" and "bulbous eyes" in the wallpaper is understandable, irrational and erratic designs can form rational patterns in our minds, but to see a woman locked inside of the "bars" of the wallpaper and attempt to rescue her seems altogether crazy.  Her

The yellow wallpaper is a symbol of oppression in a woman who felt her duties were limited as a wife and mother. The wallpaper shows a sign of female imprisonment. Since the wallpaper is always near her, the narrator begins to analyze the reasoning behind it. Over time, she begins to realize someone is behind the

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story was first published in January 1892, in The New England Magazine. Many readers first thought of this story as gothic fiction but would later be recognized as a feminist short story when the feminist movement arose in the early 1900’s. It is understandable to see why many readers would of first thought “the Yellow Wallpaper,” to be a gothic text or horror story; in the story a woman is put in a room and is isolated from the outside world as she slowly loses her mind or see’s ghosts in the walls. As the feminist movement started, many readers would relate the short story to male oppression, due to the fact the narrator’s husband made all the decisions

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

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the readers many gothic elements and images. The protagonist is supposedly shown to have a mental illness that keeps deteriorating that can be traced back to her complicated marriage. The story revolves around who she needs to be and what her role should be in this complicated marriage. What shows many gothic images is one the protagonists troubled marriage and the way their household works. This “yellow wallpaper” would be another gothic element because it’s frightening and even though it doesn’t describe light and darkness that refers to gothic it still represents something musty and rotten in a way.

The geographical, physical, and historical settings in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" were more than the primary character could handle. The geography would lead to think she could enjoy the environment, but she chose not to. The physical setting showed us the reader just how grotesque and unbearable it would be to live a room in which the wallpaper to over the narrators mind. Lastly, we looked at how historically women were not allowed to speak their minds about how they felt. Maybe now that John has seen his wife go completely insane for himself he will finally seek extra attention for

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 wallpaper is beginning to take on the role of controlling her life. As the days proceed on and she continues to sit in this isolated room, she begins to notice objects incorporated throughout the patterns. Every day the shapes become significantly clearer to her until one moment it appears to be a figure trapped within the walls (734). This aversion to the color completely shifts at this point toward hallucination. The wallpaper now has complete control of the narrator’s mind and sanity.