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The Yellow Wallpaper Psychology

Decent Essays

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” portrays a married couple who move for the summer into this older creepy-looking colonial mansion. Inside the mansion there is this outdated nursery room where the wallpaper is very much odd-looking and hides a lot of irony. Gilman uses the wallpaper symbolically which displays the domestic life that traps so many women. The wallpaper and barred windows display confinement throughout the story which leads the main character onto falling deep into her postpartum depression.
The narrator and husband, John, have a baby and they should be happy and they are nervous and anxious, but the narrator is not allowed to see her baby. Readers begin to notice the confinement of marriage; he has so much power …show more content…

The color yellow is an emotional color in psychology which has a negative effect on some people. Some of the effects it causes is nervousness, anxiety, and potentially suicide. The narrator describes the paper as “repellent” “almost revolting” and “unclean”. The way the wallpaper is described in the story indicates a prison atmosphere for the narrator. She does not feel very much much like there is a woman imprisoned in the wallpaper but the patterning of it keeps the woman from coming out, therefore, the lady in the wallpaper is representative of the narrator in the story. The narrator retrains when she sees the barred windows- it is a sense that she is recognizing what she is suffering, which is estrangement. Basically the woman in the wallpaper is the narrator trapped in this psychosis that she can not get passed no matter how hard she tries; she tries to free the woman in the yellow wallpaper, but ends up “freeing” herself from her insanity, which is where she hangs herself. In the text it says she found rope and her first ideas are said on page 116, “I am angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window.. But the bars are too strong even to try” (Gilman). But she then uses the rope for her own purpose just moments before John …show more content…

She wanted her audience to feel like the narrator should have succeeded the way she did, to push against John and free herself from the type of relationship they had and escape her depression. Her name was never confirmed if it was Jane or not, but it is written in the sense it could be a metaphor of today’s Jane Doe who does not have an exact identity. Gilman’s purpose represents how this suicide just did not take place in the 1700’s or 1900’s, this could be anyone in 2016 and it necessarily doesn’t restrain her identity and it doesn’t restrain the character by giving her an “identity” by not giving her one. The story was meant for an audience to relate to this character up to a certain degree whether they are fighting depression themselves or are in a relationship where they basically are dependant on their significant other and feel

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