Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Symbolism can be a key part to a story. Symbolism is a meaning in the story using symbols to represent it. It is “the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character” (Symbolism). It is a hidden message that the author puts in their story that could have multiple meanings depending on how the reading views it. Everyone comprehends what they read differently causing it to have different meanings. Usually all the meanings are relatively alike.
Stories however can have more than one symbol put into it. In one story that we read in class, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there is two things that are symbols. The color yellow and the wallpaper are the symbols in this story. To write about both would have to be two separate papers. I am going to focus on the color yellow to help explain and show symbolism.
The color yellow has multiple meanings. One meaning is how yellow can refer to age as in the color white and how it turns yellowish as it sees more years. Charlotte described the yellow in a way that you could tell she hated it. “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (Madden 722).With that said, it could be referring to how people age. The reason this could be is because when you read faded you think it happened over time and when you read faded by the slow-turning sunlight, it backs up the word faded and makes it sound as time goes by it slowly faded to this. Time can go with ages, meaning yellow could be talking about aging. Most people think as we age we get kind of more unattractive. How some people may seem to be revolting or you want to stay away because they seem unclea...

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...ought it meant. I came to the conclusion that there are too many ideas to list them all. The ones I listed were only the ones I could think of but after comparing what I researched I found out that this is only a few of the many meanings people have come up with. That goes to show that a symbol represents a meaning, it can have one meaning to many.
Symbolism is either a meaning or a character in a story. Characters are easy to understand and point out but meaning is where it can get hard. Like in the book The Yellow Wallpaper, it can be difficult to find the true meaning. Not every symbol will have one clear meaning. Most will have it where multiple meanings can be applied to that symbol. The meanings though usually all fall under a general topic. Like in this story I believe the meanings of the color yellow can all fall under the general topic of emotion in life.

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