The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1892 gothic and horror short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” traces the mental decline of a woman while undergoing a “rest cure”. This captivating story illustrates the stifling plight of the protagonist in a patriarchal society. Her husband, John, a physician, has taken the narrator, a new mother, to a rented country home for the summer in order for her to recover from postpartum psychosis. He isolates her in an upstairs nursery, a room with barred windows, a nailed down bed, and odious yellow wallpaper, and forbids her to write, in accordance with the philosophy of the “rest cure”. Although the constraints placed on the protagonist proved to be repressive, it leads her to an intriguingly dangerous obsession with “the yellow wallpaper” that causes her to triumph over societal oppression and constraints within her marriage, giving her a heroic identity. The writer conveys all this through her ingenious usage of the image of “the yellow wallpaper”, which functions as a part of the setting, an object correlation to the narrator’s physical and mental repression, and lastly as a symbol of her life.

According to one critic “The subjection of women originated in prehistoric times when the males first monopolized all social activity and women were confined to motherhood and domestic duties” (Degler 178). During the nineteenth century these societal traditions were still imposed on women. Quawas confirms this statement when she states “In the nineteenth century, women, as agent of moral influence, [are] expected to maintain the domestic sphere as a cheerful, pure haven for their husbands to return to [home] each evening” (A New Woman’s Journey into Insanity). Because of these expectancies the protagonist is a power...

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...lpaper” Gilman clearly illustrates by the use of symbols, imagery, characters to display how women were treated in a patriarchal society. The writer appears to have semi-melancholic mood throughout the story. Gilman clearly shows how the stifling plight of the narrator who was kept in isolation becomes defiant and gains a deeper understanding of her life and role in society. The woman in the wallpaper does not only represent the narrator’s own divided self but all women who are overly restrained and bound by a society that deem these women incapable of self-actualization. As a result of her preoccupation with the “the yellow wallpaper” she descends into madness, which ultimately enabled her to triumph over marital and societal constraints. Therefore the writer demonstrates that in order to gain liberty one suffers immensely before change is accomplished.