Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses symbolism to explain the purpose of the wallpaper, and why it’s one of the largest symbols in the story. The narrator is part of the wallpapers symbolism and the reason why it deprives such a massive part in the story. The women trapped behind the wallpaper explains the mental block men attempted to place on women “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbol of the restriction on women, the struggle for equality, and the possibilities of the female sex during the 1800’s.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman prepares her readers to experience many life troubles the narrator is going through by putting her story in first person. Nevertheless, most have no idea what women went through, back in the 1800’s. Women

The idea she gives in her article based on Gilman not having the same view as the novel “Jasmine”. There is depression in one and freedom in another, but the comparison that they both have are merely on women trying gain there freedom back. Women equality had was a great issue to women back then, especially, when a situation explained in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator does not understand that she is the one trapped behind the wallpaper behind those bars. Nadkarni explains, “the story charts the narrator 's growing madness and preoccupation with the wallpaper of her sickroom and ends with her identification with the woman she sees "crawling" (55) behind the "bars" (52) of the prisonlike pattern” (219). She discovers the narrator as an insane woman who does not understand that who she discovers behind the wallpaper is she on reflection; she is the one escaping from her own miserable life. In her article Nadkarni feels as though Gilman “suggests that "the white, female, intellectual-class subjectivity which Gilman 's narrator attempts to construct, and to which many feminists have also been committed perhaps unwittingly, is a subjectivity whose illusory unity, like the unity imposed on the paper, is built on the repression of difference” (220). Nadkarni article explains women struggle for equality, and the struggle to gain

While she is in this room, her health gets worse and worse but her husband thinks she is getting better and that she is just imagining things. In John S. Bak’s article, he explains the room as a drain to the women’s life because she has locked is this room and has no options on leaving. Bak explains how the room with the wallpaper can, “reduce an artistic and articulate woman to be a beast, tipped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all fours in circuits, or smooches about the room” (Bak 39-40). In his article, he explains how Elain Hedges on interpretation on feminist and how she portrays the wallpaper that is living inside the narrator as spirit. Hedges on view during 1973 that the “paper symbolizes her situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself (Afterword 51), a view echoed by later critics” (Bak 40). Hedges also said, “‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ then, became a feminist text that indicated the men who were responsible for the narrator’s physical confinement and subsequent mental demise” (Bak 40). Another writer in Baks article has his view of the symbolism of the wallpaper, “but this is also a room not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century Panopticon” (Bak 40). In Baks article as you see, there are