Symbolism In The Yellow Wallpaper

The famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is about a woman, who much resembles Gilman herself, that goes insane after her husband locks her in a room colored with horrible yellow wallpaper. It is told in first person point of view, which dramatically impacts the story by allowing the reader to see things through a patient’s eyes, and portraying the role of women in society told by a woman herself. In the nineteenth century, insanity could be seen as a number of things. Simply being homosexual could get someone placed in a mental hospital. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is considered crazy by her doctor husband. One of the first lines of the story, “John is a physician, and PERHAPS- (I would not say it to a living soul, of

However, I think the most important is the yellow wallpaper itself. The wallpaper symbolizes the narrator’s mind. Due to her postpartum depression, she feels very trapped inside her own head. The pattern on the paper is and endless pattern, according to the narrator. It twists and turns, much like her own mind, with no end in sight. She says, “I follow that pattern by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.” Postpartum depression causes women to feel depressed after giving birth, and can in turn cause issues when caring for their child (Bennett 7). Of course women suffering from this in the late 1800s are going to be placed under much scrutiny. A woman’s main purpose in this time period was to care for children and the household. Since this narrator couldn’t, she was considered “crazy” and placed on the rest-cure, basically locking the patient away in hopes that somehow the depression would