The color yellow has many different meanings. It can bring hope and happiness but it can also bring cowardice and deceit. The shade of yellow tells the whole story. Bright, beautiful shades usually denote cheerfulness or joy but it can also have a hint of danger. Dull, dingy shades usually denote caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy. The dull and dingy yellow sets the scene for this dramatic story. The story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, has many symbolic undertones throughout the story but none as great as the yellow wallpaper being a symbol for the main character’s sanity as well as her entrapment both physically and mentally.
John physically traps her in this room by his actions of making her feel like a small insignificant child: “It is as airy and comfortable a room as anyone need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim” (514). He tricks her into believing that this is the best room for her to get well in. The yellow wallpaper traps her in as well. The paper blocks her into the room where she feels like she cannot and will not get better unless she can get out and get back to the real world. However, she can’t get out because her eyes cannot leave the pattern in the wallpaper therefore she can’t get any rest. Her eyes follow the pattern day to day and she can never find the end result and her mind wont let her leave the paper until she has scrutinized the entire thing. Her mind begins to picture the woman that is trapped and she cannot let that woman be trapped as she is. As her mental state fades, and the woman appears behind the bars she narrator feels as if they are trapped together. This is a symbol of her being trapped in a cage; the room...
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...he triumphs over him and his oppression anyway: “‘I've got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!’ Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (524). This action of her “creeping” over him shows that even though she had been oppressed mentally and physically by John she triumphs over him in the end. Everyone has their boundaries of sanity and most prefer to stay inbounds, but sometimes there are those that just get pushed a little too far and creep over the edge.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature: Shorter Ninth Edition. Eds. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 513-524. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." In Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Eds. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. 230-242.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction To Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. 7th Ed. New York, Norton, 1998. 2: 630-642.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” speaks of a woman who struggled of more than mere insanity, but also the pressures of life. Her life continuously seemed to weigh her down and she felt trapped by what was expected of her along with her mental disease. Her environment, marital relationship, and desire to escape her illness thrust Jane deeper into insanity. In the end Jane finds a way to truly escape her disease.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Inside Literature. Ed. R. S. Gwynn and Steven J. Zani. New York, New York: Longman Publishers, 2007. 144-158.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from postpartum depression. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It would appear that Gilman was writing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. The rest cure that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself experienced; therefore, the story can be read as reflecting the feelings of women like herself who suffered through such treatments. Because of her experience with the rest cure, it can even be said that Gilman based the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" loosely on herself. But I believe that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman/women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. 354-65. Print.
...man controlling the life of the woman who must accept it, until the very end. At the end of the story, the narrator says, “I have escaped in spite of you and Jane, and I’ve pulled of most of the paper so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman, 1892, p.193). At this point the narrator made the connection between her and the woman she sees in the wallpaper and explains how she has finally escaped, suggesting her breaking out of the bars that controlled her. She shows rebellion against John when she does not open the door and makes her own choices, which not only makes her free it destroys the sense of the gender roles in the relationship, as she pretty much emasculates her husband.
The yellow wallpaper itself is one of the largest symbols in the story. It can be interpreted to symbolize many things about the narrator. The wallpaper symbolizes the mental block mean attempted to place on women during the 1800s. The color yellow is often associated with sickness or weakness, and the narrator’s mysterious illness is an example of the male oppression on the narrator. The wallpaper in fact makes the narrator more “sick” as the story progresses. The yellow wallpaper, of which the writer declares, “I never saw a worse paper in my life,” is a symbol of the mental screen that men attempted to enforce upon women. Gilman writes, “The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing” this is a symbolic metaphor for restrictions placed on women. The author is saying subliminally that the denial of equality for women by men is a “hideous” act, and that when men do seem to grant women some measure of that equality, it is often “unreliable.” The use of the words “infuriating” and “torturing” are also descriptions of the feelings of women in 19th century society.
Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Literature a World of Writing: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. Ed. David Pike, and Ana Acosta. New York: Longman, 2011. 543-51. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 1684-1695.
The short story titled, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is given its name for no other reason than the disturbing yellow wallpaper that the narrator comes to hate so much; it also plays as a significant symbol in the story. The wallpaper itself can represent many various ideas and circumstances, and among them, the sense of feeling trapped, the impulse of creativity gone awry, and what was supposed to be a simple distraction transfigures into an unhealthy obsession. By examining the continuous references to the yellow wallpaper itself, one can begin to notice how their frequency develops the plot throughout the course of the story. As well as giving the reader an understanding as to why the wallpaper is a more adequate and appropriate symbol to represent the lady’s confinement and the deterioration of her mental and emotional health. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the color of the wallpaper symbolizes the internal and external conflicts of the narrator that reflect the expectations and treatment of the narrator, as well as represent the sense of being controlled in addition to the feeling of being trapped.
Once John gains access to the woman in the wallpaper’s sanctum, he faints. In response Jane says, “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time.” (Stetson 656) Her words carry an implication that she perceives his act of fainting as one of weakness. By refraining from using John’s name, Jane robs him of his identity and places him in a gender group devoid of individuality. Additionally, Jane cannot seem to understand the reason that John fainted. To her the act of fainting seems to be irrational and unwarranted. Jane’s confusion at this juncture illustrates a loss of self-awareness. She fails to realize that “creeping” across the floor in a room where she has just stripped the walls of their wallpaper is frightening. Jane also mentions that she has to “creep over” her husband every time she traverses her path around the room. The fact that she is placed above John, when she is already close to the floor, speaks to the dominance that she can now exert over him, though it is important to note that the dominance is only manifested in the room with the yellow wallpaper and not anywhere else. Whether Jane continues the exertion of this dominance is not written in the story. However, one can infer that since Jane has apparently
The Yellow Wallpaper is overflowed with symbolism. Symbols are images that have a meaning beyond them selves in a short story, a symbol is a detail, a character, or an incident that has a meaning beyond its literal role in the narrative. Gilman uses symbols to tell her story of a woman's mental state of being diminishes throughout the story. The following paragraphs tell just some of the symbols and how I interpreted them, they could be read in many different ways.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper" The Harbrace Anthology of Literature. Ed. Jon C. Scott, Raymond E. Jones, and Rick Bowers. Canada: Nelson Thomas Learning, 2002. 902-913.