The Hidden Meaning of Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman focuses on a young woman’s psychological downfall and her fascination with the wallpaper within the house she and her husband are living in. The woman begins to believe that the wallpaper is coming alive, which leads her to become confused with reality and fantasy. Gilman selects the crazed woman as the narrator of the story. Furthermore, Gilman uses first person point of view to effectively convey the woman’s emotions and feelings during her mental decline. Gilman begins the story with the narrator describing her and her husband’s vacation home and then her illness.

The Yellow Wallpaper, A Rose for Emily and Babylon It is amazing how differently people see the world. People from different walks of life interpret everyday experiences in different ways. This is ever so apparent when discussing the gaps that occur in stories by great authors. In The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman is being "treated" by a doctor (her husband) for a condition he refers to as anxiety. She is placed in a room, apparently one that was previously inhabited by a mental patient, and told to rest.

The Yellow Wallpaper, Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is comprised as an assortment of journal entries written in first person, by a woman who has been confined to a room by her physician husband who he believes suffers a temporary nervous depression, when she is actually suffering from postpartum depression. He prescribes her a “rest cure”. The woman remains anonymous throughout the story. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in the room, and engages in some outrageous imaginations towards the wallpaper. Gilman’s story depicts women’s struggle of independence and individuality at the rise of feminism, as well as a reflection of her own life and experiences.

She wants to free the woman within, yet ends up trading places, or becoming, that "other" woman completely. Her husband's reaction only serves as closure to her psychotic episode, forcing him into the unfortunate realization that she has been unwell this whole time. There are more clues and subtle hints that reinforce these statements, most correlating to her mental illness and self-perception. The statements made through the use of said symbolism turns this story into an interesting viewpoint of a psychological breakdown.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a partial autobiography. It was written shortly after the author suffered a nervous breakdown. This story was written to help save people from being driven crazy. Appropriately, this short story is about a mentally disturbed woman and her husband's attempts to help her get well. He does so by convincing her that solitude and constant bed rest is the best way to cure her problem.

The narrator finally wins the battle of escaping her imprisonment of John the controlling husband. Jane is finally free of her depression and of her husband’s dominance. It temporarily cost her, her sanity to the point where images were being projected from the yellow wall-paper. The paper was a part of Jane’s neurosis, but also crept into the entire household. In order to cope with the madness Jane found her inner self is an image of a creeping woman trying to escape the patterned wall-paper.

Undermining the Patriarchy in “The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is narrated by an unnamed woman who is struggling with mental illness. Though the narrator feels she knows which actions will bring about her recovery, she is compelled to move to an old abandoned mansion and do everything that her husband thinks is best, because he is a physician and the head of her household. What unravels is a story of how upholding the patriarchy instead of trusting the woman’s intuition leads to tragic consequences, which undermines the idea of patriarchy itself. At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator explains that she is suffering from some sort of psychiatric malady, but explains that her husband

Subsequently, Jane discovers the woman behind the wallpaper, who only she can see. This woman symbolizes herself in that she is stuck with her mental illness and confined to her home, just as the "woman" is confined to the wallpaper. She writes, "So I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away." (Gilman 9); she feels trapped in the house just as the woman does behind the wallpaper, and begins to feel as if she is that woman. So when she finally eliminates the yellow wallpaper, she (as the trapped woman or hallucination) feels like she has been released and has a new freedom from John and Jane (herself).

The two novels “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour” contain many similarities between the two women characters. Both plots can be seen to have a wife whose husband’s affects to their medical situation turn them for the worst rather than better. Indications of mental disorder are very apparent throughout each story, starting innocent and building to the demise of the wife. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, we begin with a woman admiring her house that her husband has taken care of for their summer home. She suffers from nervous depression and complains that her husband, who also is a doctor, belittles her symptoms and her thoughts in general.

The story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” centers on the life of a woman, whose name we never learn, narrating her daily experiences as she slowly starts to lose touch with reality after giving birth. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Gilman uses the internal and external conflicts of the narrator to reflect the expectations and treatment women encountered during the time period. Furthermore Gilman uses the yellow wallpaper in the story to symbolize the central character, while also emphasizing her sense of entrapment. In this short story the narrator is confined to an isolated room where her only outlet is her thoughts. The narrator’s situation is representative of a period where men dominated women.