The Yellow Wallpaper

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Recommended: Symbolic significance of the yellow wallpaper

For this assignment I chose to review “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The yellow wallpaper was about a lady with what is said to be a temporary nervous condition and her husband traveling to the country for the summer and for the healing powers of being away from writing which seems to worsen her condition. The people in the story rent a house for three months and the main character in the story is tormented, she stares at this wallpaper for hours on end and thinks she sees a woman behind the paper. "I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman." She becomes obsessed with discovering what is behind that pattern and what it is doing. "I don't want to leave now until I have found it out".
The plot of the story was boring, going from one thing to another just to have the woman lock herself in a room and pull all the wallpaper down at the end. The rising action would lead you to believe she completely went crazy there was one part where she explicitly says she wanted to burn the house down because of the smell from the wallpaper. It sounds as if she is suffering from far more than a nervous depression when you hear things like that.
There was one big thing that’s repeated throughout the story and it’s the fact that she keeps saying no one wanted her to write because it is supposedly the cause or one of the reasons her ailment continues. The other characters in the story are distant from her like everyone is trying not to see the problem this woman is delusional, psychotic, maybe even completely insane. There are hints of this all throughout the story, she doesn’t go anywhere nobody wanted her to write. I’m thinking there is more going on in the story, something between the lines maybe she’s being abused and that is the real root of her illness.
When you get to the root of the story it’s really about this woman being dominated by her husband. She is almost running scared of him she doesn’t dare do anything around him, she doesn’t mention it but I believe she would be disciplined in some way if she was to get out of line by defying him some way.

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