As human beings, we play the cards that are dealt to us in this world. In life, every person goes through their individual ups and downs and occasionally may break down to the extent of not knowing what to do with oneself. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” which takes place in the late 1800s, focuses on the first person narrator who is an infatuated woman. The disheartening story concentrates on a woman who is suffering from postpartum depression, and as well had mental breakdowns. The narrators husband John, moves her into a home isolated in the country where he wants her to “rest” and get better from her illness. During the course of being confined in the room with the wallpaper, she learns new things and finally may have an understanding …show more content…
It represents the psychological block that society attempts to place on women during the 1800’s. The color distinct color yellow is connected with sickness and weakness which displays the gender differences of how society sees women as weak and men inferior. The wallpaper in fact makes the main character feel “sick” as the short story develops. As a matter of fact, the wallpaper draws a line between insanity and sanity that the narrator faces. Quawas offers honest insight and advice on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and its symbolic significance that is portrayed throughout the short story. In the process, Quawas offers a deeper interpretation of the main character decline into madness and how the direct identification of the narrator with the wallpaper brings many underlying symbols that lie within the story. “The narrator is torn asunder between her own personal feelings, which are indeed healthy and positive, and the patriarchal society's view of what is proper and decent behaviour for women. Since she has internalized society's expectations of women, this conflict is felt as a schizoid within herself” (Quawas, 44). This supporting evidence helps give bigger insight of a deeper meaning to the correlation of insanity and symbols in the actual …show more content…
The yellow wallpaper being the most significant and obvious symbol which underlie societies attempts regarding women in the late 19th century, gives the reader an eye opening view to the repression women were under and still are in todays society. The main character writing in her notebook symbolizes a sense of stability in an oppressed life. Lastly, the isolated room, gave sense of symbolizing a safe haven for the narrator or even imprisonment. The symbols exposed in "The Yellow Wallpaper" give the short story a stronger essential meaning and a sense that the narrator was not entirely insane, however a women who found her individuality in something as horrid as the yellow wallpaper. In short, the yellow wallpaper mirrors the makeover of a woman’s identity which is triggered by a corrupt social structure that stops woman from being their true
In conclusion, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a complex story, which tells of the ultimate demise of a woman who succumbs to mental illness.
...men have more authority and are better than woman and he dismissed all his wife’s fears, which led to her madness. The narrator eventually breaks from the chains that her husband had put on her, which shows how anyone can escape from entrapment. By tearing down the yellow wallpaper the narrator finds a kind of liberty and freedom from her submissive relationship with her husband. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a great story that demonstrates how a person needs stand up for him or herself to be free of what is holding them back from life.
“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.
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions which society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria. The narrator makes comments and observations that demonstrate her will to overcome the oppression of the male dominant society. The conflict between her views and those of the society can be seen in the way she interacts physically, mentally, and emotionally with the three most prominent aspects of her life: her husband, John, the yellow wallpaper in her room, and her illness, "temporary nervous depression." In the end, her illness becomes a method of coping with the injustices forced upon her as a woman. As the reader delves into the narrative, a progression can be seen from the normality the narrator displays early in the passage, to the insanity she demonstrates near the conclusion.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" explains a woman's life in that time period, especially that of the narrator, who is living a life of a typical housewife of that time, but who is not able to cope with the oppression. Seems like the narrator fails to see her imprisoned state till towards the end of her story.
...oney to sustain themselves. Many of them felt trapped, as if behind the hideous yellow wallpaper. They were expected to have a domestic life, oppression was present in and out of the house. The color yellow is prominent in the story, it is a lively color that is often used to symbolize life and energy. The use of the lively yellow color contrasts the feelings of the narrator. The narrator realizes that herself as the woman becoming a freed woman from the oppression of the yellow wallpaper, which represents the Victorian society. At the end of the short story, when the wife refuses to leave and the husband faints she symbolically steps over his body to freedom. Imagery present in “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the narrators slow spiral into madness. The imagery along with the oppression and isolation felt by the narrator lead to lunacy which eventually set her free.
As the narrator’s mental state changes so does the way she perceives things around the house. The most prominent example of this is the imagery of the wallpaper and the way the narrator’s opinion on the wallpaper slowly changes throughout the story; this directly reflects what is happening within the narrator’s mind. At the beginning of the story the narrator describes the wallpaper as “Repellent...revolting... a smoldering unclean yellow” (Gilman 377). As the story continues the narrator starts to become obsessed with the wallpaper and her opinion of it has completely changed than that of hers from the beginning. Symbolism plays a big part in “The Yellow Wallpaper” too. This short story has a multitude of symbols hidden in it but there are specific ones that stand out the most. The recurrence of the wallpaper definitely makes it a symbol. An interesting interpretation is that the wallpaper represents women, in the sense that the 18th century woman was considered almost decorative and that is exactly what the purpose of wallpaper is. Another prominent symbol that runs parallel with the wallpaper, are the women the narrator would see in the wallpaper. The women appear trapped behind bars in the paper and one could argue that the women the narrator sees represents all women of her time, continuously trapped in their gender
The Yellow Wallpaper was written as a realism story. It showed how woman felt they had the same opportunities as men in their personal choices. In this story, the woman expressed her worries to her husband who through good intentions, required that his wife stay in bed 24/7, and not do any of the things she would normally do. In effect his wife became worse until she reached the limit. The behavior of the husband at this time was completely normal. Men were the higher power over women and women, like the one in this story, felt that they couldn?t stand count for themselves.
On my first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", I found the short story extremely well done and the author, successful at getting her idea across. Gilman's use of imagery and symbolism only adds to the reality of the nameless main character's sheltered life and slow progression into insanity or some might say, out of insanity.
The Yellow Wallpaper is the largest and most blatant of the symbols in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, paralleling her mind. In the beginning of the story she recognizes her mental illness, although she doesn’t completely understand it, and attempts to reach out and get help from 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.
The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the most interesting and disturbed characters of any story that I have ever read. She is never given a name and she changes throughout the story, giving us no consistent character. This story is a representation of how being locked up and controlled can affect the way someone thinks and feels. The narrator is presented as a normal person at the beginning, but we quickly find out that she has many problems that only worsen and affect everyone around her. The author indirectly tells her personal feelings and story through the narrator who stands for her and women of that time.
The title itself, The Yellow Wallpaper, is symbolizing the role men play in a patriarchal society, where men are the more dominant sex, and how women are 'trapped'; in a life of male control. For instance, At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all moonlight, it becomes bars!';(Gilman 211) This shows how the narrator feels trapped by the paper. Another symbol that refers to the role women play is, 'And she is all the time trying to climb through that pattern, it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.';(Gilman 213) This is meaning that if a women tried to play a role in society she was just not taken seriously, or felt like trying to play a role was getting nowhere.
Through the lens of Post-Structuralism, literature is a system of signs with an impossibility of understanding their meaning due to the fact that language is unstable, arbitrary and ambiguous. The signifiers so familiar in Structuralism become floating signifiers in Post-Structuralism in that the function of a word, or phrase, is not concrete, i.e. it changes. Binary oppositions (male/female, good/bad, open/closed) represent an implied classification and as such, along with the reader/author relationship, are destabilized. Through this lens, “The Yellow Wallpaper” contains binary oppositions worthy of focus. The narrator could very well be insane as she isn’t intimately familiar with her illness, she speaks of the house as being hateful and even haunted, and she almost immediately begins to hallucinate once she moves in. On the flip side the narrator could very well be sane as she is able to write legibly and maintain her diary in a neat and orderly fashion and acts in an intelligent manner, with movements that can be considered carefully planned. This blurs the line between sanity and insanity. The short story appears to present a situation in where a woman has endured a situation designed to deliberately exclude any sort of enjoyment of activity or mental expression. As such, the
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.