Yellow Wallpaper Feminism

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a woman suffering from postpartum depression is prescribed a “rest cure”. She is forced to stay in a room with yellow wallpaper which She says is “committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 419). The woman convinces herself that there is a woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper, and it is her job to free and catch her. She begins to mix reality with fantasy and she unknowingly becomes suicidal and drives herself mad. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” uses dialogue, narration, and symbolism to show that women are not taken seriously when it comes to mental health.

Interpretation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” Domineering and neglectful spouse causes his wife to lose her sanity. This is a story about how a woman’s arrogant husband drives her to insanity by forcing her to spend so much time alone. After spending months in her bedroom looking at yellow wallpaper which she despises, her imagination begins taking over her mind. She believes a woman is trapped inside of it. By the end of the story she actually thinks she is the woman who had been trapped in the wallpaper and has finally escaped from it.

The setting of the room symbolizes the loneliness the narrator is undergoing. The narrator has her mind encased that there is a woman struggling and in her solitary room, she feels its true and she is even seen fighting for her. The author used the room to symbolize what the main character was going through all alone in the isolated estate where she was brought by her husband. The yellow paper played a distinct reason for the narrator’s madness. In her writings, she explains that the more she became insane, the more the wall paper became a big issue to her that is why she smudged ultimately.

Through the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the main character is driven into a state of madness as a result of isolation. The narrator explains that she is suffering from a slight nervous depression, leaving her husband to treat her with rest. She and her husband moved to a house in the country house expecting improvement. During this time, she is placed in a solitary room with walls covered in yellow wallpaper against her will. The excessive abundance of social isolation that this character experiences brings her to an inevitable mental breakdown.

The narrator suspects the her husband and sister are aware of her obsession so she starts to destroy the wallpaper and goes into a frenzy trying to free the caged woman in the pattern of the wallpaper. The narrator becomes insane, thinking that she also came out of the wallpaper, and creeps around the room, and when her husband checks on her, he faints because of what she has become, and she continues to creep around the room, stepping over body. In Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the narrator represents how women were treated in this time period by the theme and symbolism presented in the story. This is shown in three distinct ways: stereotypical social conventions displayed by each major character, dialogue, and the symbolism of the wallpaper. The stereotypical aspect of the characters starts out with their ... ... middle of paper ... ...s of tearing it or escaping from it or herself, bits of it still remain on the wall suggesting to the necessary progression to be made for gendered social equality.

The story ends with the woman’s husband breaking down the door to find her creeping around the wallpaperless room. After witnessing this the husband proceeds to faint as the wife continues to creep around the room. At face-value of this story is the showing of false ideas and insanities of a woman who is mentally ill. The people that are portrayed in this story by the narrator are the narrator, her husband John, and the sister-in-law and housekeeper Mary. The conflict of this short story is the struggle to stay within the grip of reality.

In her alone time, the narrator focuses on the wallpaper and it drives her to insanity as she sees and image and works to free the woman she sees. The isolation the narrator faces plays with her mind and makes her go crazy. The alone time was supposed to help with the narrator’s illness but in turn it only makes the situation worse. Works Cited A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

She begins to imagine a woman behind bars in the paper. Finally, she loses her sanity and believes that she is the woman in the wallpaper, trying to escape. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses setting and symbolism to suggest that imprisoning oppression causes a type of loneliness (in women) that can lead to a deadly form of insanity. Gilman uses setting to suggest that imprisoning oppression causes a type of loneliness that can lead to insanity. Gilman's young mother describes the nursery bedroom "with windows that ... [are] barred for little children" (426).

The curves of it “commit suicide”, the patterns “crawl” and “creep”, and there are “unblinking eyes are everywhere” (Gilman). In her mind, she is animating an inanimate object. The wallpaper becomes a terrifying object for both the narrator and the reader. Strangely, she also sees a woman trapped inside of the wallpaper, shaking invisible bars. Possibly due to her own circumstances, she is imagining herself as that very woman inside the wallpaper.

She recognizes that she gets "unreasonably angry with John sometimes" and later wishes he would get his own room. She dreads him coming home because she enjoys exploring the wallpaper and wants to free the woman imprisoned behind it, which symbolizes her own individuality. The narrator feels trapped by both her husband and surroundings, it is clear to assume that the woman she sees behind the wallpaper is a symbol of herself. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman seems to go out of her way to express the symbolic relationship between the real and wallpaper woman. Much like the protagonist, the wallpaper woman is described as “all the time trying to climb through.