Yellow Wallpaper Thesis

The Yellow Wallpaper” is a widely anthologized short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman was an advocate for women’s rights and a social reformer. This story was published in 1892, a time when women were often belittled and considered to be inferior to their husbands. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” also feels inferior to her husband because of the way he treats her and controls her actions. The woman believes she knows what is best for her mental and physical help, but her husband will not allow her to do what she wants. She has been diagnosed with postpartum depression, so she is forced to stay in the same room with very little interaction with other people. The woman, whose name is never revealed, becomes fixated and obsessed with

The woman’s brother is also a doctor and tells the woman the same thing, because a male’s opinion was more important than a female’s in this context. They tell the woman she needs the “rest cure”, which means the person receiving the cure must be kept in isolation and free of distractions that could be harmful. However, John does not know what is best for his wife because even she claims “personally, I disagree with their ideas” (Gilman 376). She believes that instead of sitting around in a room all day she should be doing something exciting and riveting. The narrator, who is never given a name, is required to stay in isolation by the will of her husband; she is not given an option as to what she would like to do. The fact that the narrator is not named is a perfect example of the subordination of their marriage. Basically, the woman in the story is not important enough to have a name, only her husband and other male characters get names. Since Emily from “A Rose for Emily” is set in a later time period, Emily is credited with not only a first name, but a last name as well. In “A Rose for Emily”, Emily is also forced to be isolated, but she is forced into isolation by her father. When Emily was of dating age, her father would never let her go out with any suitors and made her stay

In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, “Gilman presents the narrator's insanity as a form of rebellion against the medical practices” (Quawas 2). From the beginning of the story, the woman in the “Yellow Wallpaper” was told she needed the “rest cure”, but she was in opposition to what her husband and other doctors said. She went against their wishes by writing in her journal despite being told she needed to rest her mind. The reader can confirm the woman’s insanity because she exclaims, “I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch along the wall…” (Gilman 386). The narrator had been crawling along the ground, rubbing up against the wallpaper so much that it was starting to fade from where her shoulder rubbed against it. That is a definite sign of insanity, which originated from being isolated in a nursery room day in and day out. The reader can confirm that Emily has gone insane when at the end of the story, the narrator says, “what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt has become inextricable from the bed in which he lay” (Faulkner 226). This also confirms that Emily was the one who killed Homer, and proceeded to keep his body on the bed for years after. The townspeople would have never suspected to be the one who murdered Homer because “the town thinks of her as an idol” (Rodman 118) so it was