The Yellow Wallpaper

The Woman behind the Bars in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a tragedy illustrated from the point of view of a woman, whose name is not mentioned, that suffered from a nervous disorder and goes through her journey to insanity. Ironically, the root to her insanity is her husband’s attempts to recuperate her mental health by prescribing her rest cure treatment during their stay in a colonial house. The author conveys messages of gender inequality, social bias, and the struggle women faced in the nineteenth century by using first-person narration with the help of symbolism. Underlying the story are symbols of male oppression of women in the nineteenth century, symbols such as the yellow wallpaper,

The narrator’s build up habit in analyzing the yellow wallpaper aggravates her frustration and rashness. The revelation of the abstract patterns represents the narrator’s inner thoughts to revolt against John’s authority. The narrator tries to deny this realization by finding rational excuses for herself like, “Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so!” (Gilman 650). The narrator is terrified to step over the line shows her minds and emotions are being trained to comply with her husband’s orders. Ironically, John perceives the narrator as the patterns, he is not interested in further exploring her inner thoughts other than her general thoughts. The author of the paper “"The Yellow Wallpaper” and Women's Discourse”, Karen Ford, argues that “The wallpaper, in fact, sometimes appears like male discourse in its capacity to contradict and immobilize the women who are trapped within it” (311). The narrator later saw emergence of, “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Gilman 652) in the sub-pattern and it represents her compliance to her inner thoughts of being free. The woman in the wallpaper, much like the narrator, was only

The room where the narrator stays is decorated with multiple loops, nauseating yellow wallpaper, and huge barred windows. Windows usually symbolizes hopes, but in this story it symbolizes the narrator’s confinement from her thoughts by the norms of the society. In one scene, the narrator opens the barred windows for some fresh air but John immediately said what she "felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window" (Gilman 648). This action symbolizes John’s controls over the narrator by shutting out her hopes. Karen Ford states that, “In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the physician is the quintessential man, and his talk, therefore, is the epitome of male discourse” (310). John and the narrator’s brother are both physicians, illuminating that their decisions shall not be questioned. Indeed, when the narrator’s husband and brother diagnosed that she has neurosis, she finds it impossible to refute them and take whatever medicine is prescribed for her. “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman 648). The narrator’s question of “what is one to do” further suggests the society influenced women that it is normal to go along with men’s decisions. When the narrator requested being active as the form of treatment, John denied it (Gilman 649). John’s behavior demonstrates his