Yellow Wallpaper Feminism

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, is a feminist short story. It is about a woman who is mentally ill and gets misdiagnosed by her controlling husband. He puts her in a room saying doing nothing will cure her. While in the room she becomes captivated by the yellow wallpaper. She starts to see a trapped woman in the wallpaper. The woman’s obsession over the wallpaper and imprisonment in the room causes her to lose her mind. She has fallen victim to her madness in her desire to let the woman out the wallpaper. Her husband faints upon seeing what she has become. The woman and her oppressive husband’s relationship are that of prisoner and warden. The yellow wallpaper harbors the narrator’s state of mind. This short story dwells

The room becomes the woman’s world because he cannot leave. The yellow wallpaper represents her fear of being trapped. It also is the very thing causing her imprisonment inside the room. The narrator says “At the night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamp light, and worst of all by moon light it becomes bars!” (Gilman 662). Every night she lies awake and looks at her cell of a room as her eyes roam around the wallpaper. At the beginning she hates the wallpaper but becomes infatuated with it as the woman continues to try to get out. “ ‘nobody could climb through that pattern it strangles so…strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white’… If this can be seen as a metaphor of women’s oppression and death in the limited domestic space” (Fanghui). The woman could end up feeling useless, “suffocated” (Fanghui), and so closed off and commit suicide. The restraints used against her could be her downfall. She has become “possessive about the wallpaper” (Rao) because she feels “it is here property” (Rao). She no longer feels the need to leave because she has not found a way out yet. Once the narrator “freed the woman in the wallpaper” (Rao) she became insane (Rao). She says “I wonder if they all came out of the wallpaper, as I did?” (Gilman 665). She no longer sees the trapped behind the wallpaper as someone else but herself. She has been alone in for weeks trapped in the room with

Charlotte chose a woman to flaunt feminism but in a grotesque demeanor. She has the woman turning away from the light of the day and living in the dark. The woman would rather sleep through the meaningless day because nothing shifts in the wallpaper till it night arrives. The narrator’s imagination darkens as what lies in between the patterns manifests. The horrible faces a frozen death is what it seems like she sees. It represents the many women who have tried to break out of their own cages but giving up when becoming stuck. Thus died from the suffocation the oppression brought but read as strangulation from trying to get out. From the begging she suspects the house to have a gruesome background. She is surprised until she becomes sectioned off to that room. She is kept from the beautiful aspects of the house and only given the distasteful aspects. She is drawn by what she feels she hates the most. It is old, smelly, and nasty looking but irresistible to her subconscious. Morbid side of it seem to make more since to her and she focuses on